Financial Crash Course- Suggestions?

[Slappo]

You'll want to make sure to depreciate the cost of some of the items you have purchased, such as your laser. Those big dollar expenses have what is referred to as an expected useful life. You amortize the cost of the asset over it's expected useful life.

For instance: Laser worth $5000 with an expected 10 year useful life. The laser would be depreciated over a 10 year time span (flat rate depreciation is definitely easiest for you). Each year you would calculate $500 in expenses for the laser based on it's value dropping from 5k to 4.5k to 4k to 3.5k etc until the asset is fully depreciated. You can still use the asset past its expected useful life, but it is no longer losing book value as it is fully depreciated. You can probably find some info on what the expected useful life of your laser is, and then depreciate the costs of the laser over it's useful life.

The purpose of this is to account for the business expense of your long term assets so you can still write them off for tax purposes. You can't write the entire cost of a long-term asset off in the year you purchase it.

Like I said... it can get really complicated really fast. The nice thing about software designed for this, is it includes all this info right in the software and can do things like account for depreciation automatically.

[arfink]

Kay, I'll investigate the software options.

[arfink]

GnuCash seems to be actively maintained and sufficiently simple. It can also import and export standard file formats so if I ever really had to move my books to another program for some reason I could totally do that. I think I'll give it a try.

[arfink]

[quote name='Slappo' timestamp='1345833084' post='2473591']
I had an even bigger post but I erased huge chunks of it. Really this is something best done over a google hangout . I don't have experience with the other programs people mentioned, and they will certainly make it much easier than trying to do financial work in a spreadsheet.
[/quote]

Would you be available to chat on G+ sometime next week? I'd love to pick your brain.

[Slappo]

[quote name='arfink' timestamp='1345846206' post='2473699']
Would you be available to chat on G+ sometime next week? I'd love to pick your brain.
[/quote]

It's possible . My wife and kiddo is out of town 8/31-9/9, so I'm definitely available during that time as family obligations will be minimum.

[arfink]

[quote name='Slappo' timestamp='1345848235' post='2473707']
It's possible . My wife and kiddo is out of town 8/31-9/9, so I'm definitely available during that time as family obligations will be minimum.
[/quote]

Sure. No hurry here. I've already been saving all my paperwork so it's not like I'm gonna have any real panic problems or anything, I'd just like to do this now at the beginning instead of in a year when I have a rumpled pile of old receipts and croutons on my desk and no easily searchable digital documentation.

[Innocent]

As far as FOSS alternatives are concerned, I find on the net that [url="http://www.turbocashuk.com/index.html"]TurboCash[/url] & [url="http://www.sql-ledger.com/"]SQL-Ledger[/url] keeps getting mentioned often in this context.

Some articles; [url="http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/forums/showthread.php/12287-open-source-alternative-to-quickbooks?p=105876&viewfull=1#post105876"]1[/url] [url="http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5692/1"]2[/url] [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software"]3[/url] and two more app:[url="http://phpmoneybooks.com/"] phpMoneyBooks[/url], [url="http://www.grisbi.org/"]Grisby[/url]