[lakeeffect]

I'm a CPA and I recommend my extremely small businesses clients use a single entry excel system. If they use debit for everything they can download the bank transactions in csv. Then use a deep downlist to categorize the transactions. Then a pivot table to display the year end or quarterly income statement. I usually send them the Excel with the pivot table and dropdown list.

[wruza]

Ahhhh, right, my best-loved “we are drowning and have no idea why, can you look at our 40 xls and few html tables” type of client.

Excel and single-entry in general allows one to ignore questions about their financial structure, make decisions that lead to massive analytic information losses and bury a relatively good business in a deep grave of multiple “idk” levels of knowledge. They only become aware of it when it stops scaling (but competition does, for some reason) or a market goes down for a while (but competition doesn’t care, for some reason). Digging them out is a hard and tearful task.

[jimnotgym]

This sounds fine for a contractor sending out one bill per month, but would you recommend it for a larger entity?

I couldn't fit all of the transactions in a given month into Excel for my business. There are more than 1m rows. We are only an SME.

[mellavora]

the problem with being a larger entity is there may be legal requirements around your accounting system.

In many EU countries, if your turnover (total amount of money flowing through your business) is over a certain amount, or if you are incorporated (rather than sole proprietor) you have a legal requirement for double-entry accounting, and in some places a legal requirement to have an external firm do your accounting.

[hedora]

Excel PowerBI would easily handle millions of transactions, but it's arguably a completely different product hidden inside an excel menu.

[jimnotgym]

Yes, but once you are using Power BI you have lost the friendly interface the op described for categorising transactions, ie it is not a simple spreadseet any more.