Phasar ------ Table of Contents Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1-1 1.1 Requirements................................................ 1-1 1.2 PHASAR Overview............................................. 1-2 1.3 Financial Model............................................. 1-3 1.4 Approach.................................................... 1-3 1.5 Capabilities and Limitations................................ 1-4 Chapter 2 PRELIMINARIES 2-1 2.1 Introduction................................................ 2-1 2.2 Special Keys................................................ 2-1 2.3 Other Conventions........................................... 2-3 2.4 Upper- vs. Lower-case....................................... 2-4 2.5 Installation................................................ 2-4 Chapter 3 ENTERING TRANSACTIONS 3-1 3.1 Getting Started............................................. 3-1 3.2 Recording Incomes........................................... 3-2 3.3 Recording Expenses.......................................... 3-9 3.4 Transfers Between Accounts................................. 3-15 3.5 Cash Account And Cash Transactions......................... 3-18 3.6 Split Transactions and Calculator.......................... 3-20 3.7 Standard Transactions...................................... 3-25 Chapter 4 VIEW/EDIT TRANSACTIONS 4-1 4.1 Setting up Search Limits.................................... 4-1 4.2 Editing Transactions........................................ 4-4 Chapter 5 CONFIRM WITH STATEMENT 5-1 Chapter 6 REPORTS 6-1 6.1 Account Status.............................................. 6-1 6.2 Month-by-Month Summaries.................................... 6-3 6.3 To Cash Flow or Not......................................... 6-4 6.5 Net Worth - Assets and Liabilities.......................... 6-6 i Chapter 7 ANALYSIS 7-1 7.1 Editing the Budget.......................................... 7-1 7.2 Plot Trend vs. Budget....................................... 7-2 7.3 Loan and Savings Analysis................................... 7-4 Chapter 8 MODIFYING THE SETUP 8-1 8.1 Setup Accounts.............................................. 8-1 8.2 Setup Categories............................................ 8-3 8.3 Re-Ordering Categories or Accounts.......................... 8-3 8.4 Validate Register File...................................... 8-4 Chapter 9 LIST MANAGEMENT 9-1 9.1 Introduction................................................ 9-1 9.2 Names and Addresses......................................... 9-1 9.3 Special Occasions........................................... 9-3 Chapter 10 CALCULATING TAXES 10-1 10.1 Introduction.............................................. 10-1 10.2 What You'll Need.......................................... 10-2 10.3 The Bottom Line........................................... 10-3 10.4 Editing The Budget........................................ 10-6 10.5 Changing The Cell Contents................................ 10-7 10.6 Creating A Tax Form....................................... 10-8 10.7 Creating Form Cells...................................... 10-11 10.8 Validating The Tax File.................................. 10-14 10.9 Printing Tax Forms....................................... 10-15 10.10 Hidden Lines and Footnotes.............................. 10-16 10.11 Tax Tables.............................................. 10-17 10.12 Setting User Preferences................................ 10-17 10.13 Cloning A Form.......................................... 10-18 10.14 Category Name Considerations............................ 10-19 10.15 Setting Up Your System.................................. 10-19 Chapter 11 SETTING UP YOUR OWN PHASAR SYSTEM 11-1 11.1 Introduction.............................................. 11-1 11.2 Organizing Your Records................................... 11-1 11.3 Naming Categories......................................... 11-1 11.4 Entering Old Transactions................................. 11-3 11.5 Create New Register File.................................. 11-4 Chapter 12 ENTERING TRANSACTIONS 12-1 12.1 Credits and Refunds....................................... 12-1 12.2 Printing Checks........................................... 12-2 12.3 Check Numbers............................................. 12-2 12.4 Miscellaneous............................................. 12-3 ii Chapter 13 VIEW/EDIT TRANSACTIONS 13-1 Chapter 14 CONFIRM WITH STATEMENT 14-1 Chapter 15 REPORTS 15-1 15.1 Category Summary.......................................... 15-1 15.2 Net Worth Statement....................................... 15-1 Chapter 16 ANALYSIS 16-1 16.1 Budgeting................................................. 16-1 16.2 Trend vs. Budget.......................................... 16-2 16.3 Loan and Savings Analysis................................. 16-2 Chapter 17 SETUP 17-1 17.1 Set User Preferences...................................... 17-1 17.2 Setup Check Printing...................................... 17-4 17.3 New Year Carry Over....................................... 17-6 17.4 Create New Register File.................................. 17-7 Chapter 18 TAX CALCULATION DETAILS 18-1 18.1 Special Functions (@)..................................... 18-1 18.2 Rounding.................................................. 18-2 18.3 Operator Precedence....................................... 18-3 18.4 Cell Dependencies......................................... 18-3 18.5 Memory Usage.............................................. 18-4 18.6 Performance Considerations................................ 18-4 18.7 Editing Forms............................................. 18-5 18.8 Printing Forms............................................ 18-6 Appendix A DO's and DO NOT's A-1 A.1 DO's........................................................ A-1 A.2 DO NOT's.................................................... A-2 Appendix B FILES: NAMES AND FUNCTIONS B-1 Appendix C SOFTWARE ETHICS C-1 iii List of Figures Figure 3.1: Transaction-entry screen............................. 3-3 Figure 3.2: Pop-up help menu..................................... 3-5 Figure 3.3: Income category display.............................. 3-6 Figure 3.4: Depositing Egbert's paycheck......................... 3-7 Figure 3.5: Expense category display............................ 3-11 Figure 3.6: Entering transactions............................... 3-13 Figure 3.7: Creating a new category............................. 3-15 Figure 3.8: Options while creating categories................... 3-15 Figure 3.9: Transfers........................................... 3-17 Figure 3.10: Recording cash expenses............................ 3-19 Figure 3.11: Split/Multiple category transactions............... 3-21 Figure 3.12: Standard transactions pages........................ 3-25 Figure 3.13: Editing standard transactions...................... 3-26 Figure 3.14: Creating standard transactions..................... 3-28 Figure 3.15: Create which page?................................. 3-28 Figure 3.16: Using deductions account........................... 3-29 Figure 4.1: Setting up search limits............................. 4-2 Figure 4.2: Transactions printout................................ 4-3 Figure 4.3: Edit-transactions screen............................. 4-5 Figure 5.1: Setting up account confirmation...................... 5-2 Figure 5.2: Confirming missing transactions...................... 5-3 Figure 6.1: Account summary report............................... 6-2 Figure 6.2: Monthly category summary............................. 6-3 Figure 6.3: Printout of net worth statement...................... 6-6 Figure 6.4: Editing assets (for Net Worth)....................... 6-7 Figure 7.1: Editing the grocery budget........................... 7-2 Figure 7.2: Actual vs. Budget graph.............................. 7-3 Figure 7.3: Car loan analysis.................................... 7-5 Figure 8.1: Setting up accounts.................................. 8-4 Figure 8.2: Validating Register File............................. 8-5 Figure 9.1: Names and addresses.................................. 9-2 Figure 9.2: Editing special occasions............................ 9-5 Figure 10.1: Form 1040 showing help/options..................... 10-4 Figure 10.2: Abbreviated Schedule C............................. 10-9 iv Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Welcome to PHASAR and thank you for choosing the "Professional/Home Accounting System and Register". A couple of comments about this manual are in order. First, note that it begins with a bit of technical and philosophical information. (We urge you to read these several pages before you get involved with the tutorial). Following the introductory section, you will enter a tutorial. We hope the tutorial makes your introduction to PHASAR not only painless but enjoyable. Following the tutorial section of this manual there is a reference section which covers some of the details left out of the tutorial. And at the back of the manual you'll find a handy quick-start guide with a crib sheet on the back which describes the edit-modes and pop-up choices menus which occur throughout PHASAR. Most of this manual was written by, and all of it was reviewed by, a total computer "illiterate". We hope that the result is a manual that is easy to follow for people who are neither computer- nor financial-experts. 1.1 Requirements PHASAR runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT and compatibles, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST 1-1 computers with 512K bytes of memory. You will also need at least one disk drive and an 80-column display. A printer is quite handy but not necessary. 1.2 PHASAR Overview This PHASAR package consists of two programs, PHASAR (which we will refer to as the "PHASAR program" to avoid confusing it with the package itself) and the second, PHTAX. The PHASAR program consists of a number of modules which keep financial affairs straight and common household lists organized. The PHTAX program consists of modules which are used to determine taxes. The entire PHASAR package is "menu driven". This simply means you will be presented with a list of options in a main menu and a list of more specific options (functions) under each main-menu item. When you've selected the desired function, PHASAR will "prompt" you to enter the information necessary to accomplish your task. This provides the user with a neat and easy way to enter and examine data. PHASAR was designed to be virtually "crash-proof". You may get "beeped" at occasionally, but the program will not let you enter any information that it is not prepared to deal with. Online reminders and "help" messages are available throughout the program as well. (And, if you get really desperate, there is this manual). 1.3 Financial Model A short description of the assumptions of the financial model underlying PHASAR's development should be handy at this point. In the program, the word account will refer to an "entity" which is used to receive and disburse funds and which has a worth (balance) associated with it at all times. Examples of "accounts" are: "checking", "Sears charge card", "savings", etc. The funds (received in, or disbursed from an account) are 1-2 tallied according to categories. The categories are divided into "income" and "expense" categories. Examples of income categories are: "Paycheck", "Interest", "Rental Income", etc. Expense categories might include: "Groceries", "Clothing", "Rent", etc. PHASAR is designed to conveniently keep track of ALL your financial affairs. That means more than accomplishing the very useful function of performing the arithmetic necessary when confirming your bank statements. PHASAR utilizes interacting accounts to keep track of, and to provide meaningful records of where money came from and where it went. Of course, at tax time, that means that all necessary information is available in one place! The program does not force you to account for the source and destination of every cent but rather keeps track of how much came in (and where from) and how much went out (and where to). Like the records you keep in your checkbook register, this is a "single-entry" accounting. Simple as always. And now enlightening with the help of a computer to prepare and present various reports. 1.4 Approach Two major goals guided the development of PHASAR. - First, entering transactions should be quick and easy. - Second, the rewards should make the effort required to enter transactions well worth it. Data entry is facilitated in three ways: 1. Minimum typing is required. Wherever possible, PHASAR will hazard a "best guess" at your data entry. A single keystroke will enter this best guess default answer for you. (Even when 1-3 PHASAR is incorrect, the guess will provide you with the format for entering the correct information.) Entering category names can be accomplished by typing the entire name of the category, by typing the first letter or two of the name, or by typing the assigned number of that category (which can be recalled easily via the "Help" key). 2. In the event that you make a mistake entering data, it is easy to back up to the error and correct it. If it is inconvenient to back up at any time, you can use the full-screen edit option later. 3. The program constantly checks the data entered to make sure that it makes sense and that the program can handle it. You will get "beeped" at immediately and asked to clarify if there is a problem. 1.5 Capabilities and Limitations In addition to making data entry easy, PHASAR handles transactions in the format that you are probably most familiar and comfortable with. The transaction entry layout is very similar to that of an ordinary checkbook register. Entering data into a computer may not really be fun, but we think we've made it quick and relatively painless. Some of PHASAR's benefits are: 1. The convenience of having the addition and subtraction accomplished correctly during data entry as well as during the confirmation of an account statement. 2. The practicality of setting up a budget that can be compared with amounts actually spent or received. 1-4 3. The ease of searching for a specific payment which has come into question. 4. The safety of doing a mid-year tax projection. 5. The speed of generating a net worth statement automatically prepared by PHASAR using current balances in each of the thirty-nine user-defined accounts together with easily entered/edited assets/liabilities which you choose. PHASAR allows you to define up to 39 accounts, 29 income categories and 97 expense categories. Miscellaneous income and expense categories and cash account with associated total cash and net cash expense categories are automatically defined. Transfers between accounts are very easy. Just tell PHASAR to make a payment to the appropriate account, and the program will take care of the rest of the transfer. PHASAR will also let you write one check (or make one deposit) and have the full amount split among several categories. The maximum number of transactions permitted for any month is 500. You may predefine commonly occurring transactions (and enter them all together without re-typing them). You may predefine up to 17 sets containing 20 transactions each. A data disk is intended to hold one year's worth of data. At the end of the year, PHASAR will carry-over all unconfirmed transactions to the new data disk to help smooth your next bank statement confirmations. That's it for introductory remarks. Again, thank you for choosing PHASAR. We hope that you agree that PHASAR is practical, useful and usable. Enjoy. 1-5 Chapter 2 PRELIMINARIES 2.1 Introduction Are you feeling on top of things after reading the introductory section of the manual? (If you didn't read it, we suggest you do so prior to starting this tutorial). If you're feeling somewhat unsure of yourself, don't worry. Using this tutorial should clarify the concepts underlying the PHASAR financial model and its conventions. Take your time going through the tutorial. We think you'll have some fun and we've found that "hands on" use enhances the understanding of information in the text. You'll get a taste of many of PHASAR's capabilities. (And, you'll get more for your money if you lear the full range of functions available to you). Hopefully PHASAR will serve you well for years to come and repay you generously for the time you spend now getting to know it. Enough of the lecture! Have fun. Don't be afraid to attempt the exercises. PHASAR was designed to be virtually crash-proof. You may get beeped at occasionally, but the program will not let you enter any information it is not prepared to deal with. 2-1 2.2 Special Keys As you begin the tutorial, it will help to keep in mind a few basic conventions and aids that will make your exploration easier. On the quick-start guide there is a list of special keys specific to your type of computer. Help is available throughout PHASAR. Each sub-menu has a help option in it which will present a brief overview of the functions in that sub-menu. : Additionally, after you've selected a function from one of the sub-menus and you're entering data or answering questions you can request a very short, specific help message. To do so strike the help key. works on all keyboards and if your keyboard has a key labeled "Help" you can use it. If you prefer the mouse you can depress the right mouse button for help. When you request help at this level you'll get a help message as well as a list of options currently available. : Striking this key will call up PHASAR's built-in four function calculator whenever the program is waiting for information from you. You'll find out more about this handy feature as we go through the tutorial. : This key is located to the right of and above the Space Bar key. Some keyboards label it "Enter" and some call it "Return" (as in "carriage return" on a typewriter). The left mouse button is equivalent to the key. You can use it to tell the program you're through typing in information or to execute one of the options in the option list presented in response to a request for help. : This key is located in the upper right corner of your keyboard right above the carriage return (). If you goof making an entry, don't panic. Striking this key will erase your entry (backwards) one letter at a time. 2-2 : This key is located below the key on the upper left side of your keyboard. If you make somewhat larger errors entering information, striking this key will back you up one prompt at a time. Then, you'll get another shot at it. If your keyboard has a key labeled "Undo" that key will have the same function as the "Tab" key. (Note that this convention applies only when you are being led through your entries by prompts. In "free form" entries, the Tab key will not back you up. This will become clear as you proceed through the tutorial). or : These keys are synonymous in PHASAR. The "Esc" key is located in the upper left corner of the keyboard. Striking either of these keys will end whatever function you are engaged in. You are essentially letting PHASAR know that you are finished with what you were doing. (There are times that PHASAR will request that you not "escape", and other times that it will ask you if you're really sure that's what you want to do. Cursor keys: The up, down, left and right arrow keys are used to move around in steps of one line or one character. Sometimes it is desirable to move around in bigger steps. For these functions we use the , , and keys. Mouse buttons: The left mouse button behaves like the and can be used instead of that key (and vice versa). The right mouse button summons help (just like the or key) throughout the program; except when the main menu bar is showing. 2.3 Other Conventions Error and Warning Messages: PHASAR will beep at you if it doesn't like something that you've done, but will also help you out by displaying an error or warning message. This message will appear in a window in the center of the screen. When you've 2-3 digested the message (which should help you understand how to re-enter your information) strike the , , or left mouse button to continue. Default Entries: These are PHASAR's attempts to save you some typing. Following a "prompt" (a direction to enter information), PHASAR will frequently suggest or anticipate your response. These responses are identifiable by a flashing first character. Whenever you see a stroboscopic phrase or number following a prompt, you simply strike the carriage return to enter it. If you don't accept PHASAR's judgement, you can type over the default. Before typing over the default you may find it handy to look at the form of the default answer to get an idea of the form of the answer expected. If you want to make only minor changes to the guessed answer, move the cursor one character to the right (the default answer will turn to reverse video). We call this the character-edit mode. You may then , or type over characters. 2.4 Upper- vs. Lower-case In all situations where the program is trying to match a string of characters to another string of characters, it ignores the case. For example the categories "Medical" and "MEDICAL" and "medical" are all equivalent when working with PHASAR. 2.5 Installation The most important thing to keep in mind is: Do not use the original diskettes except to make copies which you will use. The setup will vary slightly depending on the capacity of the disk drives you have. - On a hard disk you'll put everything into one directory. 2-4 - If you have a drive that holds about 800K bytes you may want to put the PHASAR program, the help files and the data files all on one diskette (and the PHTAX program on a second diskette). - If each drive holds about 350k bytes you'll want to make a duplicate diskette set just like the distribution diskettes. If you have the data files and help files on separate diskettes you'll need to tell the program so (more on this in a couple of paragraphs). Run PHASAR. If the register data file (PHASAR.REG) is not on the same diskette as the program you'll need to help the computer find it by choosing the "search" option and telling the program on which drive the data file can be found. If the computer's date does not match the year of the tutorial data you'll be given an opportunity to set the computer's date. It will be most convenient to set the computer's date to June 1 for the sake of the tutorial. When you are presented with the main menu, select the "Setup" option. You'll be presented with a sub-menu. Select the "Set User Preferences" function. You'll see a list of items which you can set to suit your computer and personal preferences on the left half of the screen. On the right half of the screen you'll see the selections which now exist. Place the cursor on any of the items using either the mouse or the up/down cursor keys. To find out a little more about an item put the cursor on it and ask for help using the or key or right mouse button. If you have installed the PHASAR program and data files on two diskettes (rather than all of it on one diskette) it will be handy to declare the location of the register file and the help files so that the computer will be able to find them without bothering you for help. Don't worry too much about setting all of the preferences right now. When you're finished strike the key and accept the "Yes" response to the question about saving the setup parameters. The next question will allow you to test 2-5 your printer, but it may be easier to skip that now (by accepting the "No" answer). For more information on setting preferences see section 17.1 of this manual. 