Hi all :)
I’m setting up a small business in the UK, and need some accounting software to keep track of everything, and generate invoices, that sort of thing. I tried Wave a few years ago, and it looks like it does what I need, but is US based and proprietary.
It has the option of linking to your bank account too, and automatically pulling your transactions etc. This is quite important, as I’m trying to get diagnosed with ADHD, and have a terrible memory. I won’t remember to manually enter transactions regularly.
Being able to use it on Android and Windows / Linux would be ideal. I can self host it if there are any options that work.
Does anyone have any ideas please?
These 2 are worth a careful look
- ledger and its derivatives
- quickfile
I am from the UK and been doing this for over 10 years, with a CSV general ledger.
I find the double entry accounting equation simple, but need meticulous book keeping and to fully understand the scheme of accounts to minimise the time spent preparing for tax, vat and PAYE along with annual financial statements to companies house.
To work on my own I follow the ‘plain text accounting’ principle, ledger seems good, but simpler for me to use SQL on a CSV file and a Rust program to handle MTD for VAT.
I’ve studied many accounting packages, all seem over complex and obscure the simplicity of the task.
To work with an accountant I would choose quickfile. It is remarkable, and one very smart person I expect to choose the best application uses it so I feel that it has credibility.
I love GNU Cash for my business.
The only thing I dislike is the search to find an accountant who will use it to review my books at year-end (only 1 out of 10 accountants will use it). But that’s a social problem that gets better the more people use GNU Cash and pay industry experts to work with it
I also use it for stock trading. The Python bindings let me write scripts to analyaze the performance of my past trades. I like that its all offline. I can use the GUI for entry and easily write my own code against the data. Also there is a large and helpful community on the mailing list.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought about how I would get the information to an account yet. I need to look into how that would work for whichever software I use. Thanks for the heads up :)
You seem to have a lot of recommendations already, but I just wanted to mention beancount as well. It’s a decently powerful plain text accounting software. Not sure if it does invoicing.
For me it has been good because I think it is fun to hack some new functionality together that I feel missing. E.g. parse pdf receipts and break down transactions into postings based on what is in the receipt. But it you aren’t interested in simple Python programming, I’d probably not recommend it.
Being able to easily version control it using git is really helpful when you are trying things.
