step-by-step guide on setting up small business accounting

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Jon Lapham wrote:

> > Does anyone have any URLs to other good docs that teach the steps to
> > getting started with gnucash for business accounting?
>
> The docs are being written as you type your question.  :)

Thank you!

I just read your mid-July posting from the archives (after I sent my
question).

And I am reading Herman's GNU Cash Business Quick Start Guide (which I see
parts of your docs are based on).

> We've been tackling the first issue, payroll.  Take a look at what we
> have so far (comment welcome):
>
> http://www.jandr.org/temp/gnucashdocs/bus_payroll1.html
>
> The other parts of the business section are not even really ready to be
> looked at for comments.
>
> The other subjects to be tackled in the coming days are "bills and
> vendors (accounts payable)", "invoices (accounts receivable)",
> "customers", "taxes".

I look forward to your very first "Account Setup" documentation, because
editing an already exist file (as suggested in the "Business Quick Start
Guide") doesn't seem like a good idea. Since it doesn't explain how to
create the Chart of Accounts from scratch.

I am hoping for some instructions that say "to get started click on ..."
for each step.

(We had tried to use the wizard a few different ways a few different
times, but it never worked out to be easy to later add payments and bills.
For us, it is not intuitive -- probably since we have no accounting
software experience to base it on. By the way, I currently do my
invoicing via some perl scripts I wrote that generate HTML based on
tab-delimited files which I hand maintain using bc(1) and vi(1); then I
use html2ps and ps2pdf to finalize these customer PDF invoices. I am
hoping to do this properly by using gnucash :) )

> So, stay tuned, there will be plenty for you to read, or contribute!

Excellent!

I'll be glad to copyedit and, once I learn the software, I can probably
help write some docs.

Thank you, Jon.

(Derek suggested reading through archives. This could take hours. It would
be simpler to include the good documentation links from the official
webpage.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/