2-6 Chapter 3 ENTERING TRANSACTIONS 3.1 Getting Started We will assume that you have installed and setup PHASAR as instructed in the previous chapter. The main menu should now be displayed. Just for practice and to emphasize the "Help" feature you may want to request the help screens for the "Transactions" module. To do so select the "Help" item in the sub-menu under the "Transactions" option in the main menu. WE'D LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU ... We've asked a couple of friends of ours to volunteer their personal and business financial records to help us show PHASAR off (and to help you learn how to use it). Egbert and Eloise are a married couple; both work full-time; and, to really make things interesting, they also run a small business on the side. Eloise is a private-duty nurse who works for a crotchety old man (who doesn't pay her nearly enough). Egbert is a mechanic. He works in a large repair show, specializing in foreign cars. On the side, our friends raise chickens and market eggs. Egbert started this business prior to meeting Eloise, so it is appropriately named "Egbert's EggFarm". As you can guess, Egbert and Eloise are extremely busy people. They don't have time to spend on complicated record-keeping, but they are certainly in need of a system to help keep records straight. Lately, the Egg Farm has been showing a profit, so 3-1 PHASAR's tax projection capabilities will help take the surprise out of April 15th too. Egbert's and Eloise's accounts and categories have already been set up on the demonstration disk you are using. We'll help them enter some transactions and, we hope, have a little fun. 3.2 Recording Incomes We'll start by entering some new transactions, so concentrate on that information. Note that there are three basic categories of new transactions: income, expense, and transfers. MONEY, MONEY (INCOME) ... As is the way of the world, Egbert and Eloise are going to have to pay some bills. Seems reasonable, doesn't it, that they need money in their accounts if they are going to spend it? We thought so too, so we'll begin by recording a few income transactions. Select the "Transactions" main menu option and the "Enter New Transactions" option in the sub menu. You will see (figure 3.1) a list of defined accounts, their current balances and the dates of the last entered transactions at the top of the screen. In the middle of the screen is a bar with labeled columns for the information to be entered. Below that is the prompt: Which Account?:. The default account on the first transaction is "Checking". That's because that's the account they use most frequently. PHASAR is trying to save you some typing. (After the first transaction, the default account will be the account from the previous transaction). Eloise and Egbert both receive paychecks at the first of the month. Eloise is paid monthly. Her gross pay is $2000.00 (but, of course, she doesn't see that amount). Net pay, after deductions, is $1421.00. (Later, we'll 3-2 Figure 3.1: Transaction-entry screen. show how to keep track of all of the deductions). Let's help her deposit her paycheck in the personal checking account. You know how to enter a default entry, so please do so now. (Strike the key). Several things should happen. First, "Checking" should now appear in the "Account" column and "Checking" in the list of accounts at the top of the screen should be highlighted. The next prompt has also appeared. The next prompt is Date. Note that the default entry is today's date. (On subsequent entries, the default date will be the last date entered.) This time you're not getting off so easily. We're not going to accept the default. Eloise was paid on June first. Type in "JUN 1". (Don't worry about the default. You can type over it.) Strike the key. As you probably predicted, the date will now appear in the "date" column and the next prompt will be up. 3-3 That was easy right? Sure. Let's try out some other options, though. Do you remember how to back up? Strike the key. That should erase your entry and return you to the "Date" prompt. Type in "6/1". Now enter it. (Strike . You knew that). PHASAR will accept the date in either the three-letter abbreviation for the month and the day number ("Jun 1") or month number / day number ("6/1") format. Whatever turns you on. Next prompt, Payee:. Hmmmmm... what to enter here? It's easy really. Just for practice try striking the key. Eloise is depositing her check, so type in deposit or the first few letters of "deposit" (enough letters to distinguish it from the "Deductions" account. Phew. That did turn out to be easy. Typing in "deposit" also clues PHASAR in to the fact that we're talking income her. PHASAR recognizes that you are dealing with money going into (rather than out of) an account. Therefore, the prompt asks for the Income category:. The income categories are pre-defined; but, what are they? If, like Eloise and Egbert, you have trouble remembering (you can define up to 30 of them), this could be a problem, right? Wrong. It's easy to find out what they are. The easiest way to recall the list is simply strike , or the right mouse button - they all produce the same result. You'll be presented with a short help message and a list of options. (See figure 3.2). One of the options is "list Categories". It is already highlighted and pointed to by the "=>" so striking will activate that option. Also notice that to the right of the "list categories" option is . Whenever an option has a key listed to the right of the option you can select the option using that key instead of highlighting the option and striking . However there is more to the fact that there is a key listed for the "list categories" option. You may bypass the options menu completely by striking the key without first asking for help. To execute press and hold the key on the left side of the 3-4 Figure 3.2: Pop-up help menu. keyboard and strike the "l" (letter "el" i.e. the first letter of "list"). The list of defined categories should be displayed at the top of the screen (figure 3.3). The "Income" category we need is "Eloise Pay". We'd like to show PHASAR off again, so stay patient while we show you different options for entering this. "Eloise pay" is "Income" category number 1. Type in 1 and enter it. What happened? PHASAR recognized the category and printed all nine letters. You only had to type one number! Let's try other entry styles. Back up to the prompt. (Did you remember how? Strike ). Type the "X". Oops. That's not what we meant to enter. That's o.k. Remember how to erase it? Just strike the "Backspace" key. Now type in "E" and enter it. It turns out that "E" is not enough information for the program to decide which category you had in mind. It will present you with a list of income categories which 3-5 Figure 3.3: Income category display. start with "E". Using the cursor keys or mouse move to the correct choice and select it using the or left mouse button. (If you want to arrange your categories such that the first one which starts with any given letter is most likely the one you meant you can disable the choices window and have the program assume you meant the first possible match. See the "unique categories" item in the "Set User Preferences" section). Note that you can type the category name in lower or upper case or even a combination of the two. Onward. Next prompt is Check Number:. This entry is optional. Since it's not our check, we really don't care. Just strike to leave it blank. Let's see. Amount is up now, right? Eli's net pay is 1421.00 so type in 1421.00 (or 1421. or 1421). While striking the key keep an eye on the 3-6 Figure 3.4: Depositing Egbert's paycheck. corresponding account balance displayed on the top of the screen. If you're fast you'll see PHASAR adjust the balance. (If you missed it, you know how to go back and try it again. Go ahead. It's exciting!) (If you do back up, notice that the balance readjusts and PHASAR is waiting for the correction). Comment is the last prompt. Appending a comment is optional. We'll practice adding comments to later transactions. For right now, let's just strike to leave it blank. Egbert also gets a paycheck on the first of the month. He gets paid by-monthly, so this check is a little smaller. Egbert's net pay is $670.00. Let's help him deposit his check (figure 3.4). We'll move a little faster this time. We're on a roll. As is often the way of the world, Egbert's and Eli's clients are a little late in paying this month. 3-7 Consequently, the business account is a bit short and Egbert has decided to deposit his paycheck to the business checking account. (Unfortunately, their bills are still due!) Which Account: The default entry is "Checking". This time, however, we don't want the default entry. We need the business account. PHASAR will accept the first letter or two of the account name. You may type in "B", "b", or "bsn"; take your pick. Enter it, please. Date: This time we're in luck. As promised, the default date is the last date you entered (Jun 1), which also happens to be the date of deposit. Strike to accept. Payee: Remember? Sure. Egbert is depositing this check to the business account. In such a case, the payee is "deposit". Enter that information, please. (Another short cut here: Entering a single quote (') will duplicate the previous payee). Income Category: PHASAR recognizes that you are recording money coming into your financial picture, so the program asks for the name of the income category. This check is Egbert's. Type in "e" or "E". Ugh-oh. What happened? There are three categories which could match our input. We can select the one we wanted or we could have typed "Egb" which is enough to uniquely identify Egbert. If you are running with the "force unique category" option turned off, PHASAR will choose the first such category encountered in its search for a match and go merrily on its way (even though it didn't choose the one we had in mind.) Otherwise we'll need to enter either the number or the first three letters or more of the defined category "Eggie's Pay". Check Number: Once again, it's not our check so we don't really care. Strike to leave this optional entry blank. (See, we really are on a roll!). Amount: Eggie's net pay was $670.00. Check the business account balance now, and enter the amount in the style of your choice. (Remember that you may enter the amount at 670., 670 or 670.00). Did you see the adjustment in the account balance? 3-8 Comment: Once again, let's leave the comment blank for now. (Merely strike ). We will enter some comments at a later point. You deserve a pat on the back. You just completed a section of this tutorial. This would actually be a good time to take a break and digest the information presented so far (and maybe a snack, too.) Meet you in the next section! 3.3 Recording Expenses Welcome back. If you exited ( or ) from PHASAR during your siesta, you'll need to select "Transactions" in the main menu and "Enter New Transactions" again in the subsequent sub menu to rejoin us. Unfortunately, and true to life, Egbert and Eloise won't get to hang on to too much of their income for too long. It's the first of the month, and bills are due. since you've spent all that energy depositing money in Eggie's, Eli's and the EggFarm's accounts, we'll help them pay a few bills (Figures 3.5 through 3.8). Don't worry. This won't bee too hard. It's much like entering checks in your register, with the grand exception that PHASAR does the arithmetic for you. The EggFarm bought 80 lbs. of chicken feed from Phil's Pheedlot during the month of June. Continuing credit with the Pheedlot is contingent upon payment of the bitt in full at the first of every month. If you exited PHASAR during your break, the default response to the first prompt, Which Account:, should be "Checking". If you did not exit, then the default response will be "Bsns Check" because that was the last account for which you entered a transaction. Type "Bsns Check" or "B" (or "b" or "bs", etc.) over the default if "Checking" is displayed. If "Bsns Check" is displayed, then strike to accept the default. No sweat. 3-9 However, we're going to break here to make a pint. What if I goof, you ask? Just for kicks, let's see. Back up to the prompt ( key.. but you knew that.) Type in "Tseking". (Don't laugh. Some of us really can't type). Enter it. Oops. PHASAR isn't programmed to recognize bad spelling. The program may be a little bit finicky, but is trying to be helpful, too. You are told that "Tseking" account cannot be found. Also, you are asked if you would like to define a new account. Since we don't want to define a new account (yet) strike to accept the default "No" answer. Now the prompt has returned and you may enter "Bsns Check" in any manner you desire. Now you can pay attention to the second prompt, Date. The date bills were paid was "Jun 1". If you know what you're doing, go ahead and do it. If you don't, read on. If your default shows the current date and that's not correct, just type over it and strike . If it shows "Jun 1", simply enter it by striking the key. Onward. Next prompt is Payee. The check was made out to "Phil's Pheedlot". PHASAR doesn't know Phil, so you'll have to type this one in. We won't, however, make you erase it! Did you remember to enter that last bit of information without a reminder? Hope so. Wow. The program knows you're paying a bill. Now you'll have to enter the "Expense" category. If you've got a memory like Eggie's, you probably don't remember the expense categories. (Actually, come to think of it, you don't even know what they are!) Must be time to scream for help. Remember how? Sure. Recall the list from the ozone by striking , then take the highlighted option by striking or simply strike and bypass the help. Note that this time, the display only shows you the "Expense" categories (rather than "Income" categories). (Figure 3.5). Did you spot the necessary category? It's number 13, "Chkn Feed". If you remember your options for entering this information do so now. If not, follow the text. You may enter this 3-10 Figure 3.5: Expense category display. by typing the number "13", "ChK", "CHKN", "chkn", or "Chkn Feed". If you enter just "C" or "Ch" you'll be asked to specify further which category you had in mind. Now, "Check Number" is waiting for you. This time we care about keeping track of the check number. The bill was paid with check number 1200. Type in and enter that number. Now we need to explain what's happening. You're asked if this really is the check number. The program realizes that up until now the checking account didn't have a check number sequence going and thinks just maybe you typed in the amount prematurely. If you answer "No" the program will leave the check number blank and automatically default the amount for the next prompt to $1200. However, in this case we did mean to have the check number be 1200. Now that we have started a check number sequence the program won't complain on further entries. You may find at some point that you have accidentally entered a 3-11 check number for an account which shouldn't have a check number sequence (e.g. Visa). From then on you'll get this obnoxious default check number prompt when you really want a blank default answer. To tell the program that an account should not have a check number sequence, enter an expense transaction with a check number of "0" (zero) and that will fix the problem. Now, the Amount prompt should be displayed. Just for the heck of it, let's pretend that we don't like anything we're doing and we want out of this module. Strike . What happened? PHASAR can't deal with an exit at this point. You would have to complete this transaction or your way back to the initial ("Which Account") prompt if you truly wanted out. However, we don't really want to leave. What to do? Striking now will return you to the "Amount" prompt. The feed cost $75.00. Enter that amount in the style of your choice. The "Comment" prompt should be showing. As promised, we'll finally practice entering a comment. Phil's prices have increased and Eggie and Eli want to not that fact so they'll know why their monthly bill has increased. Type in: "Chicken feed's not chicken feed any more. Price increase May 15." Enter it. Note that "Yes" appears in the comment column. You're getting good at this! We're going to enter another expense transaction, but we'll let you flex your muscles a little. Eggie ran out today (6/1) and bought a hundred feet of barbed wire to fix his fence. He paid for it with check number 1201 (on the business checking account) made out to "Hardware-n-More". The amount was $27.00. The appropriate expense category is "Mat & Sup" and we'll skip the comment. Go ahead and try to enter this transaction on your own. (Figure 3.6). If you get stuck, check the next paragraph for clues. Good luck! (Clues..."Which Account": Business checking should be your default and is the correct account. "Date": The 3-12 default, 6/1, is correct. Enter it. "Payee" is "Hardware-n-More". There's no default here. Type it in and enter it. "Expense": Strike or to view the defined categories. "Mat & Sup" or number 14 will set PHASAR on the right track. "Check Number": Note that PHASAR automatically updated the check number. Since the check written actually was a one number increment from the last number entered, strike carriage return to enter this default response. "Amount": As noted, the amount was $27.00. Watch for the account balance adjustment. Strike to skip appending a comment. Done!) How'd you do? Easy? Let's move on then. We'll enter one more expense transaction. We'll let you try another solo flight on this one but when you get to the category prompt you'll want to check the clues in the following paragraphs. 3-13 Right after Eggie returned with the emergency fencing, the household toilet began to run ceaselessly and maddeningly. Eli ran out to buy a toilet tank replacement kit. (Unlike Eggie, she's fairly handy around the house). Eli also went to "Hardware-n-More" and paid the $7.32 bill with her Visa. We really don't want to record Eli's comments on this event. That should be all the information you need, so go to it. Bon voyage. (Clues, as promised..."Which Account": Your default won't cut it right? Right. Type in "Visa", "Date": Lucky here. Enter the default. "Payee": Type in "Hardware-n-More". (We can use one of the short cuts here: Enter a single quote (') and the previous payee will be repeated.) "Expense": Strike or to view the categories. Well! That was kind of mean wasn't it? Can't find one that applies? Let's create one. How's about, "Hsehld Sup". That should do it. Now what's wrong? PHASAR says there ain't no such category. PHASAR is usually right. Now what? Not to worry. PHASAR will let you create income and expense categories on the fly, so to speak. Enter "Yes" (or simply "y" or "Y") and let's proceed. Now we see a new screen, figure 3.7. Let's use the arrow keys or mouse to move the highlighted cell to the blank slot beside the number "12". Type in the name "Hsehld Sup" and . That will do it, except how do we continue? Let's ask for help. (Figure 3.8). There are many options but the only one we need right now is "quit" which is . The disk will spin for a moment while the program records the new category then the "Expense Category" prompt will return. Strike just to check that the new expense category is listed as we expect. You are now the proud creator of a new expense category! Phew. Go ahead and enter it and we'll go on to the next prompt. "Check Number": doesn't apply. Strike . The "Amount" was $7.32. No "Comment". You are now safely grounded. Congratulations!). 3-14 Figure 3.7: Creating a new category 3.4 Transfers Between Accounts There's a special kind of expense transaction that involves paying one account from another account. These transactions are appropriately called transfers. Let's do one. Eli and Eggie pay their Sears account on the first of the month. They generally send the minimum payment of $19.00, but this month they've decided to send a round $50.00. Let's take this one prompt by prompt. Which Account: Since the Sears card is generally used for personal items, the bill will be paid from the personal checking account. If the default is incorrect, please type in "C" or "Checking" and enter it. 3-15 Figure 3.8: Options while creating categories Date: You keep getting a break here. The default is correct. You know what to do, so go ahead. Payee: The payee, of course, is Sears. Please type and enter that information. Notice (figure 3.9) that "Xfer Out" for "transfer out" now appears magically in the income/expense column instead of the "Expense Category" prompt. (We will admit that this is exciting, but you ain't seen nothing yet!) The indication of "Xfer Out" is to let you know that PHASAR realizes it will have to adjust two account balances - debit checking and credit Sears. Check Number: PHASAR has no prior information on the personal checking account and can't generate a check number for you. Type in "2225" which was the recorded check number. Again you'll be asked if you really meant to enter a check number. Answer, "Yes". 3-16 Figure 3.9: Transfers Next time the program's guess will be 2226; no questions asked. Amount: As you no doubt remember, the payment was for $50.00. Before you type that amount in, please notice both "Checking" and "Sears" account balances. When you enter the amount the checking account balance will reflect the debit (actually the transfer out). Comment: Let's skip it by striking the enter key. when you enter the comment the Sears balance will change to reflect the transfer of money into that account. Did you note the magic that happened after you responded to the "Comment" prompt? PHASAR generated a second line to record the transaction that affected the Sears account. Two lines for the price of one! Does it seem clear that one line represents the 3-17 "Checking" transaction and the second the "Sears" transaction? Hope so. If not, we think it will become clearer to you as you continue to use PHASAR. You have by now noticed that the credit card accounts show a negative balance. That's because that's not money that you have, but rather money that you owe. Therefore, it's an "in the red" account and payments to the account will take you closer to a zero balance. 3.5 Cash Account And Cash Transactions There's a special kind of account that involves cash. Eggie is really bad about keeping track of his cash and the Mrs. tends to get upset about what that does to their budget. We're going to help him out. See the CASH account? It's at the end of the list of accounts at the top of the screen. Note: There are also two pre-defined cash expense categories. Only one of them will show up when you ask for a list of expense categories. It is labeled "Cash...."; the trailing ...'s are a subtle reminder that this is a somewhat different type of expense category. We will refer to this category as the total cash category. The other cash category as the total cash category. The other cash category (the one which doesn't show up here) is the net cash category. You will never enter a transaction on the net cash category - it is something which PHASAR uses to keep track of how much cash you spend that is not explicitly accounted for in any of the other expense categories. Confusing, you say? The philosophy here is that hardly anyone keeps track of every penny of cash spent. Quick definitions: "Total Cash" is the amount you started out with; "Net Cash" is what's left over after recorded expenditures. (Hang in there. It'll get clearer.) Let's work through an example using the cash account. Eggie wrote a check (on the checking account) for cash on the first of June. You know how to respond to the 3-18 Figure 3.10: Recording cash expenses first two prompts, so pleas do so. The third prompt is "Payee". Hmmmmm. It's really not too hard. The money goes to Eggie, right? It goes into his "Cash" account. Enter "Cash". The "Income/Expense" category says "Xfer Out", right? The check number is 2226 and that's right. The amount was $50.00. The second line generated transfers the money into the "Cash" account. We'll show you how to view the amounts in the two cash expense categories later. Now, let's spend some of that cash. (Figure 3.10). Eggie goes to the handy "Quick-n-Overpriced" store on the corner to get some gasoline, a magazine and to satisfy his sweet tooth. The gasoline cost $13.50 and the total bill is $16.21. Eggie is interested in knowing how much the old jalopy is costing him, but he really doesn't want to bother keeping track of incidentals like candy bars. Therefore, he'll enter a $13.50 debit on the cash account for the expense category, "Car Expens". Please enter that information now. 3-19 If these last two transactions are the only ones affecting the cash account this month then we should be able to decipher the results. Making the assumption (which PHASAR does) that Eggie is not hoarding cash in a tin cup in the lower forth then he must be spending all of the cash ($50.00) he obtained. "Total cash" spent is, therefore, the total of the cash withdrawn. Eggie recorded an expenditure of $13.50 for his car. Later we will view the categories in the "Summary Reports" module (which, of course, is where you will see amounts for all the expense categories.) The summaries will show the debit to the "Car Expens" category; the "total cash" balance of $50.00; and the $36.50 difference in the "net cash" category. Eggie has a record of cash spent (blown?) on incidentals that was not tracked. The "cash account" doesn't display a balance. That's because the balance bounces around $0.00 all the time and a cumulative record in the account is unnecessary. We've found that this concept is somewhat confusing, but never fear. We've also found that use of the categories clarifies the concept. It'll become crystallized when you view account summaries and as you use the categories. Note that we put money into the cash account via a transfer of $50 from the checking account. This helped (hopefully) to illustrate the entity which we call the cash account. The money could have been taken out of the checking account and placed in the cash account in another way. We could have entered a transaction on the checking account (as above) but instead of making it a transfer into the cash account we could have made the payee be "Egbert" and the expense category be "Cash....". The overall effect is the same. 3-20 3.6 Split Transactions and Calculator MONEY, MONEY EVERYWHERE... OR AT LEAST SPREAD AROUND PHASAR offers another handy expense transaction feature. Sometimes a payment encompasses more than one expense category. In such cases, you need not only keep track of the amount spent, but also of where the money went. For such occasions, PHASAR allows for "multi" multiple or split expense (or income) category transactions. (You may take your choice of entry styles; "multi" and "Split" have the same effect.) We'll help the EggFarm enter such a transaction and its possibilities should become clear to you. (Figure 3.11). 