Free Accounting Software - no trial just free

[mrs maggot]

a friend suggested I take a look at GnuCash, its free to use, and is not cloud based, it may well be of use to people on here, it is US based, so you need to make sure you add the UK bit on, and then remove some of the columns which are not needed here, but overall i would say its good - well very good considering its free.

http://gnucash.org/

[pisquee]

In the end, after looking at a few free options, we were advised by a designer friend (who used to be an accountant for some big corporates worldwide) to go with Sage.
As we already have a Sage account for taking payments on the website and card terminal, their Sage One (cloud based) system is free as part of the subscription.
The friend thought it best to go with a service that was robust, had a good reputation and support behind it, but also a system that would scale as our company grew, i.e. to be able to move to a more advanced Sage package.
Thankfully she is doing the set up of the software so we can get the most benefit from it, and also to make sure it can scale well with us, this is taking some time, but will be worth it in the end, but I just wish we'd done this when the company was small and simple!

[Justin]

Always good to see another alternative, thanks for the share Mrs. M We settled on Xero a while back and haven't looked back since. Only issue we have is that our bank decided they'd mess the feed up so we don't get transactions for 4 days now. pain in the back side.

[Quinsfan]

Just marking this thread to come back in the new year.

[mrs maggot]

we had sage, and i have always found it a little clumsy to use - maybe thats just me, and i really had it for our accountant friend, as it made his life easier to help me out, as everything was where it was for the other accounts he did, but sadly he died 2 years ago and i have been doing the books solo since then, i thought i would give this one a look over, and so far i am liking it a lot, the fact that i can just enter all entries on one page and they go off to where they belong bank account wise, current, paypal, cash, is easier for me to manage. If you get sage free as part of a package, thats all well and good but if you don't it certainly is heavy on cost to use for a small business, thats why i thought i would share something that might fit others pockets, their help is good, and their youtube video's are also very useful.

[pisquee]

I think Sage One is only £10 per month if you don't have a Sage Account already.

[Red5]

Always good to see another alternative, thanks for the share Mrs. M We settled on Xero a while back and haven't looked back since. Only issue we have is that our bank decided they'd mess the feed up so we don't get transactions for 4 days now. pain in the back side.

I use Xero also, Very good, product and excellent value, i also have issues with the Feed, (my bank is not yet supported yet, so have to do manual imports at the moment)

[Justin]

We're changing banks to try and make life simpler, it's all to do with the bank/Yodlee feed. If you choose the right bank you can get direct feeds so you don't have to get them each time.

[James990]

I use quickbooks, and hate sage, I even block all sage adverts etc. Hate it, hate it, hate it! Besides that hate it!

[UK Printed Mugs]

James do you use QB desktop or cloud based system? We were looking into it but two QB support staff told us that a records unique identifier is the customers name (which is one field rather than title, firstname and surname oddly) and therefore you cannot have multiple customers with the same name. They said you would have to add some characters or numbers onto the end of a persons name if it already exists! This either cannot be true OR they had a work experience teenager create their software?