PS: the company is incorporated and based out of India. Even though accounting tools are country specific, I'm looking forward to some best-practices guides and tutorials on how to do accounting myself.
At the very least look into hiring someone for a "bookkeeper" role. Often accountants, or others with an accounting background, will moonlight doing the books for small companies. Search craigslist or the equivalent in India.
So here's a recommendation - it's probably better to keep all your receipts in a folder system, along with records of your bank statements, and do nothing in software until you're totally committed, or can hire a bookkeeper. You can hand the receipts over to a professional a little later, but handing over a half assed mess in Quickbooks or whatever is much worse IMHO. Just don't wait too long to find that bookkeeper :)
Also, if being generally organized and fastidious is not one of your skills, bookkeeping is probably better handled by someone else, whether you have a great accounting tool or not.
http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/
It's available packaged in MacPorts, Ubuntu, and so on.
2008/01/01 income
assets:bank:checking $1
income:salary $-1
Xero, Freeagent, Less Accounting and FreshBooks ( <- Disclaimer: I work @freshbooks) are all solid resources that - to the best of my knowledge - will work in India.
Ditto. For instance, if I had talked to my accountant soon enough, I could have saved half of my company registration costs - he knew about a special, not too well advertised, local program, which my in-house lawyer did not know of. Also, tax legislation looks like a minefield to me - a competent[1] accountant is a mine-sweeper that may save your bacon.
[1] Horror story from friends: years ago they formed a company, didn't do much business, dissolved (which in itself may be hard, especially if someone moved away). Later had to keep paying fines because of paperwork improperly filed by their accountant.
P.S. The "grumpy editor" at lwn.net occasionally looks at FOSS accounting software, and readers chime in; e.g. at http://lwn.net/Articles/314577/
While you are probably more than capable of doing basic double-entry accounting, it is a huge nuisance and a mistake can get you into trouble. Your time, as a founder, is better spent growing the business than dealing with the annoyances of accounting, reconciliation, reporting, and taxation.
The hired accountant will suggest software packages with which they prefer to work.
Lastly, India may present a different scenario, but consider having payroll and benefits handled by a firm like ADP or TriNet -- even if you hire a consulting/part-time accountant. The quickest way to get in trouble with federal government is to make a mistake on payroll tax withholding/reporting.
My 2 cents...
Just keeping in mind that at some point, you will have to hand over all the data to an accountant.