TinyBooks Pro is a simple, flexible, non-bloated, single-entry bookkeeping and accounting system for the Macintosh. TinyBooks is designed for Sole Proprietors, home and other small businesses, and family finances.
TinyBooks Pro is the simplest way to handle the books for most small companies. You enter your expenses and income, and TinyBooks does the rest. Current and year-to-date on-the-fly totals are continually displayed. Fully automatic bar-charting of all expense and income accounts make the determination of monthly trends intuitively obvious.
Bottom Line Reports, Transaction Searches, Recurring Expenses, Professional Invoice Printing, Non-Calendar Fiscal Year Support, Tax Support, Keyboard Navigation and Mouse Scroll Wheel Support and much more.
TinyBooks Pro, based on years of experience doing the books, is written exclusively for the Intel-based Macintosh running Mac OSX and is available now.
TinyBooks Pro: An Introduction
TinyBooks Pro (currently for Macintosh only) is an ultra-simple
accounting and bookkeeping program designed for home and small
businesses and perfect for Sole Proprietors.
TinyBooks Pro is a flexible, non-bloated, single-entry bookkeeping
program and the perfect companion to help with taxes throughout and
especially at the end of the year. Though designed with small businesses
in mind, it can also be used in the home to help with the family
finances.
Many tax-related programs, such as TurboTax, H & R Block's At Home
(formerly known as TaxCut) and others, are tied to a particular tax year
and must be re-purchased every single year. TinyBooks Pro is NOT tied
to a particular tax year. Tax laws may change, but the need to keep
track of expenses, income and profits never seems to change, and that is
exactly what TinyBooks Pro is all about! The TinyBooks Pro you purchase
today can be used to help you with your taxes in past years, this year,
next year, and for years ahead.
TinyBooks Pro actually works on automatic most of the time. All you
really have to do is enter each expense or income item, as it happens,
or at month end, and the program calculates everything else,
automatically and instantly.
The Accounts dialog, the Bottom Line Reports window and the Reports and
Transaction Search windows allow you to create Income, Expense,
Quarterly, Full-Year and Custom Reports for just about any time period.
The Bottom Line reports are exactly the reports that an accountant would
want. There are no parameters required for these reports, the program
knows exactly how to create them. End-of-year accounting is simply
effortless.
The Accounts Dialog not only instantly displays monthly and year-to-date
account totals, but also displays monthly trends (instantly,
graphically, intuitively and without any user intervention.) Budgets are
also optionally and easily integrated into any account.
TinyBooks Pro also includes a Professional Invoice Printer utility and
the invoices are printed on plain white paper, so no expensive
third-party forms are required. The Professional Invoice Printer has
been totally revamped. It's now easy to create a multitude of standard
and custom forms, such as Invoices, Estimates, Statements, Proposals,
and more.
All transactions and reports can be exported as desired (for instance,
to give to an accountant, or for import into a spreadsheet, etc.) All
transactions can be easily sorted by Date, Comment, PaymentType,
Account#, Amount or Type of Transaction (expense or income.)
TinyBooks Pro also supports all kinds of domestic and international
taxes, such as Sales Taxes, GST (Goods and Services Tax), PST
(Provincial Sales Tax), VAT (Value-Added Tax) and more. TinyBooks Pro
can even handle multiple types of taxes without adding any complexity.
TinyBooks Pro: Is It Right For You?
TinyBooks Pro is, without a doubt, an astoundingly simple-to-use
accounting program. That is surely it's main niche! It's written for
small business owners who pretty much hate accounting and want to do as
little of it as they can get away with, yet still have all the facts and
figures that they need to run the business and help at tax time.
TinyBooks Pro fills this need for thousands of businesses. But, being
such a simple program, it cannot include the vast features of the "big
boy" accounting programs...the Quick-this and Quick-that programs, as I
like to call them. Those programs are truly superb, but they suffer from
being so overly complex that they leave most users who are not trained
accountants in a daze of bewilderment.
TinyBooks Pro: How Do You Actually Use It?
(A Step-By-Step Tutorial)
Note: TinyBooks Pro is a Macintosh application. It requires an
Intel-based Macintosh computer running OSX. It also requires a monitor
with a resolution of, at least, 1024x768. Higher resolutions and wide
monitors are also supported.
When you run TinyBooks Pro for the very first time, you will want to
create a new set of books (also known as a TinyBooks Pro document) for
your company or family for the current year. Each TinyBooks Pro document
covers one business (or family) for one year. To create a new TinyBooks
Pro document, choose the NEW item from TinyBooks Pro's File Menu.
The NEW item is actually a hierarchical menu with two choices. There's a
NEW (for first time users) and a NEW (with import.) The second NEW is
what you'll use next year so that you can easily import all of the
customizations that you might have added to your this year's accounts.
For now, though, and for this tutorial, choose the NEW item that is
designated for first-time users. The "Create New Set of Books Dialog"
will then appear. It looks like this...

