I am using Moneyworks, in Canada. MW has both a windows and Mac version. It is not especially pretty but does get the job done(especially GST). There is a version that can operate in the cloud, but local data works for now. There are single purchase and subscription services.
I used Banktivity previously. To make it more in line with true double-entry principles, I set up my chart of accounts, and then I set up a dummy account called “Transfer Clearing.” All transactions were logged in the transfer clearing account with appropriate expenses/income lines to be considered debits and credits for the corresponding accounts. Each transaction had to balance to zero, as did the transfer clearing account as a whole. It’s not supremely elegant and not really what Banktivity is designed to do, but it worked well enough for me. (I have since switched to a cloud product because I was willing to trade some control for better integration with my selling platform.)
Which solution did you go with?
I migrated to Wave. It’s free and suits my rather-limited needs (the only reports I need to generate are P&L and balance sheets). Also, thanks to a triangulated integration between Wave, Zapier, and Stripe, my webstore transactions automatically import into Wave as the appropriate journal entries for sales and transaction fees, reducing the most consistent drudgery I faced when keeping my books manually.
I don’t love Wave. I find it to be buggy, and frustrating at times, but I tell myself to dial back the complaints since I’m using it for free. I’ve thought about looking for a desktop-based solution since I generally eschew cloud products when I can, but I remind myself of how much time I’m saving from the Zapier automation, and so far that has encouraged me to stay the course.
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I just remembered that I ran across Prudent awhile ago, which is built on top of Ledger. I thought it looked kind of interesting but haven’t tried it out.
I grabbed MoneyWorks Cashbook (since it’s free) to take a look at whether it’s changed in the past few versions - it is a little bit cleaner than it used to be, although still not going to win any awards. It does definitely seem a bit more polished than Express Accounts, so I’ll give them that.
Thanks for the pointer, I’ll take a look at this. The idea of building a GUI on top of ledger is sort of inherently funny, since its whole raison d’être is “edit it with a text editor”. But I like the idea of having some input validation.
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I gave Prudent a try - it’s literally (at this point) just a web UI on top of a text editor to directly edit a Ledger file, plus a number of extensions specific to Singaporean banks. A nice start, but not enough of a delta over vanilla Ledger to make it compelling IMO.
Coming in late to this thread, but I’m using https://www.designersdomain.com/Corona/Corona.html, and it works for me. You need to know double entry accounting, but you can do anything with journal entries.
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Thank you for the suggestion, I have just signed up with FreeAgent, I get it free with my Natwest business banking. Will hopefully be simpler than managing spreadsheets.
Will also take a look at Moneywiz.