Free Accounting Software for a startup

By Pachi | Jul 28, 2008

With 2 hands doing 100 things in a startup, we can get pretty disorganized and mess things up if we don’t take care of it early.

One area which requires atmost attention is finance. To keep track of expenditure, payroll etc. Unforeseen expenditure is a common thing in a startup. You will need to keep track of where the money is going and from where the money is coming in a systematic way.

But the money being tight, its difficult for any startup to hire an accountant or buy costly accounting software such as tally.

Most of us resort to excel to maintain cash-flow balance. But this is tedious, and most of time mess it up.

GNU Cash, an open source free accounting software answers all these problems.It has necessary features to solve day to day accounting. Moreover, it is free, easy to learn, easy to use and available for almost all the platforms.

You can download this free accounting software from their website http://www.gnucash.org.

It is pretty well documented and takes an hour or two to learn to use it. And an hour to configure it, based on your usage. It has ready made templates which can be quiet helpful. That is it! You can start using the software to maintain daily expenditure, sales, payroll and other financial details and retrieve the required information with ease.

I am no expert in finance, so don’t know if GNU Cash is enough to maintain records as the company grows, but can definitely be used in a startup and small business organisations.

Some of its features/usage are:-

Checkbook-Style Register
Double-Entry bookkeeping
Scheduled Transactions
Mortgage & Loan Repayment Druid
Small Business Accounting Features
OFX, QIF Import
HBCI Support (disabled in pre-compiled binaries due to licensing conflicts)[2]
Transaction-Import Matching Support
(Limited) Multi-User SQL Support
Multi-Currency Transaction Handling
Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios
Online Stock & Mutual Fund Quotes

Was the tip helpful? You know/use any other accounting software? Please leave a comment about it.

3 Comments so far

Nancy Walters July 29, 2008 1:20 am

Hey guys, I currently use a nice
Payroll Software that I wanted to share with you, the name of the software is Payroll Mate, and you can download a free demo if you want to from the link below:
Payroll Software Download
sanimoyo August 17, 2008 10:10 pm

sometimes the more tedious a program the better results you get if you invest time on riding the learning curve, that is why i prefer excel, will try out this though if it is just as good. love the blog by the way.

sanimoyos last blog post..Illegal downloading makes us all poorer
Ian O'Donnell September 21, 2008 11:56 pm

I don’t know about GnuCash but we tried Turbo Cash (also open source) and it was terrible. We now use Bionic Books which has a free plan and it is much easier to use.