ATH was started a couple years ago as a way to earn a little money on the side, and to help save up money and put a down payment on a house. I started doing consulting with just a screwdriver, a stack of blank CDROM's, and about 20 years of experience. Today I've built a group of professionals with expertise in anything and everything to do whatever needs to be done and damn good in the IT field. Forward to today it's becoming apparent that my accounting scheme is woefully lacking.

Like most small business owners I put serious consideration to one of the off the shelf accounting packages for a couple hundred dollars. Then I decided to research it the same way I would research a software, hardware, or networking solution for a customer, and I think I've decided to use a package called GnuCash. I used GnuCash a number of years ago as a checkbook register, but it was a bit more than I needed, and I run a mixed environment of operating systems and GnuCash was only available for Linux. I'm well aware that I could just VNC or Xsession into the Linux box to work on my accounting system, but that was kludgy, and I wouldn't be able to pull up an offline copy of it on my underpowered work laptop that ran Windows back then.

After cursory research it looks like they finally released a version that will run under MS Windows, Linux, and Mac, so it looks like this will be a GnuCash shop at least for the time being. Since GnuCash is 100 percent free, there's no harm in at least giving it a good run for the money. I'll stop back here in a few days and give an update on how it goes.

<--Update-->

Unfortunately GnuCash for windows was not terribly usable, and my wife (an accountant) doesn't do Linux. My scroll on my mouse didn't work right, and some of the windows had to be closed and reopened often because they would get garbled. I imagine this has something to do with the GTK libraries for windows, and that it's a newer product under Windows than it is for Linux. For the time being it looks like my accounting package of choice is Intuit Quickbooks. It looks like it should do most of what I need, it's just a pain that it does such a poor job of converting data from Quicken, and can't import anything but IIF formatted files, and not the quicken formats (A product from the same company!).

I've been spending a few hours each day to catch up all my registers through the year, then I'll be spending a mountain of time entering miles, customers, etc. In the end I had to consider that the extra time I would spend monkeying around with GnuCash even though I like the package at the core wouldn't be worth the money I would save by purchasing a retail package. Running a small business right certainly requires doing things I don't really enjoy, but overall it's still a great experience.

--David