I have not looked at any tools on the linux side, however I hope what I am
about to provide is helpful.
If you are an incorporated company, then you should have a proper
accounting package that will give you a proper balance sheet and income
statement.
If you are not an incorporated company (either a single proprietor or a
simple partnership) then you only require an income statement for tax
purposes. (You still need to track your capital assets like computers,
cars, equipment and their associated depreciation). I don't believe that
you need to provide an on-going balance sheet (it has been years since I
have run an unincorporated company). I will try to ask my accountant this
morning.
Before starting on your accounting, it is really worthwhile to sit down
with your accountant and workout what your code of accounts are so that the
information that you need for tax purposes are where their suppose to be
and you won't have any surprises at the end of the year.
Personally, I have two sets of books and I would recommend that for small
organizations. One set is for the company and the company bank account and
the other is for your personal expenses like personal bank account, credit
card, etc. In theory, the two should always be separate, however as an
owner, I frequently purchase goods and services using a personal credit
card or personal bank account (the transaction fees are lower and there are
sometimes fringe benefits as well as shear convenience). On a quarterly or
annual basis, I run a report of company expenditures on my personal set of
books and enter a summary journal entry into the company books.
The other thing that is really worthwhile is dealing with a bank / credit
card that has the ability for you to download your transactions (really
saves on entries). Most of the major banks permit you to download credit
card and account transaction data in Quicken or QIF format (sorry, banks
are slow so you will have to take what is available -- this is a windows
product format, but I think GNU Cash supports this).
Finally, a necessary disclaimer -- I am not an accountant, so the above is
an engineer's view of an accountants world.
HTH
I'm looking for some tips on tools and methods for doing the
accounting/book-keeping for my business.
I've looked at GNUCash, and it seems to be rather complete, and more or less
bug free. However it requires dome Gnome libraries, and I'm trying to avoid
this if possible (though I have no objections to installing the gnome
packages if I must).
I've looked at a couple of other packages but haven't found one yet that has
the polish of GNUCash. SQL-Ledger looks promising in terms of functionality
though.
TUX Magazine 3 has an article on Quasar from LinuxCanada (a Calgary
company).
http://www.linuxcanada.com/download2.shtml
I'm toying with the idea of trying this out, but they don't seem to have a
Gentoo ebuild (yet). So I guess I'll have to compile from source... Anyone
have any experiences with this package?
Other than trying to find a decent accounting package, I'll have to admit my
lack of knowledge with regards to accounting. Any suggestions on how best to
set up my accounts and do the data entry?
I'm prompted to this by some troubles I've been having in contacting the
bookkeeper I thought I had hired... So I may as well bite the bullet and do
this myself.
Thank you for any tips/suggestions.
Shawn
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