3-21 Eggie wrote a business check to his cousin Mario who owns a hardware store. The check total was $175.00. Seems easy enough, right? But... (you knew that was coming, didn't you?) this check covered the purchase of some lumber, protection money for Mario, and a step ladder for the Mrs. (Eggie's thoughtful--Eli has trouble reaching chicken coup light fixtures that need repair.) NOW what does the Farm do about the Expense category? Well, you could use a calculator and a separate piece of paper to keep track of these things, but PHASAR doesn't want you to work that hard. We'll help Eggie and Eli record this transaction and let PHASAR take care of the hard stuff. You know how to enter the first three prompts, so do us a favor and do so now. ("Which Account" is "Bsns Check"; "Date" is "Jun 1"; "Payee" is Mario.) "Expense" is the next prompt. Type in either "multi" or "split". "MULTIPLE" will now be displayed under "expense" category and a "Multiple Expense" reminder message will appear at the lower right corner of the screen. Take the default on "Check Number"; it's correct. Enter the TOTAL amount of the check for the "Total Amount". Note that the account balance was adjusted accordingly. To save time, let's not comment. (If you're argumentative, go ahead and enter one. We'll wait.) When you enter the "no comment" comment, PHASAR will generate a second line for you. Note that the column entries are automatically recorded for you until the expense category. That is also the next prompt displayed. Now you will simply enter the categories for each part of the expense as well as the amount of that portion. Let's do it. The lumber cost $75.00 and the protection money was $50.00. (Cheap at half the price.) The lumber belongs under the expense category "Mat & Sup" and the protection money under "Miscellaneous". (Note: If you don't enter an expense category, PHASAR will assume "Miscellaneous" for you. This is called "Expen Misc" to distinguish it from the miscellaneous income category "Incom Misc".) Enter "Mat & Sup" for the ladder expense category. Now, how much was the ladder? Well, although we're sure you can do this in 3-22 your head, it's a good time to take a side trip. (Besides, neither Egbert nor Eli can do it in his or her head.) PHASAR offers another really handy feature. Anytime the program is waiting for input from you (like now), you can call up the built-in four-function calculator. (You do not have to exit from the module you are working in! As we're doing now, you can even call up the calculator in the middle of entering a transaction.) The calculator will add, subtract, multiply or divide for you. (Note: Addition is indicated by a "+"; multiplication by a "*"; division by "/", and subtraction by "-".) So how's about striking now? The "jargon" word you see on the bottom left side of the screen means "Expression". (Unless you have a good memory for math classes that may still sound like jargon - but don't despair.) So, what do we need to know? First of all, let's add the $50.00 and $75.00 to get a total. Type it in like this: "75.00 + 50.00". (Without the " ", of course, and with or without spaces.) The total will appear on the right side of the screen after you enter the expression. Strike to return to the program (actually to escape from the calculator). However, that's not the amount we needed! Rats. Now we need to know the remainder. Notice that your last result remains on the right side of the screen so you won't have to strain your memory. Re-enter the calculator (strike ) and type in "175-125.00". Now there's the answer we need. Type and to enter the amount. Now that we have completed the split transaction PHASAR informs us that the sum of parts equals the whole amount. The question at the bottom of the screen asks us if we are ready to end the split transaction. We are so go ahead and do so. Notice that PHASAR knows better than to adjust your balance for the individual parts of the split transaction. Also notice that in the "Confirm" column, just to the right of the "Account" column, the word "split" is showing. This means that the parts of the whole amount are already confirmed and that they will 3-23 not ever show up on a bank statement and therefore will not be confirmed later. A few words are in order about what the program does with all of this information. The total amount (the value of the check) is saved and comes up when you confirm your bank statement because that's all the information which the bank has - it didn't know or care about the ladder and other stuff. However, Eg does care about how much he spent on "Mat & Sup". PHASAR will keep track of the amounts spent in each category and the totals spend in each account. The account balance is ok, the category amounts are ok and you didn't have to sweat the details. If you try to terminate the entry of a split transaction (with the key) PHASAR will add all the parts and compare that sum to the total amount 0 if they are different it will warn you. It's time to quit. Strike the or key to end transaction input and return to the main menu. Two more quick comments. If you, like Eg and Eli, have some trouble keeping up with your account balances, PHASAR can be either helpful or irritating (depending on your point of view). If the transaction you are entering will plunge you into the depths on the negative side of zero, PHASAR will warn you. The program will not stop you from overdrawing, however. You're on your own there. Also, when you decide to escape from transaction entry, PHASAR will present you with the option of printing checks if you have told it that you want the option. We'll tell you more about that later. Time for another pat. You just completed another section. If you're overwhelmed, or just thirsty, we'll wait while you take a break. 3-24 3.7 Standard Transactions The Same Old Grind ... PHASAR knows that most of us pay many of the same bills and records many of the same deposits on a monthly basis. In order to avoid some tedium in recording these (and to give your typing finger a break), PHASAR offers an option for typing in this information once and recording it with a few keystrokes. These special entries are standard transactions. Standard Transactions are stored on "pages" (groupings of up to 20 similar transactions). For more immediate thrills, we'll enter an already created page of such transactions first. Choose the "Use Standard Transactions" option in the "Transactions" sub-menu. PHASAR will first present you with a list of titles of existing pages of standard transactions and ask you to choose the page to record (Figure 3.12). In addition to the paycheck that we helped Eggie enter on June 1, he also receives a paycheck on the 15th of the month, so let's choose the page entitled "Egbert's Paycheck" and enter a default date (the date that PHASAR will initially set up the new transactions for) of June 13. PHASAR will then present you with a "page" of transactions that might look quite familiar to you. The cursor (lighted bar) will also be presented. To move the cursor among the columns (to edit the entries) use the arrow keys or mouse. We've done such a good job that we really don't need to edit any information, but let's practice moving the cursor around anyway. Use the key or mouse to move the cursor to the "Date" column. Type in "Jun 1" over the displayed "Jun 13" (figure 3.13) date. As always, strike the key to register it. Since we really don't want that date, however, type over it again. (If you discover an error prior to entering it, striking will return you to the original information.) A word of caution may be 3-25 appropriate here. If you change the amount on one line of a split transaction the whole amount (sum or all the parts) will not automatically be updated, however PHASAR will warn you that you have changed part of the multi-line transaction. Now, how to tell PHASAR that you are satisfied with this page? Consistency is the name of the game. Strike . PHASAR will now present you with four options: * Record the transactions. * Re-examine or edit the same page. * Choose another page to edit. * Exit without recording transactions. 3-26 Let's go ahead and enter these transactions. Select the first option (the default) and enter it. It's quite possible that you'll have transactions on a page of standard transactions which will not be required every time you use the page. To delete one of the lines on the page being displayed just place the cursor anywhere within the transaction and strike the delete key. Now, let's create a page of standard transactions. (Figure 3.14 through 3.16). In the "Transactions" sub menu let's choose the "Edit Standard Transactions" option. We will now create the first page. Choose the "Create new page" option from the choices menu. Notice that only pages 2 and 3 are defined. Tell the program that you want to create page 1 in response to the prompt (Figure 3.15). We will be creating a page for deposit of Eloise's paycheck, so in response to the prompt, let's title it "Eloise's Paycheck". So far so good. 3-27 Now we will enter the information under appropriate columns much as we did for entering other transactions. First, account name will be "Checking". Enter that information. "Std 1" (for "Standard Transactions page 1") will be displayed in the second column (with no effort on your part). Great. That's what we want. Payee for Eloise's check is, of course, "deposit". Type and enter that information. Do you remember the income category to enter? We don't either. Strike (or ) to view the categories and enter "Eloise Pay" any way you'd like. Leave "Check Number" blank. The amount was $1421.00. Notice that you are not given a chance to append a comment yet the "yes" appears indicating there is one. PHASAR uses that spot to store the title of a page of standard transactions. As promised pages and pages ago, we'll now explain about the deductions account. (Figure 3.16). This is a convenience. Eggie and Eli created this account to keep 3-28 track of their cumulative deductions. As we enter the information, we hope its usefulness will become clearer. "Account" name is "Deductions". Columns 2 and 3 are freebies. Payee is again, "deposit". Here we got to see another nice short-cut in entering transactions. The income category is again, "Eloise Pay". Since we want the same category as on the last transaction we can enter a single quote mark (') and strike to repeat the last entry. If you forget this, asking for help will refresh your memory. Skip the "Check Number". The total amount of Eloise's deductions is $579.00. Enter that total amount in the "Amount" column. This will deposit the total deductions in that account when this page of transactions is used later. You may have noticed that you aren't being given a chance to append comments to these transactions. The 3-29 philosophy behind this is that if a transaction is common enough to be defined for easy, repeated entry then it won't need a comment. However, when you use the standard transactions you can append a comment to any of them. Again, so far so good. However, we'd like to keep track of the individual deduction amounts as well as the total. What to do? Enter "Deductions" as the account name again. Let's first record federal tax deductions (ouch). Enter "Uncle Sam" or "Feds" or any similarly appropriate name under "Payee". Strike or to view the expense categories and enter "El FED TAX" for the expense category. Federal tax withheld is $350.00. Enter that information. What you have done is deposit the total deductions to an account that will keep a running balance. You have also created a method for keeping track of individual deductions under the expense categories. 3-30 We will continue creating the page in a similar fashion. You should be becoming so proficient at this, however, that we will just give you the information and let you zip through the rest of the page. State withholding is $45.00. Social Security withholding is $134.00. Retirement withholding is $50.00. Good luck! When you have finished entering the information, let PHASAR know by striking . You will be returned to the list of options concerning editing standard transactions. Another or a will return you to the main menu bar. That's it for standard transactions. In the next chapter, we'll let you see all the individual transactions you have entered (rather than just the account balances). By the way, you've made it over the hurdle, this chapter is by far the longest of all the chapters. Now you've seen the heart of PHASAR and the rest of the manual will demonstrate all of the things you can do with the transactions that you have entered. 3-31 Chapter 4 VIEW/EDIT TRANSACTIONS Welcome back! To rejoin us you'll need to choose the "View/Edit Transactions' option in the "Transactions" sub menu. Now we'll let you see those transactions which you've been entering plus some that we have entered for you. 4.1 Setting Up Search Limits PHASAR will display a screen asking you to define the "limits" of your search; that is, which accounts you'd like to view along with the dates of interest. See figure 4.1. The default choices are "all" accounts and categories and the current month. The highlighted cell is initially setup so that we just need to strike any key to begin the search. To change any of the limits, we only need to move the highlighted cell to the item to be changed and either type over it or strike the key which puts us in character-edit mode where we can make minot changes to the previous answer. The top item is "Account(s)". You may search all or any accounts you'd like. ( or will display them.) Let's look at all accounts so we don't need to make any changes here. We can do the same for the income and expense categories. If we want to list several accounts or categories which are contiguous we can type the name or number of the first one then a 4-1 colon ":" and the name or number of the last one to save some typing. Now we come to the "Payee" item. Let's not select on the payee so we'll just pass over it and make no changes. The "Search Period" of interest to us encompasses April, May and June. Enter "Apr 1" for beginning date and "Jun 15" for ending date. Notice the "To Printer" option is skipped. This is because normally it isn't used. (if you'd like a hard copy of the search period, change this option to "yes". If you'd like to see what the printout looks like for the first part of June see figure 4.2). 4-2 The highlighted cell indicates that we only need to strike any key to begin the search. So let's strike the and see what happens. Notice that there is a summary of the total credits, debits and transfers for all of the transactions which met the search criteria. After you get any information of interest from this display, strike the or to view the transactions. 4-3 You should be presented with a display that contains, by now, familiar columns. This is a record of all transactions entered for the period we specified. Again note that there is a column titled "Confirm" for confirm, to record the date that you received confirmation that transactions were recorded by your financial institution. The cursor takes the form of a highlighted cell here. Remember that you use the arrow keys or mouse to move the cursor among the columns. At the bottom of the display, PHASAR will display the total number of pages which fit the search limits and the page you are currently on. Page down , to view subsequent pages. To move quickly to the last page strike the key, or move to the top page of the list strike the key. Note also that if you ask for help, PHASAR notes which column the cursor is in and gives a brief description of that field. If the cursor is in either the account or category column PHASAR offers to list the accounts, or income/expense categories. 4.2 Editing Transactions Let's do some minor editing just for the fun (and experience) of it. With "Page 2 of 7" showing let's pick a transaction and edit the amount. A little over half way down the screen there's a payment of $59.56 to Phil's Pheedlot. See figure 4.3. Put the cursor there and type in "69.56" and enter it. The amount will change and you'll get a warning message. We wanted to show you that if you edit one part of a multi-part transaction you are warned that you might want to edit the associated part(s) of the transaction. Now move the cursor to the date column and change any date to May 2, just to practice. Again, enter it. One more exercise and we'll be finished with this program module. If you want to change the category or account associated with a transaction you'll need to 4-4 know what to change it to. If the cursor is in the category or account column (and the category is not one of the special ones like "Xfer Out") striking will present you with a list of accounts or categories as appropriate. How do we tell PHASAR we're finished? Prediction? Clever person. Right, strike and you'll return to the search-limit screen. If you are through searching/editing then another will take you back to the main menu. 4-5 Chapter 5 CONFIRM WITH STATEMENT Now that we're satisfied with out entries so far, let's do a little time travel. (Did you know you were in for so many experiences when you bought PHASAR?) It's now June 10th and Eggie and Eli just received their bank statement for the month of May. Here's the bank statement we'll be working from. This is the statement for the business checking account. Let's help them reconcile. Choose the "Confirm with Statement" option in the "Transactions" sub menu. The highlighted cell is initially on the "which account" item. Does the answer 5-1 seem obvious? Sure, it's business checking ("Bsns Check"). Now what? PHASAR has presented you with the last confirmed balance for the business checking account (the balance entered the last time the account was reconciled) and the date of that balance. The highlighted cell moves to the "ending balance" item. Use the statement above to enter the ending balance ($292.16). The statement's beginning date is May 1 and its final date is May 31. PHASAR will guess the statement ending date but you should check its guess. (See figure 5.1) PHASAR also guesses a "Default Confirmation String". The confirmation information stored with each transaction is a string of up to six characters of your choice. (You may enter anything that is meaningful to you.) The program's best guess (default) will be a string of three characters indicating the time of month ("Beg", "Mid", or "End") and the three-character month abbreviation. In this case, since the statement ending date is May 31, 5-2 PHASAR will suggest, "EndMay". If you don't like that string, just move to that cell and change it. The usefulness of this "default confirmation string" will become clear very soon. Let's take a moment to look at the "Sort Transactions" item. Place the highlighted cell there and ask for help. Notice there are several ways to sort the transactions which are about to be presented to you. The default is to sort by date (which is actually the same as "No Sort"). Some banks place all of the deposits at the top of the list on their statements. To make confirming easier, you can have the program do the same thing by electing to sort by "income/expense" - it's up to you at this point. Please make sure that all the information is correct and move the highlighted cell to the "Start Confirmation" item and strike . The disk will crank and grind for a short while as PHASAR searches for all of the unconfirmed transactions for the business checking account. Now PHASAR should present you with a display of all transactions you (and we) have entered for the business checking account which have not been previously confirmed. Go ahead and compare the information displayed with the sample bank statement. First of all, let's confirm those transactions which are in agreement with the statement. How to do that? Move the cursor (arrow keys) to the "Confirm" column. Check against the statement and if facts agree, strike to confirm (the confirmation string will be entered in the appropriate column, and you'll know that the transaction agreed with one on your statement). Know also that you may edit as you have done in other modules by using the arrow keys, typing over erroneous information and entering the correction. (If you want to erase a confirmation string type a single blank in the "Confirm" column and strike ). Note also that the discrepancy between your balance and the bank's is displayed near the bottom of the screen. When you have finished confirming, strike to tell 5-3 PHASAR you're done. (You've probably noted a discrepancy, but patience, we'll get to it.) As you no doubt predicted, your statement doesn't balance. Rats. PHASAR presents you with the statement beginning balance, confirmed deposits, confirmed debits, and the balance. (All right, we'll take credit for the error). In addition, you are told the amount of the discrepancy and are presented with five options: * Re-examine transactions * Enter missing transactions * Change ending balance * Accept statement balance * Sort transactions 5-4 Let's choose the second option (by highlighting it and striking or by striking the "E" key. We're sure you noted that a transaction was missing. The service charge was not recorded. Since you enter this as you do other transactions, we'll turn you loose and let you do so. When you have finished entering the missing transaction, strike to let PHASAR know you've completed Eggie's and Eli's dirty work. PHASAR will now ask you to review the transactions once more and to confirm the transactions you just entered. (Figure 5.2) Guess what? Celebration time! You balance! Strike to return to the main menu and we'll have some fun in other modules. 5-5 Chapter 6 REPORTS Video Fun and Games ... This section should be rather fun, and not much work on your part. PHASAR does all the hard work. You'll get to see the fruits of your efforts by just striking a key or two now and then. Sound good? (Feel like you deserve it by now, don't you?) Choose the "Reports" option from the main menu. Notice that two of the sub-menus say "View" and two say "Print" but are similar otherwise. "View" as used in a menu means view the information on the screen and "print" means print the information on a printer. We will encounter this same convention later. 6.1 Account Status Let's see how Eggie, Eli and the EggFarm are making out. First, let's display (view) the Account Summaries. Choose that option in the sub menu. PHASAR will present you with a display of accounts, confirmed balances, unconfirmed deposits and debits on the accounts, and the date of the oldest and newest (latest) unconfirmed transaction. (Figure 6.1). Finally, for each account, PHASAR will print the current balance (based on the confirmed balance and unconfirmed transactions). That's a lot of information packed into each line so let's break it up a bit. Notice that the 6-1 account name is to the left of center. The information to the left of the account name is the last confirmed date and amount. This is taken on the basis for computing the current balance in the account. To the right of the account name is listed the number of transactions and total value of all of those transactions which have not yet been confirmed. Deposits and debits are listed separately. To the right, there are two columns which tell you the oldest and newest unconfirmed transactions. This information can be quite useful. For example, if it's now June and there's an unconfirmed transaction dating back to Jan 12, it might be wise to look into it. And if the newest transaction noted is June 3 and you know you wrote a check on June 5, you either forgot to record the check or mis-dated it. Finally, to the far right, is the current balance (Confirmed balance + Unconfirmed balance - Unconfirmed Debits). When you get used to this layout, 6-2 it will be a pretty easy way to see where you stand. (Obviously, the corresponding option that says "Print Account Summaries" in the "Reports" sub menu will do exactly that). 