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Which Bookkeeping Software for a Sole Trader?

Also available in Suomi

I won’t take a position here on whether you should do your bookkeeping yourself or hire a professional. That depends on how interested you are in it. Either way, transactions should be recorded somewhere when they happen so they don’t get forgotten. Kilometres driven, travel expenses, receipts and so on need to be kept.

The purpose of this post is to find out whether free bookkeeping programs are a solution for recording income and expenses.

At the end I have also added some information about bookkeeping services.

Free bookkeeping programs

The options I have found so far are:

  • Excel
  • Tilitin
  • Tappio
  • Holli
  • Odoo CRM

At a quick glance, none of these is open source software that would allow further development if the original developer decides to stop.

Excel

You can of course use spreadsheet software, but all the proper terms come out better in software designed for the purpose.

Tilitin

“Tilitin is a free bookkeeping program for Windows and Linux.

Features:

Reports: account balances, account statement, income statement, balance sheet, journal, general ledger and VAT report by account Saving reports as PDF files Voucher types Several chart-of-accounts templates”

The latest version is from 2013.

Link to the download page: Tilitin

Tappio

The latest version is from 2010.

Link to the download page: Tappio

Holli

According to the version history in the program’s help file, the latest version is from 2017.

According to the help file, it is similar to Tappio but is not based on the same source code.

Link to the download page: Holli

Odoo CRM

Link to the page: Odoo for Finnish bookkeeping

Commercial accounting services for bookkeeping

There seem to be plenty of options.

  • Netvisor
  • SimplBooks – from 9€/month
  • Accountor Go
  • Merit Aktiva
  • OP Kevytyrittäjä – 5% of sales invoices
  • Ukko Pro
  • ALVin – from 14.90€/month

This article on yrityksen-perustaminen.net goes into bookkeeping programs (in Finnish) in a bit more detail.

Entrepreneurship