To create a new set of books, TinyBooks Pro really only needs the
following two bits of information...the Company Name, and the Fiscal
Year...
1 - The Company Name - For this demo, you can see I've typed in "The Demo Company" as the name of the company.
2 - The Fiscal Year - Each TinyBooks Pro document handles "the books"
for one company (or family), for one year. You must specify the business
year that this document covers. Most people accept the default calendar
year, running from January to December of the year chosen. In this
tutorial, a simple calendar year is assumed. I actually started creating
this tutorial in January 2010, and so TinyBooks Pro automatically chose
2010, assuming that would be the year that I want this TinyBooks Pro
document to cover. In this case, TinyBooks Pro's guess is exactly right.
Note: TinyBooks Pro also supports non-standard Fiscal Years. To choose a
non-calendar Fiscal Year, enter the closing month and closing year of
your Fiscal Year. Once entered, the program will calculate and display
the range of your fiscal year for your verification. Fiscal Years, by
the way, are numbered based on the year in which the ending month
resides. So, for instance, if you were creating a TinyBooks Pro document
with a Fiscal Year that runs from March 2010 through February 2011, you
would choose February from the popup menu, and type 2011 into the year
field.
After you enter and double-check the required information, click the
SAVE AS button. As with all SAVE AS dialogs, you need to choose a name
and a location for this document. TinyBooks Pro will suggest a default
name of "ShortCompanyName-Books-2010" but you're free to name it
yourself. Hopefully, you will rename the "ShortCompanyName" part to
something that makes sense for your company or family. For this
tutorial, I've changed the suggested name to be "Demo-Books-2010".
Remember, each document covers one company or family for one year, so
including the name of the company (or rather a shortened name of the
company) and the year in the name of the document itself is a very good
idea.
IMPORTANT NOTE: All of the most important information that TinyBooks Pro
knows about your company is stored in this one document that you just
created and named. In the future, this is the document that you will
double-click to start "doing the books." Unlike other accounting
programs that use multiple files to store such information, TinyBooks
Pro simply stores everything in this one file. It's easy to find, easy
to backup, easy to understand, etc.
Once you save your TinyBooks Pro document (also known as your "set of
books"), you'll see an empty Expense/Income Window appear. It will look
something like this...

...and, by the way, if the columns you see look a little different than
the above picture, it might be because you are showing or hiding the Tax
fields (which we'll talk about later.) For now, try pressing Command-T
(for "Tax") or choosing the "Show/Hide Tax Fields" from the TinyBooks
Pro Utility Menu.
The title of the Expense/Income Window that appears will include the
name of your company, the month and year, and the name of the document.
The window is empty, because you haven't yet added any expense or income
items.
This window, by default, shows the items in the current month according
to the date and time set on your computer. To switch to another month,
select it in the Month Menu, or use the left/right arrow buttons on the
Expense/Income Window, or use the left/right arrow keys on the keyboard.
NOTE: I created this step-by-step tutorial in February of 2010, and
chose to create a set of books for 2010, using a standard January to
December fiscal year. So in my case, TinyBooks Pro chose to show me
February 2010 when the document was first opened. If you are going
through this tutorial at a different time (or with a different choice of
fiscal year), TinyBooks Pro will show you a different month than you'll
see here.
TinyBooks Pro also relies on the concept of accounts. Accounts are used
to track various types of expenses and income. In future years, you
might have your own customized set of accounts that you use every year.
If so, a customized list of accounts can be imported. But, since this
tutorial assumes it is the first time TinyBooks Pro is being used, a
Default Account List is automatically created for you. (Later in this
tutorial, you'll learn how to customize the Account List.)
Before we start to enter any actual transactions, let's give TinyBooks
Pro some other information about our company. Later on, as you'll see,
you'll be able to use TinyBooks Pro to create some very professional
Invoices, Statements, Proposals, Estimates and more. We need to supply
TinyBooks Pro with your company information, such as addresses, phone
numbers, web site address, email address, and more. This kind of
information is customized using the Company and Tax Information dialog.
Select the Company and Tax Information Dialog from the TinyBooks Pro
Utility Menu. You should see a dialog that looks something like this...

