JDT

John Dixon
Technology
Limited

Earnings Tracker Overview

Earnings Tracker is a free accounting / bookkeeping software tool, primarily aimed at UK contractors and freelancers. Earnings Tracker is not a fully blown accounting package and it will not remove the need for an accountant.

History

The first version of Earnings Tracker was developed in 2005 when I, John Dixon, needed a simple way of keeping track of how much my company was invoicing, what my monthly expenses were, how much income tax and national insurance I was paying, whether my company had earned enough money to enable the shareholders to take a dividend, and so on.

At the time I was trying to get as much PHP and MySQL experience as possible, so I decided to develop Earnings Tracker in PHP and MySQL. In the first version, many of the items that are now variables that can be modified via the user interface, were hard coded into the PHP script. As I was the only user of the software at that time it didn't matter, but when I decided to make the software available to other people I obviously needed to make the software more flexible, so I got rid of a lot of the hard coding.

Features

I have always tried to ensure that Earnings Tracker covers the main bookkeeping tasks that a UK contractor needs to perform on a monthly basis. Having said that, there is always a tendency to want to introduce more and more functionality, but at the same time I want to keep things as simple as possible. I want Earnings Tracker to be useful, and I want people to use it; if it becomes too complicated to use, people won't use it.

Navigation

All primary navigation within Earnings Tracker is performed via a single menu bar across the top of the window, which is always available wherever you are in the application.

The Code

As I said above, Earnings Tracker is written in PHP and MySQL. Everything revolves around one class, and I've tried to keep the code as simple as possible. This is primarily so that people new to PHP and MySQL programming will be able to easily understand what's going on if they want to download and install the software.

Web Server

If you want to download and install Earnings Tracker you'll need to have a web server available, which supports PHP and MySQL. The server can be either on your own computer, or on a third party computer.

Go back to Earnings Tracker User Guides home page

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