If you are a realtor (real estate agent) in North America, this package that I put together for you might save you a bunch of time and money because it’s *totally free*.
First, credit where credit is due:
1. The developers of the free and open GnuCash (www.gnucash.org). These folks have poured their time and money into making a great and very robust accounting software. Make sure, when finances able, to put some $$ back their way if you like it like I do.
2. Ubuntu: Gnucash was just one free click away from the Ubuntu software center which is where I found it initially. Thanks to the Ubuntu community for making so many pieces of software available so easily.
3. I took the chart of accounts example from realtor chart of accounts.
How I set this up
Just so you know, all I did was take the chart of accounts above and manually enter it up and save the resulting file. Regrettably I did not have time to customize it further and I can see that there are definitely other accounts that need to be added but this will definitely get you started, and some need to be deleted as well because they were residual from the default install of GnuCash. So, once you open it up, make sure you go through the whole chart of accounts and add in things and delete things that might be irrelevant or doubled. It’s easy to identify the ones that I added because they are under the parent categories that look like this:
64000-64999 Name of Main Category
I will also admit that I am not a master of Gnucash but I remember it being pretty simple and very robust so that you could just export the file to your accountant at the end of the year.
I hope this helps you and if you could be so kind as to take this gnucash file (.gnucash) and tweak it even further for the rest of real estate community that would be much appreciate it. I will then blog it out again with update and give you credit.
Thanks!
How to get started:
- Download Gnucash free accounting software (easy if you are on Ubuntu) for your system from www.gnucash.org. At the time of this post the site has problems so you may have to search alternative download site if this is the case…
- Download this file–> gnucash-realtor-template-v1.gnucash <–to your computer
- Open up this file with gnucash
- Enjoy!
