(I used to have a small business and previously was relying on third party accountants for bookkeeping and accounting. Though I was okay to send most of the financial documents and receipts to the bookkeeper, I was looking for a software that can be used for personal bookkeeping and accounting as well as preparing the year end reports that can be used for tax filing purpose. There are a number of commercial software such as Quickbooks and Sage Pro that can be used for this purpose and I intended to purchase one. However, after I purchased and started using one such software, I noticed that it required additional modules / subscription for other necessary functions such as employee payroll processing. But in the meanwhile, I came to know that GnuCash is a free accounting software that can be used for a small business such as mine. It seems to be easy to use and can be adapted for most of the additional functions such as payroll processing with little effort on our side.)
GnuCash is an opensource, free accounting software. It is used for tracking personal finances as well as small business accounting and invoicing. Even though it doesn’t have an integrated payroll system, payroll expenses can still be manually tracked in GnuCash, if taxes and deductions are calculated outside the software, probably using spreadsheets. It implements a double-entry bookkeeping system.
GnuCash software is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS and can it import a variety of popular open and proprietary file formats, including QIF, QFX, OFX, CSV, etc. Hence, converting from other personal finance applications, like Quicken, would be easy.
Installation
GnuCash is supported on Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is part of many Linux distributions and can be installed using the Linux installation option similar to other software such as LibreOffice. For Windows and MacOS, the binaries can be downloaded from https://www.gnucash.org/download.
Installation on Windows 10
1) Download the software binary from GnuCash site by clicking at “Microsoft Windows 8/10”
2) Double click on the downloaded binary to launch the installation.
3) Select the language of installation (English) and click OK.
4) Click Next
5) Change destination folder, if different from default, and click Next.
6) Click Next
7) Click Next
8) Click Next
9) Click Install
10) Click Finish
11) Launch GnuCash application by either typing gnucash at start menu or double-clicking at the GnuCash icon at the desktop
12) The GnuCash Application Opens. Click on “Open the new use tutorial” and OK to know more about GnuCash
Installation on Linux
Most of the Linux distributions have GnuCash prepackaged with their distribution and so it is just a matter of selecting the software during the OS installation or through the software package manager.
For example:
• To install GnuCash on Red Hat, CentOS, or Fedora:
$ sudo dnf install gnucash
• To install GnuCash on Debian, Ubuntu, or MintLinux:
$ sudo apt install gnucash
You can also install the latest version 4.4 from Flathub.
On Ubuntu 20.04, this can be done using the following commands :
# Install FlatPak (on Debian based distributions, others have to replace ‘apt-get install’):
sudo apt-get install flatpak
# Register FlatHub repository:
sudo flatpak remote-add –if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
# Install GnuCash …
## for all users:
sudo flatpak install flathub org.gnucash.GnuCash
## or only you:
flatpak install flathub org.gnucash.GnuCash
# Run GnuCash:
flatpak run org.gnucash.GnuCash