For this demo, please enter the applicable information for your company.
The company name should already be filled in and ready to go, but you
can add the address, email, phone, web site and more. Please also note
that this is also the dialog in which you customize what kinds of taxes
your company must be able to handle. For this demo tutorial, it is
assumed, there are no taxes to worry about. But, feel free to enter the
names and rates of taxes that are applicable to you. If, for instance,
you lived in Massachusetts and had to pay a Sales Tax of 6.25%, you
could enter "MST" (for Massachusetts Sales Tax) as the abbreviation for
Tax#1 and you could enter "0.0625" for a 6.25% Sales Tax as the Tax
Rate#1. In later parts of the tutorial when you are actually entering
sample transactions, you can just click the Calculate Tax button on the
Item Entry Dialog to automatically calculate the tax fields for you.
When this info is entered, just click the SAVE button, and you'll be
right back at the main monthly window, ready to enter some expenses and
more...
OK, let's enter an actual expense you just paid out (or an income item
you just received.) First, if you tried moving around month to month as
shown above, make sure you're on the correct month for this expense by
checking the title of the window. For this demo, let's make sure we're
on January. With the correct monthly window frontmost, just click the
Enter New Item button (or press its keyboard equivalent.) When you do,
the Expense/Income Item Dialog will appear. Most window positions are
remembered, so where my windows and dialogs appear might look a little
different than where your windows will appear. The Enter Expense/Income
dialog will look something like this...

When the dialog appears, you'll enter information about the first
expense or income item. You'll typically use the tab key to move from
field to field (or shift-tab to move backwards from field to field). The
first field, called "Day", is looking for the day of the month in which
the expense was incurred. TinyBooks Pro can automatically enter Today's
Day for you, or leave the field blank waiting for you to type in the
Day, or it can automatically use the last day that was entered. See the
TinyBooks Pro Preferences for some additional shortcuts.
Then, you would type a short Comment or description about the item in
question. All the comments you enter are remembered automatically. In
the future, if the comment you are about to enter is similar or
identical to one you entered before, you can choose a comment from the
Dropdown menu on the right of the Comment field. In fact, as you type, a
previously remembered comment that matches what you've typed so far,
will automatically appear "ahead of you". You can just type over it, or
you can hit the TAB key to accept the suggestion and go on to the next
field. The Comment dropdown menu starts out empty, but will grow as you
add new entries, as you'll see in the days ahead.
Hitting tab again, you'll end up in the PaymentType field. If a check
was involved in this transaction, you can record its number in the
PaymentType field. You can also automatically insert one of the many
suggested types of payment, such as Cash, VISA, M/C, ATM, PayPal, etc. I
often use the word "Cash" or "Visa" depending on how I purchased the
item in question. In this case, let's assume I just purchased 100 First
Class Stamps using Cash. As you start typing "Cash", you'll see that
happens to be one of the suggested entries. So, you can just accept it
by tabbing to the next field (or continue typing what you might have
wanted instead.)
After filling in the PaymentType field (or selecting one of the built-in
standard entries from the PaymentType Dropdown Menu), you would hit the
TAB key again to move to the next field. You would then enter the
Account# that is associated with the item you are entering.
WAIT! Don't panic! You don't actually have to remember any account
numbers. Though you can enter the account number directly, if you happen
to remember it, you can also just type the first letter of the account
name you want to use ("P" for Postage, for instance.) A popup list will
appear with a listing of all the accounts, and the list will
automatically jump to the first account that starts with the letter you
just typed. If the first account that starts with "P" isn't the one
you're looking for, press "P" again (in this case) and you'll
automatically jump to each account that starts with that letter. Click
the OK button or hit RETURN and the account name and number are entered
automatically.