6.2 Month-by-Month Summaries Now let's look at (view) the category summaries. We told you in the introduction that PHASAR is programmed to allow you to budget. You have an option of viewing "actual", "budgeted" or "difference" amounts. We will get to budgeting in the Financial Analysis section, but for now, choose actual amounts. Select "March" for the period to view. The display will show you all defined expense categories, the amount spent in that category, and the percentage of total expenditures for by that category. (See figure 6.2) Note that there is the Cash.... category and one which we promised earlier, Cash (Net). Also the "Cash...." (i.e. total cash) category is not included in any of the totals. This is because adding up the net cash (all cash which was not accounted for) and all of the normal categories with their part of the cash which we did account for will give us the correct total. Adding in total cash would be double counting the same money. In addition, PHASAR calculates the total monthly expenditures and displays it last. As directed at the bottom of the screen, strike any key to see the income category summary. On this screen, you will also see the calculated difference between total income and total expenditures, or "Net Cash Flow". Again, an easy way to eyeball your financial standing. Note that if you'd like to see the full category summary, year to date, you'll have to print it out. You may do so now if you'd like, or save it for a later treat. This goodie requires minimal muscle (any location) exertion. If you'd like to try this now, just lay back 6-3 and let PHASAR and your printer have a little tete-a-tete. Note that the amount of information contained in this summary is just too much to fit on the screen. You'll see income and expense summaries by category, by monthly total, by cumulative total, and monthly and cumulative cash flow. 6.3 To Cash Flow or Not There are circumstances where you will receive or spend money and not want it to affect the bottom line cash flow. This is often the case when the expense or income is a one-time thing such as a car down payment or winning the lottery. There is a way for you to enter these transactions so that your account balance will be updated correctly yet your cash flow will not be unnecessarily distorted. If you want this capability 6-4 you'll need to define an income and/or expense category which you will name "NoCashFlow". Furthermore you will have to place this special category immediately before the predefined miscellaneous income or expense category. For example if you want a "NoCashFlow" expense category and you currently have 40 expense categories, you'll define category number 37 (just before the predefined "ExpenMisc" category) to be "NoCashFlow". As in all of PHASAR whether the letters are upper case or lower case is not important, i.e. "NOCASHFLOW", "nocashflow" and "NoCashFlow" will all work. 6.4 Sorting and Unsorting What in the world does "Sort/Unsort Categories" mean? (Took the words right out of your mouth?) It's a nifty feature. If you'd like to view categories arranged from most (expenditure or income) to least, then this is the option for you. Choose "Sort/Unsort Categories" and answer "yes" to sort them. You need to tell the program what amounts to look at when it sorts them into numeric order. Tell it actual and which month (March) or total (year-to-date). PHASAR makes you wait a bit, but you don't see anything terribly exciting do you? Actually, it looks like nothing happened. Choose "View Category Summary" again. (Actual amounts; month of March.) Now do you see it? Sure the categories are no longer arranged in order of the numbers assigned to them when created, but rather from most money spent to least money spent. Strike any key to view income categories ranked from most to least. Nifty, huh? (Note: If you sort according to "March" and then look at a different month (e.g. "April") the categories may not be sorted exactly according to the April amounts.) If you would like, choose "Sort/Unsort Categories" and answer "yes" again (the question has changed). This will put the categories back in their original order. It 6-5 seems like nothing happens but trust us that the categories were restored to their original order. Actually, you could leave the categories sorted without any effect in other parts of the program. Sorting does not permanently affect the order. 6.5 Net Worth - Assets and Liabilities The New Worth function in the "Reports" sub menu consists of five options that deal with calculating and presenting a net worth statement. Since we believe in instant gratification, Eg and Eli have entered enough information to allow you to look at the results of a net worth calculation. If you have a printer why not select the "Print Net Worth Statement" function? If you don't, that's o.k., choose to "View" the statement. You'll get the same information. (See figure 6.3). PHASAR will ask you for a title for the statement. The title may be anything your heart desires (even blank). And you'll also be asked for a date to put on the statement. PHASAR will print or display a listing of assets and liabilities as well as calculated net worth before returning you to the sub menu. Not much work for all that excitement! Now we'll give you a little more information about how PHASAR got the information to calculate net worth. Choose the "Edit Assets" function in the "Reports/Net Worth" sub menu. Let's take a look at the screen. (See figure 6.4). The left-hand part of the screen contains descriptions of assets. Move the cursor to this area (using the arrow keys or mouse). You're now in cell-edit mode. You can start typing and type over the current contents of the highlighted cell or strike to go into character-edit mode to make minor modifications to the existing contents of the cell. 6-6 To the right, the "Amount/Account" column allows you to enter either a fixed amount or the name of an account. If you enter the name of an account, the balance in that account will be substituted automatically when you display or print a net worth statement. 6-7 There are a number of block-oriented commands available here. Request help and you'll see them listed. You can copy, delete, insert or move a block of lines. Select any one of these options and follow the prompts to execute the operation. When inserting lines you need to be aware that there is a limit of 40 lines for the assets and another 40 lines for the liabilities. If you go over the limit the bottom lines will be lost. So, before inserting lines make sure that enough unused lines are available at the end so that you don't lose anything accidentally. The Liabilities function is identical to the assets function. (Except you list liabilities instead of assets. Bet you guessed that.) One little detail might need explaining. Accounts with negative balances (e.g. VISA) are listed as liabilities rather than assets. The program will take the balance in a liability account and change its sign. Thus, if the Sears account has a balance of 6-8 -$123.45 it will be listed as a liability of $123.45. Anyway, it all works out. If you wanted to start totally fresh (with no assets of liabilities defined), you'd select "Clear Net Worth Statement" from the "Net Worth" sub menu. If you choose this option, however, please be sure that there is nothing in the currently defined net worth statement that you want to save. We'd be willing to lay money on the fact that you're in need of another break. It would be a good idea now to stop and congratulate yourself. 6-9 Chapter 7 ANALYSIS 7.1 Editing the Budget Since money doesn't grow on trees, Eggie and Eli have decided to do some budgeting. To help them out we'll need to choose the "View/Edit Budget" function in the "Analysis" sub menu. You will be asked to name the category you wish to budget. Striking or will list all of the categories. Let's choose groceries for our example. Now you see a whole bunch of information - but with a little guidance it will be come not only clear but useful! (See figure 7.1). Go ahead and read the instructions on the top fo the screen. The cursor is in the "amount" column set of "All Months". If we enter a number here, it will be entered all the way down the screen. Let's budget $200.00 for groceries. (Don't forget to enter it!) So far, so good. However, for Thanksgiving and Christmas, Eggie and Eli have both their families in for major feasts. $200.00 ain't gonna cut it. Move the cursor down the amount column (using the down arrow key or mouse) and type in $275.00 for November. Watch the amounts on the right side of the screen. PHASAR will adjust your expenditure and net income projections. That way you can see the "bottom line" while you play with proposed budgeted amounts. It'll help keep your feet on the ground! The "actual amounts" column will also help keep you grounded. 7-1 Finally, change the amount for December to $275.00 as well. We're done. What to do? Bet you know. (Strike . This next section is a piece of cake. Put your feet up and enjoy it. You've earned it. 7.2 Plot Trend vs. Budget This next option is really fun (and impressive, too). Choose "Plot Trend vs. Budget". Ugh-oh. First question is a toughie. Remember how you pulled the categories up from the depths before? Same way here. Strike or to rescue the categories from never-never land. Notice that the categories are numbered a bit differently from usual and that there is an addition at the bottom of the screen. You can also choose composite categories. Since it's the most fun, let's choose the composite "204" ("step through the 7-2 categories"). That way we'll get to see all the categories. Next question is "Category from which to start stepping?". We'll start with #1. (It is obvious that you could start from any category whim or necessity dictated.) Now, lean back in your chair... put your feet up (if no one objects). Now you'll see PHASAR draw a graph (Figure 7.2). On this graph will be amounts on the vertical axis and months on the horizontal axis. Both budgeted and actual amounts spent are shown. If you would like to print the screen you can use the key to back up to a previous graph). PHASAR will continue to draw its little heart out until you get more information than you can digest or until you get antsy 7-3 to move on. At that point, strike and you will return to the sub menu. Let's try another option to illustrate a point. Let's look at the EggFarm Income versus EggFarm expenditures. Is Eggie making any money? Strike to view the categories once again. (Again, notice that they are numbered a little differently from the usual method.) We'll need to figure EggFarm income (#4) less the EggFarm expenditures (#23, 24, 25, 26, 28). In response to the "Which Category" prompt type in, "4-23-24-25-26-28". Enter the information you just typed in and PHASAR will plot the results for you. Ugh-oh. The EggFarm has its ups and downs - mostly downs. You may list up to 20 categories. if you separate the categories of interest with a "," or a "+", PHASAR will add them. You may also subtract categories with a "-". There is a short-hand notation which we can use when we want a range of categories. In the above example we typed "4-23-24-25-26-28" but we could have typed "4-23:26-28" since we wanted all the categories 23 through 26. Stay and play if you like. We'll wait for you in the next section. 7.3 Loan and Savings Analysis Conveniently enough, Eggie and Eli have defined a couple of loan and savings accounts for us to learn from. Since they've gone to the trouble, seems the least we can do is to select the "Analysis" function from the main menu. To start, let's relax and examine a couple of already completed analyses. Choose "Loan Analysis" in the sub menu. You should see a screen with layouts for four loan projections or calculations (similar to figure 7.3). You have available eight possible loans analyses on two pages - four loans per page. On this page, two loans have already been defined. The Eggmans have stored 7-4 these loans for two reasons. First, having defined a loan, they may quickly obtain a good estimate of their remaining balance. Second, the information displayed includes an estimate of the interest paid for the current year. This piece of information is very handy for their tax projection. The layout of the loan screen is divided into two parts. The top portion, labeled "Account Specification", is used to define the loan. The bottom portion, labeled "Calculation Results", is calculated by the program based on amounts and dates entered for the loan definition. Look at the left-most loan for the Eggmans home mortgage. Did you find it surprising, horrifying or amusing to see how much interest is paid over the life of a 30-year home mortgage loan? Just for the fun (and learning experience) of it, let's see what the balance of the Eggmans will be on January 1, 2000. Move the cursor (using the arrow keys 7-5 or mouse, as before) to the "Date" row (just above the "Calculation Results" banner). Type "Jan 1 2000" (or 1/1/2000) and enter it. PHASAR will recalculate the balance for the date you just specified. (Note that if you get ambitious later and enter the definition of your own home mortgage loan but the calculated payments are lower than actual payments, your payment probably includes an escrow payment and possibly an insurance premium). Now we'll practice entering a loan definition. The Eggmans have decided that their old truck guzzles too much gas for general driving and are considering the purchase of more economical transportation. The car they are considering costs $9500.00 and the Eggmans have shopped around a little bit to see what car-loan interest rates are. The local credit union will loan them the money at 14% for three years if they will put $1000 down. The bank will make them a loan at 15% for four years with only $500 down. The Eggmans would like to do a loan comparison. They would like to know the difference in interest they will pay on these options and what their approximate monthly payments will be. Let's be neat and start with a clean page. Strike the key (to go to the next page). We'll help you enter the information for the credit union loan and let you solo for the other. First step is to define the loan. You may title your definitions in any way that makes sense to you (as long as you use no more than ten characters). NOTE: If you leave the title blank PHASAR will think the loan is not defined and won't show you what is in the cells even though you may have entered something there. Enter your chosen name and use the arrow keys to move down the column. Enter today's date for the "Original Date" of the loan. (Don't forget to use the down arrow key after entering the date. If you forget, you'll type over your entry. No major problem, but it would be inconvenient). Original principal is $8500.00 (obviously, $9500.00 minus the 7-6 $1000.00 down payment). (If it's not obvious, the calculator is available). Term (number of payments), is "36". Percent annual interest for the credit union loan is 14%. Enter "12" for the number of payments per year since monthly payments are due. The date will be today's. We'll grant you that took a little effort on your part, but now you get to see PHASAR do the truly hard work. Keep your eye on the bottom half of the screen. PHASAR will take the information you just entered and calculate payments and interest on the loan. Time for your test flight. Enter the information defining the bank loan. (See figure 7.3 for help). Now Eg and Eli can compare PHASAR's calculations to decide on the loan they'd rather (or can afford to) pursue. They are grateful for your help! We know they're not your loans, but take a minute to view the information, anyway. It'll give you a good idea of the possibilities of this function. When you are properly impressed with the loan analyses, strike . Movin' on. The "Savings Analysis" function is enough similar to the "Loan Analysis" function that we'll just make a few comments about it here. You are welcome to take some time to play with it if you'd like, but you're on your on! (Which shouldn't be a problem for a pro like you! Besides, help is available from PHASAR and in the reference section of the manual.) The primary difference between the savings and the loan analyses is in the definitions. When defining a savings account, you will need to tell PHASAR the amount of the payments you plan to make (rather than the number of payments). The number of payments to a savings account is open-ended. PHASAR will calculate both "total interest" and "interest this year" from the information you enter. The "interest this year" figure is, of course, useful for tax calculations. Note: Depending on the dates entered for a savings account, you could get a total-interest amount less than 7-7 the interest-this-year amount. This might seem odd at first but let's try to make sense out of it. The "interest this year" figure reflects all the interest earned for twelve months, assuming you make the usual payment at the frequency specified. "Total interest" is the interest earned up until the date entered for calculation. If that date is prior to the end of the year, "total interest" to date may be less than interest projected to the end of the year. This module can also be used to specify any asset gaining in value at a fairly constant "interest" rate. (In the case of a bond, for example, the payments will be zero and the appreciation will be due solely to the interest being earned by the "principal".) Enough said. We're on the road again. 7-8 Chapter 8 MODIFYING THE SETUP The "Setup" module is distinct from any module we've examined so far in that it is not used to enter or examine transactions or to do computations. This module allows you to do occasional maintenance and to change certain aspects of your original disk set-up. 8.1 Setup Accounts If, perchance, you acquire a new account after original set-up, you'll need to let PHASAR know about it. By amazing and convenient coincidence, the Eggmans just opened a charge account at HARDWARE-N-MORE. What luck! We can help them set up the account on PHASAR. Choose the "Setup Accounts" function from the "Setup" sub menu. PHASAR will display a list of currently defined accounts. Find a blank account slot (7 will do nicely). In the "Account" column of account number 7 type in "Hardware" (without the quotes). To complete the account definition we'll have to give a starting date and balance. Since it's a new account we'll give a confirmed balance of $0.00 and a date for that confirmed balance of today. (See figure 8.1). If you need to change the confirmed balance of an account you can do it here. (Normally an account's confirmed balance is kept currently by confirming 8-1 transactions with a bank statement). You are given the chance to edit the account information without changing its name. You can change the last confirmed balance and its associated date. Note that you will be changing the last confirmed balance, not the current balance. When you take a look at the account statistics (using the "Reports" module) you'll see the new confirmed balance which you entered and the current balance computed by PHASAR based on the amount of outstanding (unconfirmed) transactions. If you need to rename an account you'll need to change the account name on all of the transactions based on the account you wish to rename. To do this you'll need to create another account with the new name. Then use the "View/Edit" module (from the "Transactions" sub menu) to call up all of the transactions for the "old" account and change them to show the "new" account. Be sure to change any reference to the "old" account in standard-transaction templates also. You may then safely delete the old account from the list of accounts. If you try to delete an account or change the name of an account which is in use the program will not allow it. If you think that you have removed all transactions which refer to a certain account by the program claims otherwise there are two things to check: 1) Did you also look at all transactions which were carried over from previous year? 2) Did you look at all of your standard transaction templates? If neither of these solves the problem, we suggest "Validating the Register File" and trying again to delete the account. After you've defined a new account, you'll need to travel to the "Transactions"/"Enter New Transactions" module to enter unconfirmed transactions (if any) pending on it. (Note: It is strongly recommended that you define all of your accounts when you first set up your data disk so that transfers between accounts will be handled properly. Don't get impatient to play with just a couple of them!) 8-2 8.2 Setup Categories Defining new income or expense categories is very similar to defining a new account; only easier. Since there is nothing associated with a category (like the confirmed balance and date) all you have to do is pick an empty slot and type a name. There is one thing worth mentioning now. The way the PHASAR tax calculation works requires that incomes or expenses which are used in the tax calculation be referenced by the category name, not on an individual transaction basis. Thus if you have some "employee business expenses" which you will want to declare on your income tax return you'll create an expense category for those expenses. Whenever you speed money for "employee business expenses" you'll register the transaction with that expense category. In the tax calculation you will need to mention the appropriate category and the total amount of all of those expenses will be picked up. 8.3 Re-Ordering Categories or Accounts After using PHASAR for a while, you will have lots of categories and accounts defined. Chances are that the neat order that you started with will have gotten lost along the way. There is an easy way to rearrange the order of the categories and accounts to make the information contained in the summaries easier to digest. If you're not already in the "Setup Accounts" function select it from the "Setup" menu now. Let's practice by re-ordering two accounts in the tutorial data. Let's say we want to interchange The "Sears" (#2) account and the "Bsns Check" (#5) accounts. Place the highlighted cell on the "2" in front of the Sears account and type in "5". (See figure 8.1). Now those two accounts have been swapped. If you have accounts or categories which fall 8-3 into natural groups you may want to leave a blank account or category between the groups to make the summaries easier to digest. To insert a blank account or category place the cursor on the first account or category of the new group and strike . The highlighted item and all of the ones below it up to the next blank item will be pushed down one slot. 8.4 Validate Register File One last feature that's not really a setup function but oriented more toward maintenance is the "Validate Register File" found in the "Project" sub menu. We've tried to make it impossible to trip up PHASAR but you may try something which we didn't anticipate. Or it's possible that there will be a power glitch which 8-4 crashes the computer at an inopportune time. So it's possible that the date will get scrambled and we need a way to try to put it back into order as best we can. Validating the register file is a way to get the program to look at all of the transactions on the disk and recompute all of the account summaries and all of the category summaries. We recommend that you always make a backup copy of the transaction data file (PHASAR.REG) before using this function just in case you don't like the way PHASAR unscrambles the data. As the program goes through the transactions it will tell you how many transactions and comments were entered for each of the months. (See figure 8.2). This also gives you a clue that the program is indeed doing something! 8-5 Chapter 9 LIST MANAGEMENT 9.1 Introduction This module is quite separate from the rest of PHASAR. It does not deal with financial items at all. If you'd like to skip this chapter now (and get on with setting up your own financial data), go ahead, but... for those who want to skip this chapter, here's one little enticement before we let you go. (We want to make sure you come back!) Once you've defined the list of special occasions, you can tell PHASAR that you would like to have a list of the coming events automatically presented each time you run the program. Imagine never forgetting birthdays or anniversaries! It's all explained in the "Special Occasions" section of this chapter. 