[INTPenis]

As a freelance consultant from Sweden I looked at GnuCash several times over the past 10+ years but it was always the same issue.

It's not tailored for our economy and our revenue services.

Here in Sweden if your revenue is below 3 million SEK/year, then you can use "simplified bookkeeping" (rough translation of "förenklat årsbokslut").

In practice it means I could write a very basic program to manage my expenses and income and just have it generate all the necessary numbers that I then enter manually into our revenue service's online app every year.

[john61]

I am also a solo freelancer with simplified bookkeeping. I experienced that Double-entry bookkeeping is - beyond the initial learning curve - not more effort than simple book keeping. That is because it automatically avoids common errors. GnuCash works fine for me since 20 years. Never looking back to fragile spreadsheets and half-baken Access DB's.

[INTPenis]

How is the GnuCash DB any different from using an Access DB?

For simplified bookkeeping GnuCash, and most generalized bookkeeping programs, is overkill.

I accomplish the same thing with 250 lines of Python, and the result is that I get exactly the numbers I need to enter into Skatteverkets e-tjänst, and nothing else. And each transaction is one yaml file, and stored off-site with git.

[john61]

Double entry bookkeeping is the gold standard in finance bookkeeping since the romans. It is not overkill, because once mastered it is very easy to handle especially with a program that implements the logic like GnuCash. The problem for novices is usually to understand the logic: https://gnucash-docs-rst.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/C/ch...