Announcing indiAccounting 1.6: A Bank Register, Check Printing, and Payroll That Handles Real Life

indiAccounting 1.5 was about tax season — filing your 941s and W-2s and switching systems mid-year. indiAccounting 1.6 is about the other 360 days: the everyday bookkeeping that shouldn’t require an accounting degree, and the payroll situations that real small businesses actually run into.

Here’s what’s new.

Enter transactions the way you think about them

Not every transaction comes from an invoice or a bill. You pay a fee, you write a check, you move money to savings, you make a deposit. Until now, recording those by hand meant a journal entry — and journal entries mean thinking in debits and credits, which is exactly the wall most business owners hit.

The new Bank Register knocks that wall down. Open an account, click Register, and record what happened in plain language:

Deposit — money in
Check — money out by check
Withdrawal — money out (a card swipe, a fee, cash)
Transfer — move money between your accounts

You pick the category, type the amount, and save. Behind the scenes indiAccounting posts a correct, balanced journal entry for you, so everything you record flows straight into your reports and your bank reconciliation — you just never have to see a debit or a credit. The register keeps a running list with each entry’s payment, deposit, and balance, exactly like the paper checkbook register you already understand.

Print your checks

Since you’re already writing checks in the register, you can now print them. Record a check, click Print Check, and indiAccounting produces a proper business check with a detachable stub for your records — the amount both boxed as a figure and spelled out on the legal line the way a check reads (“One Thousand Two Hundred Thirty-Four and 56/100”). Load your check stock and print. No more handwriting.

Payroll that handles real life

Payroll is never as simple as “hours times rate.” 1.6 adds the pieces that trip up real businesses.

Tax exemptions for family employment. Employing your kids in the family business? Their wages can be exempt from Social Security and Medicare, and from federal unemployment — but only in specific situations. You can now mark an employee exempt from FICA, FUTA, and/or SUTA independently. The wages still show on the W-2 and still get income tax; the exempted tax simply isn’t withheld or accrued, and it’s correctly excluded from the 941 and W-2. (Set these only when you have a clear statutory basis — your accountant can confirm.)

Cash advances. Front an employee some money and collect it back over the next few checks. Enter an advance right on the pay run — it’s added to net pay as a loan, not taxable wages — and record repayments on later runs. indiAccounting tracks the outstanding balance and never lets a repayment take more than the check can cover.

Wage garnishments. Add a court-ordered garnishment to an employee once, and indiAccounting applies it automatically to every pay run as a post-tax deduction — withheld within the federal CCPA limits. It computes the deduction on disposable earnings, caps ordinary creditor garnishments at 25% while protecting the mandatory 30×-minimum-wage floor, and gives child support priority so an ordinary creditor yields to it rather than stacking on top. You set each order’s legal ceiling; the app does the math and never over-withholds.

Non-taxable reimbursements. Paying back an employee for an expense? Add it right in the pay-run grid. It’s added to net pay and never taxed — no separate check, no separate entry.

Fix a posted entry — the right way

The general ledger is append-only for a reason: an audit trail you can edit isn’t an audit trail. So when you need to correct a manual journal entry, 1.6 gives you a Reverse Entry button. It posts a new, balanced entry with the debits and credits swapped, so the original and the reversal net to zero and both stay on the books — the way an accountant would do it. (Entries created by a document — an invoice, bill, or pay run — are still corrected by voiding the source, which posts the reversal for you.)

Smaller things that add up

Estimate PDFs. Download an estimate as a polished PDF, just like invoices.
Invoice payment terms. The invoice screen now has a payment-terms picker that defaults from the customer, sets the due date automatically, and can save your choice back as that customer’s default.
Reports carry your company name. CSV and Excel exports now include your business name in the header, so a report is identifiable on its own.
Drill down and come back. Click an account on your Profit & Loss or Balance Sheet to open its ledger detail — and hit Back to return to the report exactly as you left it, date range and basis intact.

Fixes

Bank statement imports. CSV files whose only date column is labeled “Posting Date” (Chase and many other banks) now import correctly — previously every row was silently dropped and the import reported zero transactions. Drag-and-drop of a file onto the import area works now too, and the importer recognizes more column layouts.
Invoice PDFs. Long line-item descriptions no longer overrun the columns or run off the page, and a crash on descriptions with accented or non-Latin characters is fixed.
Credits. The customer dropdown on the Issue-a-Credit screen shows the customer’s name again instead of a placeholder.

A note on the tricky stuff

Payroll-tax exemptions and wage garnishments come with real legal rules, and indiAccounting takes a deliberately conservative, transparent approach — it never over-withholds, and it shows you exactly what it did. But your situation may have wrinkles the app can’t know about (competing garnishment orders, a state rule stricter than federal, whether a family-employment exemption actually applies). Set the exemptions and the garnishment caps to match your specific orders, and when in doubt, check with your accountant or the issuing agency. As always, indiAccounting does the arithmetic; you make the calls.

How to get it

1.6 is a free update for all license holders. Everything upgrades automatically — your data is never touched. Download for Linux & Windows, and you’ll be on 1.6 in a couple of minutes.