9.2 Names and Addresses Select "View/Edit Names & Addresses" from the "Lists" sub menu. Once again PHASAR may complain that you've hidden this file. If so please help the program out by telling it where to look. In response to the name to search for, you will need to type in TWO or more letters of the name. Just to get you started we've defined one name in the name register, dear old "John and Mary Smith". If you're not 9-1 sure of the name, don't panic. If PHASAR can't find a match for the letters you typed in, it will print out the next three nearest misses. If the name doesn't appear, you may try again or use the and keys to move through the list. To request the program to search for another name you can ask for help/options (, or right mouse button) and select the "search" option. Assuming you have called up the list of names or maybe you're still at the "Which name to look for?" prompt striking the key will allow you to add a new name and associated information to the list. When it asks for the name to add we suggest entering the name last-name-first to facilitate alphabetical storage and easy recall. At any rate, consistent entry style will help you in finding particular names. Once you have typed in the name and entered it you'll be presented with a template for entering the telephone numbers and address information. (See figure 9.1). Following the template will help with other functions that use the information you enter here. Function "Print Telephone Directory" will print a list of names and the first line of information associated with that name. Therefore, if you want the phone list to include phone numbers, they must be entered on the first line of the five available lines. Four lines of address information will usually be more than you need, so you could use the last (or any) of those lines to record other information (birthday, clothing size, etc.) so that you'll always have this information available when you need it. You will be in character-edit mode entering telephone numbers and addresses. Move within the highlighted area as you have previously in this mode. There is one difference here: you can also move up and down not just left and right. when you have finished entering information. The new name and associated information will be added to the PHASAR.NAM file for future use. 9-2 Once again, editing this list is easy. There's no need to re-enter all information to change some of it. You may type over a name after moving the cursor to it and starting to type or enter character-edit mode by striking . If needed, you may move the cursor to the phone and address information and edit anything there. Beam anybody off your list by placing the cursor on the name and striking the key. (PHASAR will ask if you're sure that's really what you want to do to prevent accidental deletion of a name). 9.3 Special Occasions PHASAR can store up to 250 special dates and one-line descriptions of each of them. The program looks only at the day and month so this list is aimed primarily at events which occur annually. For any year 9-3 the program will list the event and the day of the week on which it occurs that year. The main purpose of this list is birthdays and such; but you certainly can use it to remind you of a one-time special event (TV special next month or opening of the swimming pool). It's easy to delete the event after it's passed to avoid cluttering up the file with occasions that no longer apply. Select the "View/Edit Special Occasions" function from the "Lists" option in the main menu. If the program complains that it can't find the PHASAR.OCC file it's probably on the other disk so please help the program out in its search. You'll be asked to specify the date you'd like to begin listing events from. You'll have to supply at least the month and day. If you're interested in a year other than the current one, you'll also need to specify the year. (You may display any year between 1940 and 2029). The program will list the events from your chosen date forward until the screen is full. Strike or to display preceding or subsequent events. We'll let you loose to fill in some of your own occasions. Just strike the key to start adding occasions and when you're finished. For each occasion, you'll enter the date and a short description of the event. Remember that the program does not case about the year. However, you may enter the year if that's the way you think about the event. Note that you do not have to enter the events in order of occurrence. PHASAR will sort them for you. When you ask to see the special occasions, PHASAR will list events occurring subsequent to the current date and will "roll-over" earlier dates to the following year. Editing your occasions list is extremely easy. During event display, strike the key to add a new event to your list. Or to delete an event, place the cursor on an event you no longer want recorded and strike . The item will disappear. Type over incorrect dates to change them. Move the cursor to the 9-4 event description to edit that information. You are automatically in character-edit mode. Once you start editing an event description, striking will restore the cell to its original contents or striking will permanently replace the old description with what you just entered. (See figure 9.2). You may ask PHASAR to automatically display upcoming occasions when you enter the program. Details for arranging this can be found in the "Set User Preferences" paragraphs of the Reference section of this manual. Chapter 10 CALCULATING TAXES NOTE: The PHTAX program associated with the PHASAR program is intended only to collect the information from the transactions which you have entered and the budgets you have set, combine these in a way you specify in the tax forms and do the arithmetic for you quickly. The program will not advise you on any tax strategies or check that what you tell it to do is the right or wrong way to calculate your tax liability. It is the user's responsibility to make sure the results obtained are correct. The forms and tables included for the tutorial are for illustration purposes and may not perfectly match actual tax forms and tables. 10.1 Introduction Guess what? You made it to the VERY LAST CHAPTER of the tutorial. Certainly, having all income and expense information together and easily accessible at tax time could be a big help to Eloise and Egbert, but we'll go several steps further. We'll help them project their tax situation 10-1 prior to the end of the year and we'll compute their tax standing after the year is over. We'll have to follow a few guidelines and tell the program how to compute the taxes. (Magic has its place but, unfortunately, it also has a few limitations!) The guidelines are not very restrictive. Specifying the tax calculation will take some time initially, but will save you plenty of time (and maybe some worry) later. By working through this chapter of the tutorial you should get a good idea of what is involved and be in a position to modify the approach to fit your situation. Details concerning tax setup and calculation are contained in the reference section of this manual. 10.1 What You'll Need Doing a tax calculation or projection will generally require that the computer have access to three files: 1. PHTAX: This is the file which is the program that does the calculations. 2. PHASAR.TAX: This is a data file which contains facsimiles of all the tax forms, the date entry cells on those forms and the equations that the computer needs to calculate the cells which depend on other cells. The tutorial data file is named PHASAR.TAX but you can rename it something else if you like. 3. PHASAR.REG: This is a data file which contains the transactions which you enter, examine and tally using the PHASAR program. The tax program uses the category summary information (amount spent or received in each category for each month) which is stored in the PHASAR.REG file. If you have enough room to put both the PHASAR.REG and PHASAR.TAX files on the same 10-2 diskette that is the handiest setup. If that isn't possible, putting the PHASAR.TAX file on the diskette with the PHTAX program is probably second best. 10.3 The Bottom Line Let's begin at the end and take a look at the results of a tax projection to get an idea of what you can get from it. Later we'll show you what you need to put into it. Now, run the PHTAX program. The first question asks you to specify the months which have complete actual transaction data. For these months the tax calculation will use the amount of money actually spent or received in the various expense/income categories. For the other months the amount which you have budgeted for the various expense/income categories will be used to give an estimate of the tax liability for the entire year. The program automatically suggests that the months January through last month have actual category amounts (last month is based on the date that the computer thinks is current). Since the tutorial data is complete only for March, April and May we'll overwrite the default by typing in "March:May" or "mar, april, may" or 3:5 etc. The months can be abbreviated and a range or months can be specified by giving the first and last months separated by a colon. After you tell the computer which months have complete actual category data it will display a screen showing you which months will use actual amounts and which months will use budgeted amounts. If this is correct take the default answer of "Yes" to the "Are these correct?" question. If you answer "No" you'll be returned to the previous question. After the computer knows which category data to use it will ask which tax data file to use. The default is PHASAR.TAX and we will accept that for now. As the computer reads in the tax forms it will show you a 10-3 countdown of what it's doing. Next, the computer will calculate a value for each of the data cells in the tax forms. Again, there is a countdown window to show you that something is happening. NOTE: If you see complaints about not being able to find "Eloise Pay" etc. PHTAX probably read your PHASAR.REG rather than the PHASAR.REG that goes with the tutorial. Once the tax forms are read in you'll see a main menu. Select the option to "View/Edit Form" in the "Tax Forms" sub menu. Then select the Form 1040. In a moment you'll see a rendition of a 1040 form. Ask to see the next screen via the help (options window) or by striking the key. See figure 10.1. We could skip around the 1040 form looking at the various pieces of information but there is a better way. We've created another form which summarizes the most important information of the 1040 form. To view the 10-4 summary form ask for help/options and select the "Go to other form" option then select the Summary form. It looks like they are going to get quite a big refund. But then it also looks like their income is too low. Let's pursue that possibility. Let's return to the 1040 form. (Help/options then select "Go to other form" and then select Form 1040.) Do a to view line 7 (tax form "line 7"; line echoes at the top right corner of screen is 32) where the income is listed. Make the line 7 cell the highlighted one by moving the cursor to it. On the bottom of the screen we see that line 7 is defined as "@income(Egbert pay) + Eloise pay". That looks OK except one of them says @income and the other doesn't. We've done it that way to illustrate a point. PHTAX will look at all the category names and all of the data cell names looking for a match for "Egbert pay". If it finds one it will pick up the amount from that category. There are two cases where this will not work. If there is a hyphen in a category name PHTAX will try to find two categories and subtract them. However if the hyphenated name is inside the @income() PHTAX knows that it is a single name and the hyphen is part of the name not a command to subtract two things. The other situation that warrants using @income() is when you have a category name which is used for an expense and an income category. This commonly happens when you have an "interest" category for income and expense. By stating @income(interest) or @expense(interest) you tell PHTAX which of the two "interest" categories you mean. One more thought about category names before we return to our original problem of not enough income. When you're entering transactions you can refer to categories by number or the first few letters of the name. In the tax program you are required to spell out the entire name - no abbreviations or numbers. This is to help assure that the tax calculation picks up exactly 10-5 the category you had in mind and not one that just happened to have the same first few letters. 10.4 Editing The Budget Let's from looking at the 1040 Form back to the main PHTAX menu. Ask to "View/Edit Budget". Let's take a look at Egbert's and Eloise's pay to see why their combined income was so low. Eloise's pay looks OK for the actual period of interest (March through May) and the budgeted amount looks OK for the other months. from there and look at Egbert's pay. Here's the problem; we haven't budgeted anything for Egbert's pay. Set that to $2000 for all months from editing the budget. After you finish editing the budget you are given a chance to declare which months will use budget data vs. actual data. This is an exact repeat of what you did when you first entered PHTAX. As a matter of fact, what you originally entered is remembered and you need only strike to keep the same setup. Note that editing the budget provides you a way of changing the actual vs. budget months or you could select "Change Actual/Budget Months" in the "Budget" sub menu. From the main PHTAX menu let's elect to View/Edit the Summary form. Some question marks have cropped up since we were last here. That's because we changed some budget numbers which the calculations depended on. Also there is the phrase "CALC" showing in the upper left corner of the screen which indicates that a re-calculation is needed. To cause the computer to update all of the cells ask for the help/options window and strike the "r" key to cause a re-calculation. While the calculation is being done there will be a countdown window so you can watch its progress. After the calculation is done, all of the cells on the screen will display numbers rather than "???????". 10-6 10.5 Changing The Cell Contents Let's return to Form 1040 (help/options then "Go to other form" then Form 1040). Skip down a page to find the line where we are to list interest income (Line 8). When the cursor cell is there we see that this cell is empty (bottom reverse video line on the screen). The reverse video line at the bottom of the screen will show you the name of the cell that the cursor is currently on followed by a colon and then the contents of the cell. Strike and a window will open up giving us all the information about this particular cell. Place the cursor on the contents line in the window. We want to pick up the amount of interest earned from the appropriate category. To see exactly what we may have called it ask for a list of categories as you would anywhere else in PHASAR, . In the tax program there are quite a few lists which you might want to see so now you'll have to request the list of income categories. (You can also request a list of expense categories, names of tax tables, form names, the cell names for any one of the forms, and special functions). Notice that there is an income category called "interest". Close the list window by striking . Now enter "interest" for the contents of the current cell. (You can put @income(interest) if you like but it isn't necessary here since there is no interest expense category and the name "interest" doesn't contain any special characters like '+' or '-'.) Now we close the cell-edit window and do a re-calculate to get an even more accurate picture of the tax standing. We went through opening a window to edit the contents of the data cell. That was just for practice and to show you that there is that amount of information associated with each data cell. If you just want to change the contents of a cell you can place the cursor on the cell and start typing. Your input will be echoed on the reverse-video line at the bottom of the screen. 10-7 10.6 Creating A Tax Form Let's skip down to line 12 of Form 1040, "Business income or loss". This cell is currently empty and therefore has a $0 amount in it. But the Eggmans have a business and will need to fill in this line. However this is not simply one or two category names. We'll define a new form, Schedule C, to compute the business profit (or loss) and reference that result here. Let's go ahead and make a reference to the form we are going to define. Enter "Schedule C.line 33", (without the quotes). Because we are referencing a cell in another form we need to specify both the form name and the cell name, and separate them by a period. We'll get two warning messages telling us that in Form 1040 cell line 12 we reference something that PHTAX can't find or evaluate. We'll also get an error message. Since we'll remedy that problem very soon let's choose to ignore the error. back to the main menu. We'll define a minimum Schedule C to calculate the number we need and to show you how to go about setting up any forms which you may need. We won't take very much time to lay out the form exactly but only enough to illustrate the approach. Before we start let's look at a copy of this minimal Schedule C as a guide to what we're doing. (See figure 10.2). When creating a tax form you can think of it as a blank form containing all of the lines of text and instructions. On top of that is a "clear" overlay containing the cells where we need to put in numbers. First we'll define the form itself without worrying about the data cells. On our abbreviated form we have completely skipped the top part of the real Schedule C which does not affect the numbers any. "Part I - Income" will boil down to only three lines for us. "Part II - Deductions" will boil down to only a couple of line. "Part III - Cost of Goods Sold etc." will consist of a few lines where we list most of the expenses of running the egg farm. 10-8 Now we're read to start defining the form. Let's create a new form called "Schedule C". Now we're presented with a new screen, a form consisting of one blank line. Let's first open up a little room to work in. There are two ways to open up room in a form. If the cursor is on the last line of the form (and we are in one of the Insert/Delete edit modes) striking will add a new line to the end of the form. So by repeatedly striking the key you can move the "End-Of-Form" line down to the bottom of the screen. The other way to open up room in a form is to insert lines. This may be more appropriate when you want to insert something in the middle of a previously defined form rather than append it to the end. Let's digress for a moment and talk about the various edit modes. Ask for help/options and select the Change edit mode option. You are presented with a list of six edit modes: browse, protected, line, cell, character, and 10-9 a format for printing mode. The browse mode and the protected mode restrict the cursor to the data cells; you can't wander off onto the text of the form itself. The "browse" mode will allow you to change the contents of any of the cells whereas the "protected" mode will not allow you to make any changes. The line, cell, and character mode are Insert/Delete modes. When you are defining (or modifying) a form you can set up the mode so that striking the or keys will insert or delete 1) whole Lines, 2) Cells or 3) Characters. To insert or delete something other than the type of item currently selected you can use the function keys according to the menu on the bottom line of the screen. The format-for-printing edit mode is used to establish printing attributes which we will discuss a little later. Close the help/options window by striking the . After you've opened up a dozen or so lines ask for a or to return the cursor to the top of the form. over once and type in: "1a Gross receipts or sales". (Note that the key does not have its usual PHASAR meaning. It is used to move rapidly (eight columns at a time) towards the right side of the page. Strike to go to the next line and then type "2 Cost of operations from Part III line 8". On the third line type "5 Gross income". Notice that we're leaving out lines of the real Schedule C which we don't really need. Strike twice to leave a blank line between Part I which we just did and Part II which we are about to begin. We'll skip all the way down to line 31 (other expenses) or Schedule C, line 5 on the screen (notice that in the upper right-hand part of the screen it tells you the current cursor line and column). then type "31a Computer" (for next line), then type "31b Business expenses". Go to the next line, Tab over and type "32 Total deductions". Go to the next line, Tab over and type "33 Net profit or loss". Skip a line and begin section III with a then type "1 Inventory at beginning of year". On the next 10-10 line type "2 Purchases etc.". The next line will be "7 Inventory at the end of year". The last line will be "8 Cost of operations". We're through entering the form outline and we're ready to go back and add the data cells to actually do the calculations. 10.7 Creating Form Cells Return to the top of the form using the or key. Tab over to column 65 (remember that in the upper right-hand part of the screen it tells you the current cursor line and column). Check to see you are in the proper edit mode - you can tell by looking about a third of the way across the top line on the screen. If you're not in the cell ins/del mode ask for help, select "change edit mode" and then "cell ins/del" mode. With the cursor on Schedule C line 1, column 65 strike . We're asked to name the cell we're creating. If we aren't going to refer to this cell from anywhere else we can leave the name blank but in this case we'll reference this value from line 5 so we need to give it a name - how about "Line 1a". After entering the cell name you'll see a cell-definition window open. The cursor is sitting on the cell type item. A cell can be one of several types depending on its usage: 1. Text: This type of cell can have anything in it. It is useful for putting in your address for example. The cell can have any width (up to the width of the screen - 80 columns). 2. Number: This is useful for things like the number of deductions. The value of a numeric cell is always displayed as a two digit number. 3. Check Mark: This is a one-character-wide cell which contains an "X" or is empty. It is useful for specifying filing status etc. 10-11 4. Yes / No: This is a three-character-wide cell which either contains either "yes" or "no". 5. Dollar Amount: This type of cell is the most useful for actually computing the tax liability. It will pick up a category amount or other "Dollar-Amount" cells and do arithmetic on them. The value of these cells is always displayed as a 10-character item which is rounded to the nearest whole dollar. We want a dollar amount cell so type "D" or call up help/options and select the "Dollar Amount" type from the list. Now we're ready to specify a category from which the tax program can obtain the total amount of egg sales. Put the cursor beside the "Contents:" prompt and strike . Ask to see a list of incomes. We see that we want the category called "Egg Sales". As instructed at the bottom of the page, strike to close the list window and type into the contents area "Egg Sales" or @income(Egg Sales). Note that we cannot type in the number of the category (actually we can but the program will think we mean $9). Also we are not allowed to abbreviate the category name. However, the program does not care whether we type "EGG SALES" or "EgG SaLeS". . Let's close the cell-definition window, . At the bottom of the screen we're told to place the cell where we want it and then strike . It's already where we want it but for fun you can move it around then bring it back and strike . Note that you can move it over the form text without destroying the text. That is what we meant when we said you could consider the data cells as residing on a clear overlay on top of the form itself. Move the cursor down to line 2, column 65 and insert the next cell. We'll call this Line 2. This is also a "Dollar Amount' type cell. It's value is obtained from line 8 of Part III which we haven't created yet. Let's agree to call the line 8 Part III cell "III 8" when we get to it. So enter "III 8" into the contents field of the 10-12 current cell. PHTAX complains that it can't fine "III 8". Let's choose to over-ride (ignore) the warning and continue. Close this cell-definition window, , and then place the cell by striking the key. Now for the last cell of Part I - we get to do a little arithmetic. Let's create (insert) a new cell and name it "Line 5". It is also a "Dollar Amount" type cell. It's value is the gross receipts from egg sales minus the cost of operations: "Line 12 - Line 2". Let's enter the equation. This cell is not likely to change so let's make it so that we don't change it accidentally. Move the cursor up to the "Protection" item of the cell-definition window and enter "Y" for "yes". Now close the window, , and place the cell appropriately. For Part II - Deductions, we'll tell you what we had in mind for lines 31a and 31b and let you create and fill in those two cells. Line 31a is expenses for the computer and is therefore obtained by referencing the expense category "Cmptr". Line 31b is general business expenses and is obtained by a reference to the expense category "Bsns Expen". Now we'll set up cells for lines 32 and 33. Create a cell called "Line 32" and set its contents to "line 31a + line 31b". Also create a cell called "Line 33" and set its contents to "line 5 - line 32". Now move the cursor to column 65, line 1 of Part III. Strike the key to create a new cell. For the name we could use "Line 1". The problem with doing this is later you may want to fill out the form and some of the names for lines in part II would be identical to cell names used in part I. Even though there is no Line 1 in part I let's be consistent and call each of the cells in part III by the Roman numeral III followed by its line number. According to this prescription, we'll name this cell "III 1". Make this cell a "dollar amount" type cell and for an identical value you can enter 0, or just leave it blank (which the program interprets as zero). Close the definition window and place the cell. 10-13 We'll show you a little trick you can use to make defining the cells of a form a little bit easier. With the cursor still sitting within the last cell ask for the help/options window and select the "Duplicate" option by typing "D" or by highlighting it and striking . We'll name the duplicate cell which we are creating "III 2". The new cell is not quite identical to the previous cell. The contents equation should be different. Request to see a list of expenses by striking and selecting the expense category list. The new cell's contents will be "Chkn Feed + Mat & Sup + Egg Carton". from the cell-definition window and move the new cell off of the cell from which it was cloned to its new position and strike to fix its position. The next cell we want, III 7, is identical to III 1 so move the cursor back up to cell III 1 and ask to duplicate it. Since this cell is identical to the line 1 cell we can close the definition window without making any changes and place the new cell. One more cell and we're finished. Again let's duplicate the cell that we just created. This time we're not quite through, we don't want zero for a value. The value is "III 1 + III 2 - III 7". Enter that, close the definition window and place the new cell by the label we entered entered earlier for line 8 of part III. back to the main menu. 10.8 Validating The Tax File We're not quite ready to see the fruits of our labor. Before we established a Schedule C we referenced a value from it in the Form 1040. When we did that the program didn't know there was going to be a "Schedule C.line 33". Now that everything is defined we want PHTAX to go through all of the data cells and create all of the ties that should exist between all the cells. 