Then, enter the amount of the transaction in the Amount field, and
you're done. Wait! What about those two additional tax fields? For now,
let's just ignore them. I'll talk about how to handle all kinds of taxes
later on. But, for now, let's just assume there are no taxes associated
with this transaction. (See the section called "TinyBooks Pro and
Taxes" below, and built-in Help with TinyBooks Pro itself for more
information.)
When you click the SAVE button, note that the main monthly window now shows the item you just entered.
In the picture below, if you're observant, you'll see that I've added a
few additional transactions too. As you also can see, income items are
handled in the same way as expense items, just using different accounts.
Also, notice that the bottom of the window instantly calculates many
important totals "on the fly" as you enter each item. A quick glance
shows a few of the most important totals for the currently displayed
month (top row), and for the year-to-date (bottom row.) The totals shown
include the Non-Deductible Expenses, Non-Taxable Income, Deductible
Expenses, Taxable Income and Profit. Again, if the column headings on
your window look different than this picture, just press Command-T (or
use the Show/Hide Tax Fields menu item) as desired.

After you've entered a few items (or a few months worth of items), you
will likely want to see where you're spending your money, what's
working, what's not working, etc. A good place to start is with the
Accounts Dialog. Choose the Accounts item from the Utility Menu. You
will see a dialog that looks something like this...

This Accounts Dialog shows you all of your accounts, and the totals for
each account for the current month and the totals to date (meaning from
the beginning of the year through the current month). Also displayed are
the percentages that each account represents, compared to the
applicable subtotal of that particular type of account. This dialog is
also used to add, modify or delete accounts to suit your own business
(or family) needs.
Again, if you are very observant, you might notice, that for the
purposes of this tutorial, I made a few changes. I made exactly the same
entries for February and March that I made for January. I adjusted the
Accounts dialog to show March instead of January, and I happened to
scroll down to the Online Expenses line. Take a look and you should see
that the year-to-date total ("ToDate") for that account (#17, Online
Expenses) seems to be three times as much as the total just for March
(in the "MonthTotal" column.)
In fact, now is a good time to point out the bar charts on the bottom of
the Accounts Dialog. As you move up and down the list of accounts, the
bar charts will automatically and graphically show you trends on any
account. Note in this case, that we are in the month of March, the 3rd
month in our year, and "Online Expenses" happens to be highlighted. It's
easy to tell at a glance that our monthly online expenses have held
constant...since all three green bars are the same height. But, if you
look at the Cumulative chart on the right, you'll note that,
cumulatively, the trend is rising, as it should, since your total
expenses for the year for that account are rising. Try using the arrow
keys on the keyboard to move up and down the list of accounts, and watch
the charts adjust themselves instantly. Try to get a feel for the bar
charts. After a while, you'll be able to spot trends instantly.
No doubt, by default, TinyBooks Pro includes many accounts that you do
not need or want. So, feel free to delete them. To delete an account
that you don't think you'll ever need, just click its name in the
Account List, and click the Delete button. (Obviously, if there's
activity in that account, it can't be deleted. You can only delete
unused accounts.)
If you wish to rename or add an account, select its name (or a still
unused entry in the Account List) and click the "Configure" button. Then
enter the new name as desired, but, be sure the newly named account
resides in the correct section of the Account List. The position of an
account in the list is very important. As you scroll through the list of
accounts, you'll see that there's a section for each type of
account...Deductible Expenses, Non-Deductible Expenses, Taxable Income
and Non-Taxable Income. Make sure you are adding or renaming an account
in the proper section as desired.
You might also note that you can set a monthly budget (or projection, or
"best guess") for this account in this same "Configure" dialog. Budgets
are optional, but so easy-to-use, it's a shame not to try it. A budget
is just a guide, it lets you estimate what you think (or hope?) will be a
standard monthly amount for some account. You can enter a budget for
expense or income accounts. An expense budget might be your best guess
as to how much you'll spend for a certain expense type each month. An
income budget might best be thought of as your best guess as to how much
income of a certain type you believe you should be making each month.
Your budget numbers will ONLY appear in these bar charts, as a blue
line. Budgets are not included in any displayed or printed reports, they
do not affect any calculations, and only serve as a visual guide or
reminder to you as to how an account is progressing through the year
compared to your expectations.

