Manage your accounts with this desktop financial manager application
How do I pronounce GnuCash?
Some people use the proper “Guh-noo-cash” and others prefer the easier “NewCash”. Go by whatever works for you.
Before you can use GnuCash, you have to install it. We will walk you through the steps needed to get it installed successfully on your Windows PC, whether you have Windows 7, Vista, or XP.
Let us go through the steps for downloading and installing GnuCash:
The GnuCash website will also have other development versions of the software. These are unstable and are for testing purposes only. These are not suitable for business use. Make sure you download the stable release.
Windows security might pop a message like The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software? or Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?. Click on Run or Yes to continue.
On Windows 7, the default location will be C:Program Files (x86)gnucash.
Congratulations! You have just installed GnuCash successfully and you are ready to start learning, hands-on, how to use it.
In addition to Windows, GnuCash runs on Mac OS X (on the newer Intel as well as the older Power PC) and several flavors of Linux. If you have one of those operating systems, you can download the install package and get installation instructions for those operating systems from the GnuCash.org website.
In addition to the GnuCash.org website, you can also download GnuCash from popular open source repositories such as SourceForge. Wherever you download from, be careful that you are downloading from a genuine site and that the download is free of viruses and malware.
Before we start the main show, here is a quick tip to make your life easier. GnuCash has a friendly feature to auto-save changes every few minutes. Some people find this very useful while entering transactions. However, at the time of going through the tutorial, you don’t want this auto-save to kick in. Why? You want to have some breathing time to recover from any errors and correct any mistakes and then save it at your convenience. It is even possible, heaven forbid, that you might want to abandon the changes instead of trying to rectify them. To do this, you might want to exit GnuCash without saving the changes. So, let us politely tell GnuCash, “STOP HELPING ME”!
Launch the GnuCash Preferences dialog from Edit | Preferences. Select the General tab. As shown in the following image, set the Auto-save time interval to 0 minutes. By setting this to 0, the auto-save feature is turned off. Also, uncheck the Show auto-save confirmation question, if it is checked. As we said, users have found that this ability to auto-save is a big life saver. So, don’t forget to turn this back on when you are done with the tutorials and start keeping your business books.
Even the smallest of businesses may need as many as a hundred accounts. If your business is somewhat larger, you may need to create a lot more than a hundred accounts. Am I going to make you create that many accounts one by one?
No, I am going to show you how you can create the entire set of accounts needed for a typical small business in under a dozen clicks.
We are going to create the account hierarchy for our sample business, Mid Atlantic Computer Services (MACS). This will give you the hands-on feel to create accounts for your business, when you are ready to do that.
GnuCash uses the term assistant to describe what you may have seen in other Windows applications called a wizard. Assistants help you perform tasks that are complex or not frequently performed. Assistants present you with a sequence of dialog boxes that lead you through a series of well-defined steps.
Most Windows applications require you to save files with a 3 or 4 letter extension. Microsoft Word, for example, requires a .docx or .doc file extension. However, GnuCash uses the longer .gnucash extension. If you fill in the file name, GnuCash will automatically add the .gnucash extension.
There you are. With a small amount of effort, you have not only created a complete set of accounts that would be needed for a typical small business, but you have also learned how to enter opening balances as well. Now that we have that under our belt, let us discuss the key aspects of setting up accounts.
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