Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide Paperback – February 9, 2011

We have a farm which is generating revenue from egg sales ("eggs from free-range, pasture-fed, spoiled rotten hens"), and we hope to sell other agricultural products as well. I wanted to move beyond the cash envelope and receipt shoe box in order to work towards profitability. Gnucash seemed like the way to go because it's free, open source and easy to use. It's also designed to fit US IRS tax forms."Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting" is just what I needed. The author assumes no knowledge of bookkeeping and teaches the concepts while teaching how to use Gnucash. Given the subject matter, the book is surprisingly readable. I read the entire book before downloading the software, and was able to follow the book quite easily without hands-on experience. I wanted to be sure that Gnucash was right software for us, and have a good sense for which accounts to choose when setting up the bookkeeping system. Of course it's generally easy to make changes later, but I wanted to be able to envision how the system would meet our needs.The author is very good about covering how to recover from errors, including rare problems that the software doesn't facilitate. He answers questions you might have like, "Why not skip entering transactions and just import them from an electronic bank statement?" or "Why create budgets in Gnucash if I'm going to have to export them to a spreadsheet to do certain types of analysis?" The author also points out the reports that a tax accountant will want to see, the reports a bank considering a loan will want to see, and even how to go from a budget to a business plan.The only topic of interest to me that was missing is a concept I'm calling "petty owner investment". In the author's defense, no one else seems to talk about the issue. (This is really a suggestion for a second edition.) Our business is too small to justify a checking account or credit card. We buy things for the business out of our own accounts. If I buy things for the business and don't expect to be reimbursed, I must have to show contributions to owners equity to balance the expenses. Monthly credits to the equity account totaling all the stuff we bought? As someone who's new to accounting, I'm not too comfortable inventing concepts.All in all, an excellent, readable introduction to small business accounting as well as Gnucash.

I was looking at using GnuCash for our church's finances and this book has a chapter on non-profits so I thought I would check it out. The book explains concepts well and is very engaging for a technical book, which I appreciate. Much of this information is available for free with the GnuCash manual and the documentation there is pretty good but also fairly boring. This book gives some good examples and does it in a way which is NOT boring, so that's a definite benefit. It didn't spell out exactly the information I was looking for but gave me enough to formulate my own plan for our church finance structure.My only real complaint is the cost and part of it is because I believe ebooks should be significantly cheaper than printed books. Granted he isn't self-publishing so there are still publisher costs but $20 is too much (I paid $14 when it was on sale). Then again, the market for GnuCash books is probably insignificant anyway.

GnuCash is a free open-source bookkeeping program that will run on Windows, *nix, Mac, and other operating systems. The program is quite good, has many features, but disappoints in that some obvious features are lacking (including backup, including printing check numbers when printing checks, and not automatically printing Payee address on checks, etc). So, this book has both a great opportunity to help and a difficult task since it is working with a free product that is both very good in some ways but very flawed in others. This review attempts to address ONLY the book.The author uses humor throughout this "dry" subject and follows the tried-and-true educational approach of telling the reader what will be said, then saying it, then telling the reader what was just said. A good approach that, in this case, becomes mechanical and seems to be "padding" at least as much as helpful. Any book that teaches how to use a bookkeeping program must also cover how books are (or should be) kept as well as introducing some basic accountant lingo and expectations. In this, the book excels. The book also seems to excel at warning of the reader of some of the pitfalls inherent in the GnuCash program, such as lack of built-in backup, using extra care in importing transactions, etc.Where the author tends to fail, in my opinion, is in not providing usable work-a-rounds to some of the key omissions in GnuCash, such as the inexcusable printing limitations. In those key areas, the author resignedly says, in effect, well, the program is free and should probably be used only by individuals and small businesses, so having to print checks one at a time in order to cut-and-paste in the addresses isn't too bad. Never addressed at all is the inability to even print the check number on the check itself.To me, GnuCash is well worth its price (free), while I am less convinced that the book is a purchase that I would strongly recommend. It IS good on the basics and it will get a new user up and running with the basics and for that alone may well be worth its price.