Tag: business

How to invoice your customers for free using GNUcash

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(Estimated 3 minute read)

Note: If you don’t need everything integrated into one system, or the guarantee that it will always remain free, and just need an easier means of creating free invoices, at least one other good alternative exists. The one using at present for this is WaveApps, which continues to work well for us.

To my knowledge, GNUcash is perhaps the only true free alternative to Quickbooks to date, for those who require a comprehensive bookkeeping system.

Despite this fact (at least as of the time of writing), GNUcash has not included time-tracking/integration, and has lacked any direct way to import Quickbooks-formatted files, so be advised that making the switch will likely present some challenges. For time tracking, I use a simple spreadsheet, but there are many free time-tracking tools you can use, including Harvest, which integrates with Asana.

It features a strong ledger system, but unfortunately can be even more user-unfriendly than Quickbooks and more difficult to set up, with very clumsy and limited invoicing, sadly with no way to save settings from app & very clunky tools to tweak layout options.

That said, it’s free, so let’s cut to the chase!

To set up invoices, you’ll need to first set up a customer at Business → Customer → New Customer. You can leave Customer Number blank or use a name, but you’ll want to use the full customer/client name under the Company Name field, as this will appear on the invoices. The Name field, however, can be left blank.

When your customer(s) are set up properly, next go to Business → Customer → New Invoice (Note: After creating your first one, you can also then click the ‘Duplicate Invoice’, to save yourself some time in the future.)

Fill out the invoice details and click the OK button, which brings up the following:

When you have finished entering all the items, you can Save & ‘Post’ and then ‘Print’ the invoice.

To make invoices look less hideous, you’ll then need to choose and customize a Stylesheet. Click here for more on customizing invoices…

Note: Use “Extra Notes”, not Description for customer note.

To find an existing invoice, use the Business → Customer → Find Invoice menu, but before you can edit a posted invoice, you will need to Unpost it.

Click here for more detail from the official GNUcash website…

Or here for a video tutorial on the same topic…

3 Tips on Using Asana to Manage Your Tasks to Combat Distraction

Trūists.ōrg Leave a comment

Unless you perhaps register somewhere on the autism spectrum and/or every moment of your life is being painstakingly managed for you, you are probably struggling more than ever to juggle a seemingly endless barrage of things you want and need to do on any given day. And multiply that by at least a few times if you happen to fall anywhere on the ADhD continuum!

While no tool can offer a perfect solution for keeping organized, I have tried quite a few over the years and the best I’ve found for me to-date is Asana — which is 100% free, if you happen to be working alone or in a fairly small team!

Despite having been recently designed, though, navigating Asana can still be a bit unintuitive for the unfamiliar, so I decided to share a few techniques I use, in hopes that you’ll find some utility in them!

Only assign high-priority tasks to individuals, assign everything else by Project
I highly recommend assigning everything that’s not an immediately pressing task by Project and tags, and not assigning a task to a person (including yourself), unless it’s something that needs to be acted on within the next few days. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an endless, overwhelming list of to-dos that will sabotage that crucial sense of progress, accomplishment and clarity that is so essential to the process of organizing and getting things done. This allows you keep your project management separate from your task management, going back & forth between the Project and Team Member views.

Only use ‘Headings’ for milestone-markers, within Projects, not as task-containers!
As you may know, ending the name of a given task with a colon turns it into a ‘heading’, but when you drag to reorder these, they move independently of any tasks that fall under these ‘headings’, which brings me to my last tip:

Keep every complex task organized with its own sub-tasks, but only go one level deep
If you weren’t aware, you can (and should!) ‘nest’ tasks within other tasks in Asana to group smaller tasks within overarching objectives. I recommend doing it this way because, unlike Headings (see above), it is easy to grab and rearrange them by their ‘parent’ task in any task list. The reason I suggest only ‘nesting’ them only one level deep is because navigating any deeper than one level through Asana can be a bit of a nightmare, and it’s almost impossible not to lose sub-tasks if they are nested any more than one-level in!
NOTE: In order to effectively use this method, it is also essential to keep the task description empty for any ‘parent’ tasks (objectives), because Asana lists sub-tasks below this, and adding descriptions more than a line or two long will push the sub-tasks down out of view!

I hope you found these techniques to be beneficial — Please drop me a message and/or leave a comment either way! Cheers.