Now we have finally made a new release of Lazy8 Ledger. The only major thing prior-users will notice is the account summary report has the incomming and outgoing values shown for each account.
But the major new thing with this release is that it is now compatible with OpenJDK. Before Lazy8 Ledger was only compatible with Sun-Java but now it will work with OpenJDK which is the standard Java in Linux distributions. See the details of the release here.
You can install Ubuntu's linux distribution on your computer!
Lazy8 Ledger has now been made into an ubuntu package and we are hoping to get the package into the ubuntu-lucid version that is to be released in February. See the installation instructions for how to install in ubuntu today.
Lazy8 Ledger now has a new website. You are looking at it right now. Thanks to Victor Borgvall for help and encouragement.
For a little bit of nostalgia, click on the picture below to see how bad it really was…
The old Lazy8 Ledger website
Leave comments here about problems you have had with mac installations
Leave comments here about problems you have had with windows installations
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Leave comments here about how much you like Lazy8 Ledger or about things you don’t like
Transaction number restart
Many people write about how they need to have the transaction numbers restart at “1″ for each accounting period. It’s easy. Just change the setting “Transaction id restart at each accounting period” (see the picture below):
The solution to this problem is not as simple as many book-keeping programs have solved it. Most book-keeping programs allow either unbalenced transactions or have simply a field in the account definition for an incoming balance. In Lazy8Ledger, neither of the above ’simple’ solutions are available. All transactions in Lazy8Ledger must be balanced. The solution I have come up with is the following.
1. Create an ‘Accounting period’ for the period prior to your present ‘Accounting period.’ For example, if your present accouting period is 2009-01-01 to 2009-12-31 then create an accouting period for 2008-01-01 to 2008-12-31.
2. Restart Lazy8Ledger(jEdit). You will be asked to choose which accounting period to work with. Choose the earlier accounting period.
3. Now enter a new transaction for the last day of the accouting period. In this transaction you can enter all your accounts that require an incoming balance. The hard part is that you must balance this transaction so if you enter an incoming amount into an account, you must then enter the same amount into another account to balance the transaction. Deciding which account to balance with is not always so easy and may require help of an accountant. If you are very good with accounting, you should be able to quickly come up with the right account to balance with. One technique that works for me to balance out ‘Capital or debts’ accounts (‘Capital or debts’ accounts are often the only accounts needing incoming balances) is to simply create an account called ‘Incoming Balances’ and be sure that this account is NOT marked as ‘Capital or debts’. Then use this ‘Incoming Balances’ account to balance out all the other ‘Capital or debts’ accounts incoming amounts.
4. Restart Lazy8Ledger(jEdit). You will be asked to choose which accounting period to work with. Choose the accounting period that you want to begin entering real transactions into.
Thats it.