10-14 From the main menu select the "Validate Tax File" item in the "Project" sub menu. The program will ask you if you're sure if you want to continue. The question has two purposes. First, if the file were corrupted (e.g. because of a bad diskette) it is possible there might be more damage inflicted trying to fix things. Second, this operation takes a fair amount of time when running on floppy disks and you'll have a chance now to cancel it if you selected it by mistake. Because we have been messing around with the file and know that some of the ties between cells are not correct (because we referenced cells before they existed) we do want to proceed with the validation. As the validation proceeds you'll see messages telling you that a certain cell has too few dependents and that the problem is fixed. When the validation is finished, choose View/Edit Form 1040. Do a so that the cell Line 12 is showing. After we recalculate the cells, we have a number which was computed from the form we just defined (Schedule C). If you like you can go to Schedule C and see how PHTAX arrived at its answer. 10.9 Printing Tax Forms Form the main menu select "Print Forms". Depending on how much patience and curiosity you have you can elect to print all of the forms or only one of the shorter ones (Summary or Schedule C). After you have selected a form there is another choice to be made. If you're doing mid-year tax calculations you'll probably want to print out both the data cells and the descriptive form text. At the end of the year, if the form layout and your printer cooperate and match the official pre-printed forms you may want to print just the cell contents onto the pre-printed form. The third printing option will need a little more explanation. 10-15 10.10 Hidden Lines And Footnotes One of the printing style options is to print the data cells, form text, lines which are hidden and footnote lines. You should cancel the printing or go ahead and complete it then follow us in electing to View/Edit Form 1040. Request a twice. Now from the help/options window select "Change edit mode". Then select the "Format for printing" edit mode. The right-most column now contains letters. Each line has a printing attribute associated with it. The attribute choices are: 1. P: This is the most common one, a normal Printing line. 2. H: This line is Hidden when we print the form. It exists on screen but we don't want it printed. On the form line between cells Line 22 and Line 23 we have a hidden line. In this case we used it because the cell, Line 23, is the sum of too many cells to type in the space allowed for a cell's contents. We over-came this by creating a fake line which we named "part_sum" for partial sum. We used it to add up half of the cells and then combined its value with the other half of the cells which we needed to add to get the cell Line 23. 3. F: Footnote line. If we want to make notes to ourselves when we're filling in a form and we want those notes to be next to the item we're commenting on but don't want them to interrupt the printing of the form we can declare the lines to be footnotes causing them to be printed at the end of the form. 4. N: Newpage. This instructs the program to start a new page before printing this line. 10-16 10.11 Tax Tables While we're on Form 1040 let's look at how we obtained an amount for the tax due. until the cell named Line 38 is on the screen. Move the cursor to that cell and look at the reverse video line at the bottom of the screen. We see that it has a value of @lookup(Married Joint , Line 37). This means to take the amount from the cell named "Line 37" and look in a tax table named "Married Joint" to find the tax due, then enter that amount for this cell. back to the main menu and select View/Edit Tax tables. Select the "Married Joint" table and you'll see a list of twenty lines and three columns. You can change any of the amounts in the first two columns. The right-hand column will tell you the tax bracket amount between any line and the next line. This is computed from the numbers you enter in the first two columns and cannot be changed directly by you. When you've finished making any necessary changes (due to new tax rates or if you're creating a new tax table, e.g. one for your state taxes) strike . PHTAX will sort the amounts into order. If it finds that putting the first column into order leaves the second column out of order it will complain. It is acting on the assumption that as the taxable income increases, the taxes due increase. 10.12 Setting User Preferences This function is identical to the one in the main PHASAR program. It is here for convenience in setting user preferences, especially printer characteristics. 10-17 10.13 Cloning A Form It's possible that you'll want to computer your taxes using different scenarios to find the most advantageous. There are two ways to go about this. The first way is to make a copy of the PHASAR.TAX forms definition file and call it something like PHASAR-B.TAX. Then set up the original file to computer the taxes one way and the "B" file to do it another way. Printing out the summary page for each of the two approaches will allow you to find the most advantageous approach. The main menu option to "Change Tax File" is useful for this approach. The second way to do a comparison is to define both calculations in the same tax file. The advantage to this is that you can create a summary form which will show you a comparison of the various calculations without having to jump between tax files and print out the results to compare them. There are however two disadvantages to this way. If you have a limited amount of room on a diskette you may not want one very large tax file. Also, all of the cells of a form must be read into the computer's memory before a calculation is done. If there are too many cells you won't be able to fit them all in memory at once. The second disadvantage of the one-big-file approach is that it will take longer for the computer to (re-)calculate a new result when you change something. If you choose to have one large file with more than one tax calculation defined, the "Clone" function will make it easy to make a copy of forms which you can alter to suit the various approaches you want to explore. When cloning a form, the program will not stop you from filling up a disk or filling up memory. It will copy as much as it can until either it finishes or memory is full or the disk is full. 10-18 10.14 Category Name Considerations If the tax projection/calculation capability of PHASAR is important to you you'll want to create income/expense categories with the tax consequences in mind. If you lump together various items into one pretty general category, e.g., "Bsns Expen" you will not be able to break them out for the automatic tax calculation. With PHASAR you could list all of the transactions on the "Bsns Expen" category and separate them into more specific categories by hand. However, that is a lot more effort than is needed if you name categories appropriately from the start. If you find yourself in the trap mentioned above there is a pretty easy way out. Create whatever categories you wish you had done at the beginning. then using the "View/Edit Transactions" feature of PHASAR list all of the transactions on the more general category. Go through them one-at-a-time and edit the category item to be more specific. This way you'll only have to review and re-assign them once. 10.15 Setting Up Your System After completing the tutorial, you are probably ready to customize the tax forms for your own finances. The biggest pitfall is the tendency to assume that the computer knows more than it really does. There are cells which contain items like interest paid on a home mortgage which are filled in with numbers rather than category names and therefore will not automatically adjust to your setup. The best plan is to step through each cell of all forms and look at its contents (on the bottom line of your screen). Then it would be wise to compare the amounts in each of the cells to the numbers on your last year's return, looking for amounts that seem obviously wrong. 10-19 We'll warn you of one last pitfall and you're on your own. There are some cells which will have an estimated value during the year but will need to be changed to an exact value at the end of the year for the final calculation. This is most likely the case for interest paid on a mortgage. You can get a good estimate from the PHASAR loan analysis but the final, exact number needs to come from your mortgage holder. The tax table look up may also have to be adjusted slightly at the end of the year. We've given a broad range of incomes in the tutorial tables but the steps are different from the actual tax tables and that may introduce small errors. While we're talking about tax tables we should mention that PHTAX will look up a tax liability in whatever table you tell it, it does not automatically know which table to use. Well, Egbert and Eloise help that their financial records have helped you understand PHASAR better. They sure have appreciated all the work you've done for them. By the way, they bought a new truck and have renamed the business, Egbert's and Eloise's Egg Farm. Again, thanks for choosing PHASAR. The reference section follows. It contains details about PHASAR that weren't covered in the tutorial and helps you set up your own system. Enjoy and happy financing! 10-20 Chapter 11 SETTING UP YOUR OWN PHASAR SYSTEM 11.1 Introduction You've completed the tutorial and have seen many of PHASAR's features. You should be ready to set up your own accounting system in a way that utilizes a lot of the power available to you. Setting up categories and accounts can be approached in two ways. We'll describe the two approaches below. First, however, you will have to do the hard part without the help of the computer. This is the part where you will have to organize all of your account records. 11.2 Organizing Your Records What do we mean by "organizing your records"? The first step is to list all of your accounts and charge cards. Next, find the latest statement for each account. You will need the latest confirmed balance and its date. Now obtain a list of all transactions which have occurred for each account since the confirmed balance you're starting from. This list may be a list you make, your check register or stack of charge account receipts. 11-1 Warning 1: It's important that you define all your accounts when you're getting started. Here's why. Wrong: Let's say you declare your checking account but don't declare your Visa charge account. If you have a balance of $110 on your Visa charge account and pay it with a check from your checking account you'll record it as an expense under some category such as "Visa" or "Chg Cards". The problem here is that you'll have no clue as to what that money was spent on (clothing, entertainment, etc.) Right: Now let's say you declared both the Visa account and the checking account. Let's further assume that the $110 balance on your Visa card was due to a clothing purchase of $75 and dinner out for $35. You would record those two transactions under their appropriate categories (on the Visa account). Now paying $110 to Visa from checking is a transfer which does not affect any income or expense categories. As in the first case above all of the account balances are correct. The two advantages of doing it the second way are: Your budget will be more meaningful and you'll have a verification that the charge card company didn't make a mistake on your statement (because you'll confirm transactions against it once a month, catching any errors). Warning 2: The budgeting that PHASAR does is oriented towards income and expenses not transfers. Therefore if you regularly transfer $300 month into a savings account from your checking account (e.g. you have defined both a checking and a savings account), you won't have an item in your budget for that amount. Looking at your budget may lead you to grab the phone and call your travel agent and plan a nice vacation on the "extra" money which you really don't have. One more suggestion before you proceed. We recommend that you (re-)read section 1.3 "Financial Model" before you set up your system. 11-2 11.3 Naming Categories Choosing names for the expense and income categories deserves some thought to make the transaction entry more convenient later. Choosing names which are natural and easily remembered will help you to recall them without having to call up the list of categories. The most subtle trick is to make the names distinct from one another in the first two or three letters. For example if you have two categories for car insurance: "Car Ins #1" and "Car Ins #2" and you want to refer to them by name, you'll have to type in all of the characters before the program will be able to find the right category. If you have two categories which must have the same first five or so letters and one of them is used much more frequently than the other one, putting the frequently used one first in the list will help. 11.4 Entering Old Transactions Let's first define what we mean by old transactions. Any transaction dated before the date of the last confirmed balance for its account is considered to be an old one. Why the distinction? If a transaction occurred before the reconcile date, it is possible that it has already been confirmed on a previous statement and it should not affect the current balance (since its effect may have already been included in the last confirmed balance). "Old" transactions are no different from "new" transactions in terms of how you use PHASAR to enter them. When you are entering an "old" transaction PHASAR will recognize that it may have already been confirmed and give you a chance to declare it so. The program will ask you if the transaction has already been accounted for. If you answer "yes" the transaction will be confirmed with the phrase "...old". Remember that any confirmation string other than a blank will tell the program that the 11-3 transaction has already been confirmed with a statement. So, if you're entering transactions which have not yet been confirmed with a statement (but are dated before the account's confirmation date), override the default "Yes" with a "No". This will generally be the case when you're getting started. Later, you may wish to go back and enter all of your old transactions so that you will have a computerized record of the entire year. In this case you will probably want to let the program mark the transactions as confirmed when you are entering them. To do this you will accept the "Yes" default answer to the question and thereby get a confirmation of "...old". 11.5 Create New Register File You have two options for getting started. If you want to use the categories which the Eggmans have as a starting point you can do so if you do a clean up step first. If you want to start clean and define all of your own categories your first step will be a little different. To start from the tutorial data and modify it for your situation follow the instructions in this paragraph. To start totally "clean" with no accounts or categories defined, skip to the next paragraph. 1. Select the "Confirm With Statement" module from the "Transactions" sub menu. Go through each account, one-by-one and confirm all transactions. When you're done confirming the transactions, the account probably will not balance. Don't worry, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and accept the statement balance and continue. 2. Select the "New Year Carry Over" item from the "Setup" sub menu. Tell the program not to carry over standard transactions when it asks you. 11-4 3. In the same module choose the "Setup Accounts" function. Go through each account and redefine them to suit your situation. Follow this paragraph only if you want to make a "clean" start with no categories or accounts predefined. Run PHASAR and select the "Create New Register File" option in the "Setup" sub menu. After the program sets up a new data file it will display the main menu. (If you have elected to automatically display special occasions, you'll be presented with that list before you'll be able to select from the main menu.) Select the "Setup Accounts" function in the "Setup" sub menu and define all of the accounts that you will need. You can also set up some expense and income categories by selecting the appropriate functions from the "Setup" sub menu, or you can define income/expense categories as you need them (while entering transactions). 11-5 Chapter 12 ENTERING TRANSACTIONS 12.1 Credits and Refunds Credits and refunds can be handled in a very simple manner. Let's use an example to illustrate the principles. In the data file that came with the program, we had a medical expense for Egbert when he went to the emergency room after a ski accident. The payment was recorded as a debit on his checking account and tallied under the category of "medical". A couple of months later he received a reimbursement from the insurance company. If he had recorded the insurance check as a "deposit" transaction to PHASAR, the account balance would reflect the deposit just fine. The problem is that the cash flow statement from the category summary reports in the "Reports" module would show extra income which slightly distorts the truth. However, if he had recorded the deposit as an expense transaction of negative amount in the medical category, the cash flow will show the more realistic total income and the account balance will be adjusted properly also. When he plots the medical expense category he will see a negative expense for one month which is a reasonable way to look at the transactions. The main benefit is that the year-to-date expense for the medical category will reflect the true net cost of medical services for the year. 12-1 12.2 Printing Checks To print checks, PHASAR needs to know that you want to print checks and also what format to use when printing the checks. These two pieces of information are combined in the program. If you haven't told the program what check-printing format to use it will assume that you don't want to print any checks and not bother you with a question about it. However, if you want the check-printing option, the "Setup Check Printing" function of the "Setup" module will allow you to specify the format. When you enter an expense transaction on any account that has a check format specified the program will offer to print the check for it. This won't happen right away when you enter a transaction; it happens after you finish entering a batch of transactions. 12.3 Check Numbers PHASAR will try to guess what the check number will be when you're entering transactions. It tries pretty hard but is not infallible. Whenever you enter a numeric check number on an expense transaction, i.e. numerals only, not letters (e.g. 1243 vs. A1243), the program will start counting from there. There are accounts which generally should not have check numbers associated with their transactions, e.g. Visa card. If the program thinks it knows better there is a way to set it straight. When you're prompted for the check number on an expense transaction for the Visa account, enter "0" (the digit zero, no quotes) and that will tell PHASAR that you want it to stop guessing check numbers for this account. 12-2 12.4 Miscellaneous Sometimes the program may out-smart itself and try to make a transfer out of a transaction which isn't a transfer. For example, let's say you have a Sears charge account and PHASAR knows about it. If you go into the Sears store and buy something and pay for it with a check rather than charging it you will have a little trouble convincing PHASAR that you are not transferring money from your checking account to the Sears account. That's because we've trained the program to recognize any payee which matches another account name. The easiest way around this is to use something like "Sears-" rather than "Sears" so that the program doesn't find the match. Incidentally, if you charge something to the Sears account and enter the transaction on the Sears account with the payee being Sears, the program will recognize what's going on and debit the Sears account properly. One example using the cash categories and the split categories features may be handy. Let's say the Eggmans go out to dinner with another couple. When the bill comes everyone decides that the Eggmans will pay for the tab with their Visa card and the other couple will reimburse them for half of it with cash. If the tab plus tip is $60 then we'll need to record a debit of $60 on the visa card to category "multi" or "split". On the two subsequent lines we'll enter a $30 debit in the entertainment category and another $30 in the "cash...." category. This will correctly account for the money spent directly on entertainment and also the extra cash that they just picked up (and will presumably spend). 12-3 Chapter 13 VIEW/EDIT TRANSACTIONS If you want to examine or edit previously entered transactions, you will need to tell the program which ones you are interested in. When you are specifying the accounts or categories (income or expense) you'll be able to call up a list by asking for help and then selecting the "list" option or by striking and avoiding the options list. Accounts - You may specify the name or number of any accounts here (up to a maximum of twenty). Also "ALL" is a permitted response. If you want to examine a range of accounts you could enter "Check:Bsn" to select the checking account, the business account and all accounts between. The range operator ":" can also be used with numbers e.g. "1:4". If you specify only one account, the program will offer to do something special for you. You will be asked if you want to list all of the unconfirmed transactions for the specified account (and no other transactions). This can be handy if you want to get a printout of all unconfirmed transactions to work with while reconciling your account with a statement. This is also handy if you want to quickly check to see if you remembered to enter a specific, recent transaction on a particular account. Incomes - Legal entries here are the name or number of (up to twenty) income categories of "ALL" or "NONE". As with the account specification, a range of income categories can be specified using the colon. 