According to professional dog trainers, training your dog to fetch the daily newspaper is not really difficult, as long as your dog is big enough to carry a newspaper in its mouth. Some dogs are natural fetchers and carriers, and some will never want to do this. If your dog likes playing fetch, you can teach the dog to bring in the paper with the help of some incentives, such as dog biscuits. Having taught your dog, you can check one recurring task neatly taken care of.

As a small business you will have a number of transactions that repeat monthly. In some types of businesses, you might have transactions that repeat semi-monthly, weekly, or even daily as well. Examples are expenses such as rent, utility bills and mortgage payments, subscriptions such as newspapers, magazines, professional memberships, and services such as web hosting, janitorial, paper shredding and others. Every month you keep getting a bill and you find that you are repeating the same or a similar transaction over and over again. Computers are supposed to save us from the drudgery of having to do such repetitive work. Right? Right, but the software we use must be capable of enabling such automation to happen.

Welcome to GnuCash. Say a quick "Thank you" to the development team who thought of all this and built these user-friendly features in GnuCash.

In this chapter let us look at how we can set up GnuCash to help us through such repetitive transactions:

So let's get on with it...