Re: [SLUG] revisiting a hot topic (accounting systems)

[David <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 9 May 2004, Hugh Madden wrote:

> Hi all,
> I realise this thread was done to death a few years back.
>
> Anyway, perhaps the situation has improved.
>
> I resent having to purchase myob or quicken and vmware simply to keep
> track of my finances.
>
> I'm wondering how to go about:
> BAS/STS/depreciating assets
>
> GNU Cash looks pretty awful in respect to GST.

I've been using SQL-Ledger now for two years (two tax returns). It does
the basic double entry accounting perfectly. It's a very active open
source project with new releases coming all the time.

It does GST very well - albeit with some problems relating to single
invoices with mixed taxable/non-taxable items. I get around that without
too much hassle, and in any case it's not all that common a situation.

It doesn't do depreciation. That's something your accountant does (or
yourself if you are smart enough).

I highly recommend it. It's not perfect, but it's very good, bug-free and
improving constantly. It's better than MYOB (which i used previously) and
even if you pay for the support it's cheaper. It's written in
Perl/Postgres. I believe you can even run it on Windows, so you can keep
you vmware going if you wish ;-)



>
> Is there any good open office spreadsheets floating around, or have any
> of the open source projects started to support australia tax?
>
> There must be a couple of hundred thousand home rolled systems around
> australia, why aren't any of them open source and shared?
>
> cheers,
> Hugh
>
>
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