Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepare Taxes

Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by jonathanstrange on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @11:23AM (#16859160)

I know it can deal with currencies, but does anyone know how well it fares with requirements of non-US countries? What accounting system does it use?

Is it suitable for a small business in a European country, where (I presume) the accounting/IRS and tax system requirements are more stringent?

I'm interested in using it in Portugal but AFAIK small businesses and freelancers here use different, commercial local software.

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Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by INTPenis on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @11:28AM (#16859210)

I'm using it in Sweden and GnuCash already has a BAS-12 account template built in. It's pretty much complete and there is no reason to require BAS-17.

I recently started using it so I actually have one unanswered question. Was going to connect to their IRC to find out.

The num column seems to be manual and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a globally unique value or just a sequence for each transaction (verification) you make.

Sorry if I'm talking out of my ass but I don't know the correct business english to use in these circumstances.

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Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by vq on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @11:56AM (#16859505)

I'm using it in Sweden as well. I wrote a Python script to populate the accounts from a list of accounts I received from my auditor/tax consultant, as such I don't know exactly what flavour of BAS it is.

I use a letter prefix for my transaction sequence numbers and GnuCash doesn't seem to understand it or put any value in it at all. This is definitely a weak point in my eyes and I'd love to have GnuCash support categories for transactions and strict sequence numbers.

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Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by gntech on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @12:05PM (#16859586)

Is it possible you could share that script? :) It would be interesting to see how it is done

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Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by vq on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @12:31PM (#16859849)

Sure.

It's a bit of a hack and I can't recommend anyone to actually use it. It probably contains a number of assumptions that only holds true for the SIE-files I've had to handle.

https://erq.se/sie/import_sie.py https://erq.se/sie/sie.py https://erq.se/sie/export_sie.py

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Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by jldugger on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @01:37PM (#16860487)

Num is a sequence value per account. I'm pretty sure it started off as a check number field, for US checking accounts.

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Re:Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepa... by icebraining on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @01:14PM (#16860251)

Assuming you have an accountant, you should be able to ask them for a listing of the necessary accounts. That's what we did when creating the Portuguese localization of another software.

GnuCash should do the accounting itself just fine, but in my experience accountants don't like to see reports that aren't exactly like they are used to, so you might lose a lot of time adapting its reports to the format they're expecting.

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