On 2013-08-10 12:22, George Toft wrote:

Based on my experience, gnuCash is fine - probably more than you
need.

Double-entry bookkeeping is useful in a number of ways--mostly because you have to classify everything when you enter it.  GNUcash can also generate reports, which might be useful.  I'm not sure if libreoffice does "print checks", either, while GNUcash can do that.  Make sure to check the detailed docs at http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/ for how to use the program.

I may be biased though, since I've been using GNUcash to keep track of my personal finances since 2000.  It works pretty well for that.

I had to pay an accountant
$1200 to manually transfer all the gnuCash entries to QuickBooks for
the previous four years ($300/year). It would have been much less
expensive to use QuickBooks in the first place.

This seems odd.  Was a lawyer or accountant unable to use GNUcash to read your files?  GNUcash files are just gzipped XML and can be transformed into other formats using XSLT, but doing that can take some time/effort since XSLT is not really very widely used and is kind of a pain to write.  (Appendix A5 of the documentation briefly describes this.)

will never need to have your accounting records
reviewed by an accountant or lawyers, OpenOffice should work fine.
Simply put each item from Schedule C as column headers, include date,
description and mileage, and as you enter the expenses/receipts put
them in the right column and come tax time it will take you about 5
minutes to fill out Schedule C as a copy&paste exercise.

This has the advantage of not requiring you to learn much, which can be useful.

--
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.

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