13-1 Expenses - Identical to incomes except expense categories are used instead of income categories. Payee - Use this if you want to call up transactions for a particular payee. The letters which you enter must be found in the payee name for a match to be made. The case of the letters (lower or upper) is ignored in the attempted match. However, embedded blanks or misspellings will cause the match to fail. The payee searched for must be included in the actual payee name on the transaction but does not have to be the entire name or even at the beginning of the name. For example searching for "Postal" will find payees for "US Postal Service" or "POSTAL Service". Starting Date - This is the earliest date for the search. Ending Date - Transactions after this date will not be included in the search. The best way to minimize the time required for a search is to bracket the dates as closely as possible. A maximum of 1000 transactions can be called up at one time. If the program finds 1000 matches it will terminate the search (and tell you so) even if the full period specified has not been searched. If you choose to print a group of transactions, you will see a few totals printed at the end of the list. The totals of all income and expense categories are listed (separately) for the transactions printed out above. The total amounts transferred (into or out of) are listed separately. If there is a split transaction listed, the totals will not include the total amount (marked with an "*" by the amount) but will include the categorized amounts instead. After you call up a group of transactions, the same statistics mentioned above will be displayed after the search completes but before the transactions are listed on the screen. Note that the split transactions (which 13-2 are not included in the totals) will not be marked with an asterisk because of space limitations on the screen. You can have a running balance included in a transaction printout under certain conditions. The first condition is that you ask for only one account (having the running balance for several accounts interspersed would be pretty hard to make sense of). The other condition is that the dates of the search allow PHASAR to get its bearings. The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure that the most recent transaction is included in the search period. PHASAR can also get its bearings if the search dates bracket the confirmed date for the account and the earliest date of the search is at least as early as the date of the oldest unconfirmed transaction for the account. (There will be no printout of the running balance for the cash account no matter what the dates are.) To delete a transaction you will need to have it displayed using the "View/Edit Transactions" feature of PHASAR. Once the transaction is displayed place the cursor on any part of the transaction and strike the key. To restore a deleted transaction, place the cursor on the line where the transaction was and strike the key. 13-3 Chapter 14 CONFIRM WITH STATEMENT The confirmation string used to declare whether or not a transaction has been confirmed with a statement can be up to six characters long. Any string of characters other than six blanks will indicate to PHASAR that the transaction has been confirmed. There are two ways to enter a confirmation string. The default confirmation string is defined in the statement reconciliation ("Confirm Transactions") setup menu. This string can be entered as the confirmation for a transaction by striking when the cursor is in the "confirm" column. The second method is to enter a string of up to six characters in the confirmation column of a specific transaction. You might want to use this method to make a particular item stand out when you examine transactions later. To unconfirm a transaction you can type a single blank and strike and the program will fill out the string with blanks causing the transaction to be "unconfirmed". The maximum number of unconfirmed transactions which can be collected at one time is 1000. If this is not sufficient, confirm as many of the first 1000 as possible and then re-enter the "Confirm With Statement" function using the previous intermediate ending balance as the last confirmed balance for the current confirmation. 14-1 Chapter 15 REPORTS 15.1 Category Summary When printing the category summary, the style of output with depend on the type of printer you declared in the program setup ("Set User preferences" function in the "Setup" module). If you have a dot matrix printer with 132 column capability, a summary of the entire year will be printed across the page. If the printer is not capable of displaying 132 columns an 80-column format will be used. This does not allow enough characters to display the entire year so you will be asked which half of the year to print. If a half-year report is printed, the right-most column (year-to-date) will be the sums for the entire year if the second half of the year is selected, otherwise it will be the sums for the first six months. 15.2 Net Worth Statement The "Net Worth" function in the "Reports" sub menu consists of five options that allow you to set up a net worth statement (broken into liabilities and assets), and to view the results on the screen or printer. Call up the "Edit Assets" option from the "Reports/"Net Worth" sub menu. The top line on the screen tells you which line the cursor is on out of the 15-1 forty available. You can cause the screen to scroll by moving the cursor either all the way to the top or the bottom of the screen. You may also use the and keys to move between the first and second section of twenty lines. Horizontally the screen is broken into two major columns. The rightmost column provides a place to list the value of an asset or if you want the program to automatically insert the balance of one of your accounts type the account name here. The accounts referred to here are those defined in the main body of PHASAR not in the loan or savings analysis. The leftmost column is for entering text which will be associated with each line of the net worth statement. If you move the cursor into this region, you will be in cell-edit mode. Asking for help will show you how to enter into character-edit mode and move, delete, or copy blocks of one or more lines of the statement. The liabilities section of the net worth statement is handled in an identical fashion. After you have defined your assets and liabilities you can view the finished product on the screen or print it out to use for a loan application or just to marvel at or file away. When the program asks for a title you may leave it blank if you like. 15-2 Chapter 16 ANALYSIS 16.1 Budgeting When you're setting up a budget the cash categories may need a little explaining. The edit-budget screen shows the total amount budgeted on the right part of the screen. If you change the budgeted amount for groceries, the total budgeted amounts will reflect the change. Likewise if you change the budget amount for the net cash category, the budget totals will change. However, if you edit the total cash, Cash...., amount the budget totals will not change. This is because your overall expenses are not determined by the amount of cash which you spend. The total of expenses depends on the amount of cash which you spend for items which are not explicitly accounted for (net cash) plus all of the categories which received the accounted-for cash. The PHASAR module allows you to perform several diverse operations which will help you to analyze your overall financial standing. First, we'll discuss loan and savings analysis and then we'll discuss setting up and printing a net worth statement. If you opted to start fresh on your PHASAR.REG file the loan, savings, and net worth will all be empty. If you opted to start from the tutorial data you'll have the setup which the Eggmans had. 16-1 16.2 Trend vs. Budget After doing a Trend-vs-Budget plot, all of the category sums which were used to generate the plot are listed on the display. This can be a handy way to determine the cumulative amounts in several categories over a period of time. If you want to skip the numeric information, strike rather than when you're through looking at the graph. There's a short cut way to specify a bunch of contiguous categories to be plotted. Let's say you want to plot the sum of incomes from several sources minus the sum of several expenses. In response to the "Which category to plot" prompt answer "FirstIncome:LastIncome - FirstExpense:LastExpense:. Where the "FirstIncome" etc. are replaced with either the name or number of the appropriate category from your records. 16.3 Loan And Savings Analysis This function allows you to define up to eight loans and up to eight savings accounts and computes the balance at any future date and the amount of interest earned or paid during any given year (handy for tax estimation). Select the loan analysis option in the "Analysis" sub menu. You are presented with a screen which can contain up to four loan descriptions. Striking the key will give you access to another four loans. To fully define a loan you need to enter the original date and amount of the loan, the life of the loan (called "term" on the screen), payment period and interest rate. Once you have entered values for all of these items the program will calculate and display several facts about the loan you have described. Let's look at the input and output in some detail. 16-2 the account name is up to you but should be something to help and keep different loans straight. It must not be blank or PHASAR will think you aren't interested in this loan and will therefore try to do you a favor by hiding the loan-setup information. If you want to remove a loan which you no longer need, the easiest thing to do is to ask for help and select the "Copy a loan" option. Copy a blank (not bank) loan into the one you want to zero out. The original date and principal are just what they say - nothing tricky here. The program requests the term of the loan in payments; e.g. if the loan period is one month (i.e. number of payments per year equal to 12) a 30-year home mortgage loan would have a term of 360 payments, and a 4-year car loan would have a term of 48 payments. The date is defaulted to the computer's system date when you call up this function. However, if you would like to know what the balance will be on some other date just over-write the defaulted date. The program will compute the payment which must be made every payment period to satisfy the loan criteria you have established. The program will also display the number of payments which must be made over the life of the loan. The next two lines present information which may be of interest (and a shock). They show the total of payments over the life of the loan and the total interest over the life of the loan. The next line shows the amount of interest which will be paid on the loan during the current year. (The current year is obtained from the date entered in the bottom line of the loan specification.) This number can be a handy estimate for entering into the tax calculation until you get the exact, final number from the loan company at the end of the year. The last line shows you the balance of the loan on the date specified on the last line of the top section. 16-3 The savings account setup is very similar - it is an alternate selection in the "Analysis" sub menu. The main difference in the input needed to define a savings account vs. a loan is that the term of the account is not fixed because of the open-ended nature of a savings account. A savings account can have any payment which the user chooses (it is not constrained to a certain value as it is for a loan). The output is also similar to that for a loan with the primary difference being the interest computed. The interest this year which is computed is the total interest which will be earned this year assuming that the payments are maintained and no money is added to (other than interest) or removed from the account. The total "interest" is the interest for the account from its beginning to the current date. Note that if this is the first year of the savings account the interest this year may be higher than the total interest. This is because the interest this year is computed for the entire year and the total interest is only through the date you specified. Since PHASAR allows you to define several loans or savings accounts at one time on the same screen there is the possibility of comparing different parameters (e.g. interest rates). Simply define two loans side-by-side and vary the interest rate or term on one of them to see the overall effect of the change. This is facilitated by the "Copy a loan" choice in the help/options window. 16-4 Chapter 17 SETUP 17.1 Set User Preferences This function allows the user to set items which are either determined by his/her particular computer hardware or personal tastes. The easiest way to set the value of any of the items is to place the cursor on the item's value and ask for help. You'll be presented with a list of choices from which to choose. Force unique category: If "yes" and the user types in fewer letters than are required to uniquely identify a category, the program will flash up a few choices window showing all of the possible matches and require the user to select one. If "No" the program will run through the category list until a match is found and use that category - no warning about ambiguous user input. Automatic Occasions: If you have entered a list of special occasions using the "Lists" module of PHASAR you may want to see a list of those occasions (starting from today) whenever you run the program. This can be very hand for remembering birthdays etc. Verify Exit To System: Sometimes you may find yourself accidentally electing to exit back to the system and you have to wait while the program loads again to continue. If this option is turned on you'll be given a chance to avoid the accidental exit. 17-1 Plotting Symbol: Sometimes you may want to make a printout of the screen where the budget vs. actual plot is presented and your printer will not support the graphics characters used on the screen. Whatever character you enter here will be used on the printout. This only applies to a screen printout initiated with the (for Make copy) not any built-in screen-copy function your computer might provide. Suggested characters are "X" and "*". The letter "X" can be typed in as a single character or as its ASCII equivalent enclosed in angle brackets, <88>. Standard Page For Single Transactions: This function is for you if you find yourself entering the same individual transactions over and over. (i.e. music lesson or gas bills). We call these "single standard transactions". Here's the way to speed up that process. move to the "Edit Standard Transactions" module of the "Transactions" sub menu and select the "Create new page" option. Choose an empty page (and remember its number). Now, enter all those single standard transactions, but just one more time. OK, select the "Set User Preferences" item in the "Setup" sub menu. Last, enter the page number which contains the single transactions. Now you are all set up. Later, when responding to the "Which Account" prompt while entering transactions, you can type a single quote followed by the first few letters of the payee and the program will fill in defaults for the payee and category. If you forget the payees you have listed on the "standard singles" page you can recall them by asking for help while entering the transaction (with the "Which Account" prompt showing) then selecting the standard singles option. Or you can type a single quote (') followed by . File Locations: Depending on the capacity of your disk drives and the size of the various files you'll create you may want a different arrangement for your file locations. To tell PHASAR where the files are once and for all, just fill in the file location prompts. Any legal 17-2 drive (and directory) of less than forty characters is valid here. Printout Destination: When you ask PHASAR to print something (either a category or account report or using to print the screen image) you can determine where that printout goes. The choices are Printer, Screen, Disk File or you can have the program ask you each time where you want the print output sent (Query). Sending the output to a disk file is a handy way to export the data contained in PHASAR to be picked up by a word processor program or spread sheet. Printer Type: You can declare either a Dot Matrix printer which is assumed to be capable of 132-column printing or a Daisy wheel printer which is assumed to be capable of 80-column printing only. If you want more control over the printer specification, declare a "Custom" printer. The "Custom" option allows six more specifications. These will be set to the default settings of the previous printer specified in the "Printer Type" option. 1. The "Reset String" is usually left blank if you want to be sure your printer is initialized before using it, that is the location for that string. Look in the printer's manual to find out what its reset string is. 2. The "Indent Columns" are the number of columns to move the printout to the right. 3. "Pause after form feed " if you do not use fan fold paper. 4. "Lines per page" includes the inaccessible lines at the top. 5. "Auto carriage return " should be answered "yes" if your printer automatically inserts a carriage return after a line feed. 17-3 6. "132-column mode" will display 132 columns. Setting "indent columns" to a non-zero value requires that your printer be able to print more than 80 column on a line before it loses characters or automatically wraps them around to the next line. If you enable 132-column mode you'll be allowed to specify character strings which can be used to turn 132-column printing on and off. These character strings can be a series of ordinary characters or ASCII character values enclosed in angle brackets or a mixture of the two. If you select custom printer and change the values for the number of columns to indent or the value of the automatic carriage return option the new values will be remembered even if you return to the Dot Matrix or the Daisy wheel selection. Other printer setup values will be changed back to built-in default values. After setting the values of the user preference items and taking the option you can choose to save the values you have entered. If you save them they will be recorded in a file named PHASAR.CFG. 17.2 Setup Check Printing Check printing is actually done while entering transactions. However, since check printing only occurs if you have specified a check format you will need to use this function to tell PHASAR that you want to print checks and how to format them. Load a sample check (or ordinary printer paper if you just want to play) and ask for a test pattern. (Make sure there is some way for you to reliably load checks in the same starting position each time). After you specify which account to setup the check printing for, you're given the opportunity to carry over 17-4 the format from another account as a starting point. This may be a handy way to get started after you have set up check printing for one account already. To print a test pattern place the cursor beside the "Alignment Pattern" prompt and strike the . Using this test pattern, determine which line and column you want each of the fields to be printed in, and enter those numbers into the appropriate places on the screen. If the row and column for an item are both zero, the item will not be printed. This is the way of suppressing an item such as the check number if your checks already have the check number filled in. When you're through entering all of the format information, you can print a test check by placing the cursor beside the "Test Check" prompt and striking the . The number of lines-per-check entry probably needs a little explanation. If your checks come in a continuous stream, the printer can feed each new one into the proper starting position for printing the next check. However, to do this you'll need to tell the computer how many lines long each check is. This is the number of lines from the top of one check to the top of the next one - not the number of lines from the last line printed to the next check's first line. The test pattern printout will help you to determine this parameter. NOTE: If the "Lines-per-check" field is zero there will be no checks printed for this account. Here are a couple of sources of blank checks. NEBS Computer Forms 500 Main Street Groton, MA 01471-0005 1-800-225-9550 17-5 RapidForms Interstate Industrial Park 501 Benigno Boulevard Bellmawr, NJ 08031-9886 1-800-257-8354 17.3 New Year Carry Over PHASAR is designed to keep one year of data in the PHASAR.REG file. This function provides a method to smooth the transition from one year to the next. BE CAREFUL USING IT OR YOU COULD PERMANENTLY LOSE VALUABLE DATA. Let's describe what the function does and then we'll discuss how to utilize it. Let's say your statement for the month of December comes on the tenth of January (of the next year). Even when the statement arrives it probably will not include all of the transactions which were recorded in December. It's not practical to wait until sometime in February before you start recording transactions for the new year. If you start recording January's (of the new year) transactions on last year's disk you'll have to specify the year whenever you enter a transaction's date. This is because PHASAR assumes the year is the same as that of the data file unless you over-ride the default. The approach that PHASAR takes is to carry over all unconfirmed transactions for January without having to type in the year. When you get December's statement you can do a normal confirmation on the NEW YEAR's data without missing a beat since all of the unconfirmed transactions from the old year will be on the new data disk. If you find that you must edit a transaction, or enter one that is missing, don't forget to run PHASAR on the previous year's data disk and make the changes there also if you want that data to be perfectly correct. 17-6 WARNING: DO NOT change data disks on the program without exiting the program and then restarting with the new data disk. There is a limit of 500 transactions which can be carried over at the year's end. To determine the total number of unconfirmed transactions you have, look at the account summary in the "Reports" module. It is a good idea to confirm all transactions possible before doing the carry over to minimize the space "wasted" on the new year's disk storing transactions from the previous year. When you're read to do the carry over, make a copy of the PHASAR.REG file and store the original in a safe place. Take the new one (the copy) and label it with the new year. Run the program with the new disk loaded and select the "Setup" module and then select the "New Year Carry Over" function from the sub menu. The only question which you will need to answer is whether you want to carry over the standard transactions that you have defined. Generally the answer will be yes; however, if they have changed substantially, and you have a lot of unused ones hanging around, this is a good chance to start fresh and also to save some disk space. When the function has completed you can go on about your work with no more thought given to the fact that you ar now working in a new year. On some types of computers the PHASAR.REG file will not be any smaller after the carry-over operation, even though many of the transactions were flushed. This is normal. Even though the file doesn't give up any of the space which it had previously claimed, it has cleaned the space of any confirmed transactions for the previous year and will reuse, that space. 17-7 17.4 Create New Register File You'll only use this function once (if at all). It's purpose is to create the bare framework for a financial record keeping system. The use of this function is described in the reference manual chapter "SETTING UP YOUR OWN PHASAR SYSTEM". 17-8 Chapter 18 TAX CALCULATION DETAILS 18.1 Special Functions (@) (page missing) 18-1 18.2. Rounding (page missing) 18-2 18.3 Operator Precedence The usual convention in computing mathematical expressions is followed by PHTAX. All multiplication and division are performed before addition and subtraction. If several operations of the same level (e.g. multiplication and division or several multiplications) are performed in a single expression the left-most operation is performed first. The highest precedence of all goes to expressions which are enclosed in parentheses. 