Recommend accounting book, for home and small office?

cbbrowne@hex.net cbbrowne@hex.net
Wed, 22 Aug 2001 21:57:17 GMT


Chris Shenton wrote:
> I've been using GnuCash for a few months and like it. Not sure I
> understand it all, but that's probably due to my ignorance of basic
> accounting.  I'm about to start my own consulting business and would
> like to use GnuCash to manage the accounts for it -- I just can't bear
> having to run a Windoze box just so I can use a package like PeachTree
> or QuickBooks. :-(
> 
> Any recommendations for books on practical accounting that would
> enlighten me, both for home and small business? 

The queries of late about documentation led me to take a browse at Amazon
to see what they might have that might be of some relevance.

I'd _like_ to be able to suggest 
something like "Accounting for Dummies" or "Idiot's Guide to Bookkeeping,"
but the options seem to specialize themselves out of usefulness:

- "Accounting for Dummies" is basically about financial reporting, and has
little to say about bookkeeping.

- There are references on bookkeeping, which correspondingly are pretty
detached from "finance."

- There are course texts for people planning to formally study accounting.

The best suggestion that I can see seems to be to look at a guide that has
PeachTree or QuickBooks in its name; they will, unfortunately, have _some_ bias 
towards your doing transactions in "proprietary" ways, but have the flip side 
that the books are liable to satisfy the simultaneous needs of:

- Being directed towards relative novices;
- Touching on accounting, finance, and bookkeeping [which are three distinct 
things]

_Accounting with Quickbooks(r) and Quickbooks(r) Pro with Proper Accounting_ 
appears to be one such; <http://www.systemmanagement.com/books.html> has some 
table-of-contents material.

I'd suggest browsing some such books at the bookstore, and discarding those 
that are _totally_ oriented towards a particular package to the point of 
seeming useless to any other purpose.