Accounting

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Accounting
The ATO's free E-tax software has annoyed me sufficiently that I'm doing my 2002-2003 accounting in GnuCash. E-Tax is slow, makes it difficult to keep track of transactions and entries, makes it impossible to reconile any complex transaction structure, and requires me to boot into Windows to use it. It's only advantages to me is that it handles GST and BAS statements automatically. Not even having the choice of being able to use double-entry has just become too frustrating for me. I want to keep track of everything, darn it, not just the minimum required for GST reporting.

Using GnuCash means that while GST is a little more bothersome (any business expense involves splits), personal accounting and tax is a breeze. I will give credit that E-tax was useful when I first started business, and it's good to see the tax office supplying free (as in beer) software to small businesses.

I'll probably continue to use E-tax to print invoices, since it does a good job of that, and my invoices tend to be large and infequent rather than small and often.

Hopefully this financial year I'll avoid having a mound of papers for "things which need to be remembered, but which E-tax can't handle".

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