18.4 Cell Dependencies There are links between some cells of a form or even between cells of different forms. Each cell keeps a list of the cells which directly reference it. You may view this list by opening a cell-definition window for the parent cell and asking for the list via the help/options. If a cell is referenced before it is created, and then created it will not automatically know that there is a reference to it. This can be fixed by doing a "validate tax file" operation. When you change the value of a cell, all of its dependents (i.e. cells referencing it), and all of the dependents of the first-level dependents etc., are automatically marked as candidates for re-calculation. Until you do a re-calculation they will display "???" for their values to indicate the need for a re-calculation. The danger in not having cell dependencies up to date is the possibility that a parent will change and the dependent (child) cell won't know it has a bad (out of date) value. However, when the initial calculation is done when you first read in the tax file all cells will have correct values even if the cell dependencies are not complete. Cells are also marked as to whether they depend on category amounts. If a cell is so marked and you edit the budget, all such cells are marked for re-calculation 18-3 - even if the category on which it depends was not changed. 18.5 Memory Usage Each cell requires about 115 bytes of memory, no matter what type of cell or type its contents are. All cells must be able to fit into memory. The memory to hold the cells is allocated when the tax file is read in. If there is insufficient memory the program will tell you and quit. When you're defining additional cells, memory is allocated in blocks large enough to hold 25 cells. If there is insufficient memory you will be informed and not allowed to define additional cells. If memory availability becomes a problem you may be able to overcome the problem easily by temporarily unloading some other program or desk accessory. PHTAX will use all of the memory which it can allocate and needs. Therefore, the maximum number of cells allowed will depend on how much memory you have available on your computer. PHTAX will use all of the memory which it can allocate and needs. Therefore the maximum number of cells allowed will depend on how much memory you have available on your computer. The Atari-ST is an exception to this. 18.6 Performance Considerations The PHASAR.TAX tutorial file contains quite a few text cells which you won't need if your only interest is to calculate your tax standing and not to bother with the exact layout of a 1040 Form. You can delete these unused cells and considerable speed up the initial file loading time. However, deleting unused cells will not significantly affect the recalculate time required. To delete a cell, "View/Edit" the form, change edit mode 18-4 to cell insert/delete, place the cursor within the cell to be deleted and strike . When you delete a cell or line of a form or entire form, the file size will not change. However, if you later define new cells, lines or forms the unused portion of the tax file will be used before it is expanded. Because of this it is a good idea to delete unused items before creating new ones. There is one case where the file will be extended before unused portions are re-used. Sometimes there is a need for several contiguous records in a file. These will be added to the end of the file. 18.7 Editing Forms When editing a form it is useful to have a concept of the distinction between the text part of the form and the cells which the form contains. You can think of the form text as a rendition of a pre-printed form with no information specific to your situation. The cells allow you to "fill in" information which is customized to your situation. The main thing to keep in mind is that wherever there is a cell, the underlying form text is hidden. When you're editing forms (insert/delete edit mode) the cells are shown in reverse video but are otherwise transparent to enable you to see clearly where there is an overlap of form text and cell data. If you're in one of the insert/delete edit modes (either character, cell or line) you have the ability to insert, delete or move cells. The insert and delete options are available using either the function keys (see menu at bottom of screen) or the and keys if you're in the Cell insert/delete edit mode. To move or edit a cell, place the cursor within the cell and ask for help/options. If you're in "browse mode" you can edit a cell by putting the cursor on the cell and striking . 18-5 Deleting or inserting characters of the form text will not affect the placement of any cells. Deleting lines will delete any cells which are contained on the deleted line. Before a line containing cells is deleted, you will be warned and offered a chance to cancel the operation. 18.8 Printing Forms PHTAX is not primarily intended to print onto pre-printed forms. Its strong point is the ability to rapidly project or calculate your tax standing by referencing the transaction and budget data generated by PHASAR. However, it is possible to print the calculation results onto a pre-printed form. The difficulty is aligning all of the cells on the blanks of the pre-printed form. Before trying to align the cells, find a way to place a form into your printer in an exactly reproducible place. Up and down alignment can be achieved using blank lines in the PHTAX form. Overall left/right alignment can be achieved by varying the number of columns to indent the printout. This can be adjusted in the user preferences function of PHASAR or PHTAX. To gain access to this parameter set the printer type to "custom". Since the number of columns to indent cannot be negative in the user preferences, you'll want to make sure you don't create a form with all of the cells too far to the right. If they are too far to the left, you will be able to move everything right using the indent parameter. 18-6 Appendix A DO's and DO NOT's Do make a backup copy of your data files occasionally. We recommend that you make a copy of your register file (PHASAR.REG) about twice per month. Using a name for the backup copy which is different from the current working copy will help prevent you from inadvertently mixing them up. Do keep the tutorial data disk around for experimenting. This is a way to play with some feature of PHASAR without taking a chance on messing up your read data. Do use the "Validate Register File" function in the "Project" module occasionally; especially if you suspect that something is wrong with category amounts or account summaries. Do print a list of all transactions for each month at the end of that month as an ultimate backup in case you should lose or destroy your data disk and all backups. (This, of course, assumes you have a printer). A-1 A.2 DO NOT's Do NOT switch diskettes on PHASAR without being prompted to do so. This is particularly tempting on one-drive systems. You may get away with it most of the time but occasionally you will get bitten - badly. Do NOT switch one year's data disk with another year's data disk without restarting the program. This can cause some of the data which is read in during program initialization to be written out to the wrong diskette, thus overwriting some of its data. A-2 Appendix B FILES: NAMES AND FUNCTIONS PHASAR?.HLP - Help files for the various PHASAR modules. The "?" is replaced with a number which corresponds to the associated PHASAR module. These files could be removed after the user is familiar with PHASAR and needs more room on the disk. PHASAR.CFG - Data file containing information pertaining to user's preferences and computer hardware. PHASAR: - The main program module of the PHASAR program. PHTAX: - The program module for doing a tax computation. PHASAR.NAM - Data file containing names and addresses. PHASAR.OCC - Data file containing the description and dates of special occasions. If the automatic-event-reminder function is enabled, this file must be available when PHASAR is run. PHASAR.REG - Contains the transactions, account summaries and category summaries. PHASAR.TAX - File which contains the user's Tax calculation setup. B-1 Index 2-3 2-3 2-3 2-3 @expense 18-1 @if 18-2 @income 10-5, 18-1 @lookup() 18-2 A Account balance 3-7 cash 3-18 check numbers 12-2 confirming 5-1 create 8-1 defining 8-1 definition 1-2 deleting 8-2 examples 1-2 negative balance 3-18 renaming 8-2 savings 7-7 search limits 4-1, 13-1 setup 8-1, 11-1 warning 11-2 summaries 6-1 file B-1 accounts credit card 3-18 deductions 3-28 grouping 8-3 listing contiguous 4-1 number of 1-5 re-ordering 8-3 transfers between 3-15 actual category amounts 10-3 actual vs. budget (tax data) 10-6 addition 3-23 addresses and names 9-1 editing 9-3 file B-1 analyze finances 16-1 anniversaries 9-1 arithmetic 3-23 assets 6-6 description 6-6 edit 6-6 interest gains 7-8 net worth 15-2 Atari 1-1 automatic reminder B-1 B backspace 2-2 backup character 2-2 prompt 2-3 backup copy 8-5, A-1 balance account 3-7, 5-1 cash account 3-20 confirmed 6-2 changing 8-2 current 6-2 loan 7-5 benefits 1-4 bills 3-9 birthdays 9-1 block-oriented commands 6-8 browse mode 10-10 budget amounts 10-3 cash category 16-1 editing 7-1 editing (tax program) 10-6 entering 7-1 plotting 7-2 summary 7-1 viewing 6-3 warning 11-2 C calculator 3-23 exit 3-23 F2 2-2 calendar of events: see special occasions 9-3 capabilities 1-4 case lower/upper 2-4 cash account 1-5, 3-18 balance 3-20 transaction example 3-18 categories 1-5, 3-18, 6-3, 12-3 budgeting 16-1 net 3-18 total 3-18 transaction 3-18 cash flow cumulative 6-4 hidden from 6-4 categories (see also category) 3-2 contiguous 16-2 creating 3-14, 8-3 grouping 8-3 listing contiguous 4-1 multiple (per transaction) 3-21 plot 7-2 re-ordering 8-3 sorting/unsorting 6-5 category (see also categories) 3-2 define 8-3 definition 1-3 expense examples 1-3 number of 1-5 force unique 17-1 full summary 6-3 income 6-3 examples 1-3 number of 1-5 list (income) 3-4 miscellaneous 3-22 plot 16-2 search 13-1 setup 8-3 split transaction 3-21 summaries actual amounts 6-3 tax definition considerations 8-3 transactions search limit 18-1 unique 3-6, 3-8 category (cash) 3-18 budgeting 16-1 category names entering 1-4 imbedded operators 18-1 renaming (tax) 10-19 setup 11-3 taxes 10-19 tax references 10-5 category summaries 6-3, 16-2 file B-1 printing style 15-1 cell content 10-7 delete 18-5 dependencies 18-3 duplication 10-14 editing 10-7 edit mode 10-10 memory usage 18-4 movement of 10-12 cell-definition window 10-12 cell name 10-7 identical 10-13 list 10-7 cell reference 10-8 list 18-3 cell type 10-11 check mark 10-11 dollar amount 10-12 number 10-11 text 10-11 yes/no 10-12 change tax file 10-18 character edit mode 10-10 charge cards setup 11-1 check bank (sources) 17-5 number 3-11, 12-2 clearing 3-12 printing 12-2, 17-4 format 17-4 lines-per-check 17-5 check mark (tax type) 10-11 choices menus crib sheet 1-1 clear net/worth statement 6-9 clone tax cell 10-14 tax form 10-18 commands block-oriented 6-8 comments 3-12 standard transactions 3-29 Commodore 1-1 common transactions 3-25 comparison loans 7-6 configuration file 17-4 changing 5-3 default string 5-2 string 14-1 confirmed balance 11-3 changing 8-2 confirm transactions 4-4, 5-1, 5-3 date of latest 6-2 discrepancy options 5-4 multiple/split 3-23 unconfirming 14-1 copying diskettes 2-4 screen 17-2 credit 12-1 summary 4-3 credit cards negative balances 3-18 crib sheet 1-1 ctrl-L 3-4 cumulative cash flow 6-4 cursor movement 4-4 custom printer type 18-6 D data disk do NOT's A-2 tutorial A-1 data entry 1-3 errors 1-4 data files 2-4 two diskettes 2-5 date computer 2-5 default 3-3 format 3-4 search 13-2 debits summary 4-3 unconfirmed # of 6-2 amount of 6-2 deductions account 3-28 federal tax 3-30 retirement 3-31 social security 3-31 state tax 3-31 default account 3-2 answer 3-1, 2-4 date 3-3 delete account 8-2 transactions 13-3 dependencies tax cell 18-3 deposits 3-4 unconfirmed # of 6-2 amount of 6-2 directory 9-2 disk drive requirements 1-2 set-up 8-1 switching (do NOT) A-2 division 3-23 do's A-1 duplicate tax cell 10-14 E edit/view transactions 13-1 editing budget 7-1, 10-6 cells 10-7 tax form 10-9, 18-5 transactions 4-4 edit mode character 2-4 crib sheet 1-1 end 2-3 not allowed 3-12 end-of-year 1-5, 17-6 limit 17-7 enter 2-2 entering transactions amount 3-6 check number 3-11 comment 3-12 credits 12-1 date 3-3 deposits 3-4 expense category 3-10 expenses 3-9 income 3-2 income categories 3-8 income category 3-4 payee 3-10 refunds 12-1 which account 3-2 entry styles 3-5 erasing entry 2-2 transactions 13-3 error messages 2-3 esc 2-3 not allowed 3-12 estimating interest 7-5 events; see special occasions 9-3, B-1 examine transactions 4-1 exit 2-3 not allowed 3-12 verify program 17-1 expense 1-3 category 3-10 cash....(total cash) 3-18 create 3-14 defining new 8-3 list 3-10, 10-7 number of 1-5 recording transactions 3-9 sorted by amount 6-5 split transaction 3-21 summary 6-4 F F1 - Help 2-2 F10 - quit 2-3 F2 - Calculator 2-2 federal tax deduction 3-30 file functions B-1 locations 17-2 names B-1 files data 2-4 help 2-4 register data 2-4 setup 2-4 financial analysis 7-1, 16-1 assets 6-6 liabilities 6-6 loan 7-4 net worth 6-6 savings 7-4 financial model 1-2 footnote tax line 10-16 form 1040 10-4 names list 10-7 G graphs 7-3 H help 2-2 F1 2-2 mouse button 2-2 on-line 2-2 sub-menu 2-2 help files 2-4, B-1 hidden tax line 10-16 I IBM 1-1 imbedded operators 18-1 income 1-3 category create 3-14 defining new 8-3 list 3-4, 10-7 number of 1-5 recall 3-4 recording transactions 3-2 sorted by amount 6-5 split transaction 3-21 summary 6-3, 6-4 indenting printout 18-6 insert lines tax edit mode 10-9 installation 2-4 interchanging accounts and categories 8-3 interest estimating 7-5, 16-3 gains 7-8 L liabilities 6-8 net worth 15-2 limitations 1-4 line edit mode 10-10 listing (accounts/categories) contiguous 4-1 list management 9-1 names and addresses 9-1 loan 7-4 # of payments per year 7-7 analysis 16-2 balance 7-5 comparison 7-6, 16-4 delete 16-3 entering definition 7-6 example 7-6 interest 7-7, 16-3 number of 7-4 original date 7-6 original principal 7-6 screen layout 7-5 specification 7-5 term 7-7, 16-3 titles 7-6 loan calculation 7-4, 16-2 results 7-5 lower case 2-4 M main program file B-1 maintenance 8-1 math 3-23 precedence 18-2 memory requirements 1-2 tax cells 18-4 usage 18-4 menu driven 1-2 messages error/warning 2-3 miscellaneous category 1-5, 3-22 modify setup 8-1 monthly total 6-4 mortgage 7-5 mouse buttons 2-3 left button 2-2 right button 2-2 multiple categories (per transaction) 3-21 multiple transactions confirming 3-23 editing 4-4 warning 3-24, 3-26 multiplication 3-23 N names renaming (tax) 10-19 names (address list) adding 9-2 editing 9-3 format 9-2 search 9-1 names and addresses 9-1 file B-1 naming categories 1-4 negative balances 3-24 credit cards 3-18 net cash 3-18 flow 6-3 net worth 6-6, 15-1 account balance 6-7 amount/account 6-7 assets 6-6 maximum 6-8 clear statement 6-9 liabilities 6-9 maximum 6-8 negative balances 6-8 statement title 6-6 new page tax line 10-16 new transactions 3-2 recording expenses 3-9 recording income 3-2 new year carry over 17-6 limit 17-7 no cash flow 6-4 number cell (tax type) 10-11 O old transactions confirming 11-3 definition 11-3 entering 11-3 operator precedence 18-3 overdrawing 3-24 overview 1-1 P pages 3-25 creating 3-27 payee 3-10 search 13-2 personal preferences 2-5 PHASAR B-1 PHASAR.CFG B-1 set user preferences 17-4 PHASAR.NAM B-1 PHASAR.OCC B-1 PHASAR.REG 10-2, B-1 backup A-1 year-end carry-over 17-7 PHASAR.TAX 10-2, B-1 PHASAR?.HLP B-1 philosophy 1-3 phone list 9-2 editing 9-3 PHTAX B-1 plot categories 7-2 contiguous 16-2 maximum 7-4 step thru 7-3 income vs. expenses 7-4 trend vs. budget 7-2 sums 16-2 pop-up help menu 3-4 pre-printed tax forms 10-15 precedence of operators 18-3 preferences 2-5 setting 17-1 taxes 10-17 print account summaries 6-3 category summary 6-3, 15-1 checks 12-2, 17-4 destination 17-3 net worth statement 6-6 recommendation A-1 tax forms 10-15, 18-6 tax line 10-16 telephone #'s 9-2 unconfirmed transactions 13-1 vs.view 6-1 printer type 15-1, 17-3 custom 17-3, 18-6 printout indenting 18-6 prompt 2-4 protected mode 10-10 Q quick-start guide 1-1 quit 2-3 not allowed 3-12 R range operator 13-1 re-calculate tax 18-3 re-ordering accounts and categories 8-3 recalculate tax cells 10-6 recommendations A-1 record organizing (setup) 11-1 referencing category names 10-5 refunds 12-1 register file 2-5 creating new 11-4 validate 8-4 warning 8-4 renaming account 8-2 category (tax) 10-19 reports 6-1 requirements 1-1 retirement deduction 3-31 return 2-2 rounding (taxes) 18-2 running balance 13-3 S savings (see also loans) 7-4 analysis 7-7, 16-2 calculation 7-4, 16-3 comparing 16-4 interest 16-4 this year 7-8 total 7-8 schedule C 10-8 screen copy 17-2 search names (address list) 9-1 search transactions 4-1, 13-1 limits 4-1 maximum 13-2 on payee 13-2 period 4-2 printed 4-2 total pages of 4-4 totals 13-2 setup 2-5, 17-1 category 8-3 files 2-4 register 11-4 modifying 8-1 organizing records 11-1 personal system 11-1 single standard transactions 17-2 social security deductions 3-31 software ethics C-1 sorting 5-3 categories 6-5 tax table 10-17 special functions list 10-7 special keys 2-1 special occasions 9-3 adding 9-4 automatic B-1 editing 9-4 format 9-4 maximum 9-3 sorting 9-4 split categories 3-21, 12-3 split transactions 1-5 confirming 3-23 editing 4-4 warning 3-24, 3-26 standard transactions 3-25 comments 3-29 creating pages 3-27 creating pages 3-27 deleting lines 3-27 options 3-26 pages 3-25 singles 17-2 statement 5-1 confirming 14-1 state tax deductions 3-31 subtraction 3-23 summaries 6-1 (see also summary) 6-1 account 6-1 category 6-3 cash.... 6-3 expense 6-3 net cash 6-3 summary (see also summaries) 6-1 budget 7-1 credits/debits/transfers 4-3 cumulative total 6-4 expense 6-4 full category 6-3 income 6-3, 6-4 monthly total 6-4 system choices 2-5 setup (see setup) 11-1 T Tab key 2-3 taxes 10-10 tables (tax) 10-17 look up 18-2 tax 10-1 calculation 18-1 deductions 3-30 diskette setup 10-3 interest this year 7-7 performance 18-4 program file B-1 referencing category names 10-5 renaming categories 10-19 special functions 18-1 tax bracket 10-17 tax category definition 8-3 names 10-19 tax cell definition window 10-12 duplication 10-14 editing 10-7 identical names 10-13 memory usage 18-4 movement of 10-12 recalculate 10-6 referencing 10-8 type (see cell type) 10-11 tax file B-1 access 10-2 changing 10-18 validating 10-15 tax form 10-2 category names 10-5 comparisons 10-18 copying 10-18 creating 10-18 edit 10-9, 18-5 errors frequently made 10-19 footnote 10-16 hidden lines 10-16 new page 10-16 pre-printed 10-15 print 10-15, 18-6 schedule C 10-8 view/edit 10-4 tax form 1040 10-4 summary 10-4 tax projection 10-3 actual/budgeted data 10-3 interest 7-5 tax table 10-17 list 10-7 look up 18-2 sort 10-17 warning 10-17 telephone #'s editing 9-3 names and addresses 9-1 print directory 9-2 template 9-2 total cash 3-18 transactions cash 3-18 common 1-5 number of 1-5 common/standard 3-25 editing 4-4 examine/edit 4-1 file B-1 maximum (month) 1-5 multiple/split 3-21 warning 3-26 old 11-3 recording expenses 3-9 search 13-1 sorting with confirm function 5-3 split 1-5 unconfirmed 14-1 view 4-1 view/edit 13-1 transactions entering 3-1 expenses 3-9 income 3-2 new 3-2 short-cut 3-29 transfers 3-15 transactions unconfirmed # of 6-2 debits 6-2 deposits 6-2 latest 6-2 oldest 6-2 total amount of 6-2 transfer 1-5, 3-15 erroneous 12-3 summary 4-3 tutorial 2-1 U unconfirming transactions 5-3, 14-1 printing 13-1 undo 2-3 unique category 3-6, 17-1 unsorting categories 6-5 upper case 2-4 user preferences taxes 10-17 V validate register file 8-4 recommendation A-1 tax file 10-15 view/edit transactions 4-1 view vs. print 6-1 W warning messages 2-3 multiple/split transactions 3-24 X Xfer Out 3-16 Y year-end carry-over 1-5, 17-6 limit 17-7 year summary 6-3 yes/no (tax type) 10-12 QUICK-START GUIDE for PHASAR on the AMIGA - Make a copy of the master diskette and work from the copy, not the original. - Load the diskette and open it with a double click. - Double click on the PHASAR icon. - (To run under the CLI set the stack to 15,000 before running PHASAR) 1 - When the PHASAR / Marksman Technology, Inc. screen comes up, hold the right mouse button, select "Set User Preferences" under the "Setup" menu item. - You'll see a list of items allowing you to set the program to match your hardware and tastes. Go to any item that intrigues you using cursor keys and strike the key or the right mouse button to see the options. - Save the setup parameters and skip the printer test. In both cases the "default" answer is correct to strike the key to accept the default. - See the "Edit Modes" and "Choices Menu" crib sheet for program conventions. - Play with the program for awhile if you like and then we recommend you work through the tutorial part of the manual before you get serious about setting up a system for your financial data. ------ 1. For experienced users who prefer the CLI interface. - There are places where you'll want to "page" through screens of transactions. The help menus will refer to "PgUp", "PgDn", "Home", and "End" keys. On the Amiga keyboard these are respectively SHIFTED "up arrow", "down arrow", "left arrow" and "right arrow". When these are available options they will be spelled out if you ask for help. - Remember HELP IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE using the or key or the right mouse button. More extensive help can be obtained by choosing the "Help" option under any of the main menu items. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Special Keys Manual Keyboard Meaning ------ -------- ------- Help or F1 Topical help and list options. Tab Backup to previous prompt. Shift-Down Arrow Display next screen. Shift-Up Arrow Display previous screen. Shift-Left Arrow Display first screen. Shift-Right Arrow Display last screen. Alt-Del Insert character etc. CTRL-L List available accounts categories. Esc Quit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Choices Menu When PHASAR is asking for input and you aren't sure what to answer or you want to know what the options are strike or or press the right mouse button. Most often when you do so you will be presented with a "choices menu" which contains a brief help message and a list of options available to you. |--------------CHOICES--------------| | This would be the text of a short | | help message. | |-----------------------------------| | Option 1 | | ==> Choice 2 | | quit | | backup | | none of above | |-----------------------------------| There are several ways to select an option. - Notice that the top options do not have keys listed to their right but one of the letters is highlighted (usually the first one). These options can be selected by striking the appropriate letter. - Options with a key listed to the right can be selected using that key (with or without having asked for help first.) - Any option can be selected by moving the pointer up/down and striking . - If you summon the choices menu using the right mouse button you may continue to hold the button down until the menu appears, move the mouse to make your selection and then release the button to execute your selection. - If you summon the choices menu using the "Help" key or by a click of the right mouse button the menu will appear and stays until you highlight the selection and execute it with a or click of the left mouse button. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edit Modes There are three edit modes in PHASAR. 1. The first style occurs when entering data in response to program prompts. The prompt (and guessed user's response if present) will both be presented in normal (i.e. not reverse) video (and the first letter of the default answer if present) will be highlighted. You may a) Strike to accept the default, b) start typing to delete the program's guess and enter your own answer or c) move the cursor right to go into character-edit mode to modify the guessed answer. 2. The second input style is character-edit mode. It will be clear that you've entered character-edit mode because the data field will turn to reverse video. In this mode you are free to move the cursor left or right within the field, type over characters, and to insert or delete characters. (Note: If insert and delete are options at any point in the program you must choose them before entering this edit mode, since the and keys are used to insert and delete characters after character-edit mode begins). 3. The third style, cell-edit mode, will show up when you are editing transactions, setting user preferences, setting up a bank-statement reconciliation etc. You'll recognize it by the reverse-video cell which you can move around using the cursor keys or a mouse. Similar to the first mode, if you start typing, the previous contents of the cell will disappear and whatever you type will be entered into the current cell. Or if there are only minor changes to the contents of the cell you can enter character-edit mode by striking . The field will remain reverse-video and the first character will be highlighted to indicate you're in character-edit mode (see above). Strike to accept the edited cell or to restore the previous value for the cell. The End.