The little snippet of a picture above shows what the bar charts would
look like after you set a budget for a particular account, but haven't
yet added any transactions to that account. Imagine that you set up a
new Taxable Income account (called Computer Consulting, maybe??), and
set a budget (a hopeful best guess) that you would earn, say, $1000.00
each month. Now, imagine that you use the arrow keys on the Accounts
Dialog to move to the last month of the fiscal year. We have NOT yet
entered any actual income received for this account, so there are no
green bars in the bar chart. But, you should be able to see the blue
budget lines. The monthly budget (projection) is the same each month, so
each month on the left hand bar chart shows a constant blue budgeted
value...that's how much income you are expecting each month. But,
cumulatively, on the bar chart on the right, you can see that a fixed
monthly budget results in a linearly increasing step in the blue budget
line. When you enter actual income items for this account, you'll be
able to see whether the income is above or below expectations (that is,
whether the green bars are above or below the blue line.) See the next
picture...

In the picture above, imagine that you did have some consulting income
in the months of April, May and June in the amounts of $750, $1250, and
$1500 but that you didn't have any other consulting income for the rest
of the year. Now, again, if we use the right-arrow on the Accounts
Dialog to move to the final month of our fiscal year (December, in this
case), we would see the picture above. Can you make sense of the charts?
On the left, note that the first month that we had income, it was below
our best guess (that is, below the blue budget line.) But, the next two
months, we were a little above our best guess. On the right bar chart
(the one that shows CUMULATIVE totals) it shows the totals levelling off
and getting further and further away from our budget (our best guess)
because we didn't have any more income of that type since the 6th month
of the year. The idea of budgets (estimates, best guesses, projections,
etc.) is as valid for income as it is expenses. In this example, we used
Consulting Income as an example, but the identical approach is used for
expenses too.
Advanced Note: For those curious about some of the technical details,
you might note that the minimum and maximum values of the vertical axis
of the left and right bar charts might not be the same. The charts
should be viewed in relative not absolute terms. The bar charts
accurately show trends in relative terms. For absolute numbers, you must
view the list of accounts in the Accounts dialog.
Another powerful feature of TinyBooks Pro is its ability to generate
both standard and custom reports. Usually, the Bottom Line Reports and
listings available from the Accounts dialog are sufficient for all
needs, but when a custom report is needed, TinyBooks Pro is ready.
Select the Reports and Transacation Search item from the Utility Menu. A
window will appear that looks something like this...

As you see, this feature gives you the flexibility to generate just
about any kind of report you can think of. And, by the way, please note
that I'm using the word Report loosely now. The real accounting reports
are available in the Bottom Line Reports and the Account dialogs. But,
the Reports and Transaction Search window is still a very powerful
search facility. You can request reports that only include certain
accounts, or only if transactions include a particular keyword, etc. In
the example just above, I searched for any expense, occurring at any
time during the year, that had the word "envelopes" in the item's
description.
Note that in addition to an Expense or Income Report, TinyBooks Pro also
includes a type of report that includes ALL types of entries (that is,
both expense and income.) This makes it extremely easy to view, print or
export all the transactions you've made all year (or any portion of a
year) without having to re-visit each monthly window.
This dialog is an extremely flexible way to do some very particular
kinds of reporting on a chosen subset of your transactions. For
instance, if you have carefully included the name (or initials, or ID#,
etc.) of a particular client in the Comment/Description field of every
entry, it's a piece of cake to get a per-client profitability report. If
you generate a report including both income and expenses, the resulting
total represents the total of all income items matching the given
criteria minus the total of all expense items matching the same
criteria...effectively, the profit generated from a particular client!
Though not shown in this tutorial, please try the "Bottom Line Report"
option also. You can find this in the TinyBooks Pro Utility Menu. This
is a very simple report that includes just about everything an
accountant might request. At the end of the year, this is the report
that I would print to help me figure out my taxes. Notice that there
aren't any parameters that need to be set. Nice and simple!