§lm9 §rm73 §jf §fs4:hs4:hd"ETB","USER MANUAL","ETB" §ft"Version 1.00","Last Change: 1 May 1995","#" ABSTRACT ======== This distribution prepares an extended trial balance, and nominal ledger, from a list of business or personal financial transactions. It does not prepare a draft set of accounts, but it is easy to prepare them from the extended trial balance. *** YOUR ATTENTION IS DRAWN TO THE FILE CALLED 'LICENSE'. YOU SHOULD READ IT IMMEDIATELY, AS IT SETS OUT THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLICABLE TO USING, MODIFYING, AND DISSEMINATING THIS DISTRIBUTION. INTRODUCTION ============ PROJECT NAME : ETB VERSION : 1.00 START DATE : 12 February 1995 FINISH DATE : 1 May 1995 AUTHOR : Mark Carter ADDRESS : Hill of Luncarty, Turriff, Aberdeenshire, AB53 7NU, SCOTLAND. E-MAIL : mca@gcal.ac.uk This distribution is SHAREWARE. If you like it, and use it regularly, then please send £5.00 to the address above. ETB'S CAPABILITIES ================== ETB makes a competent job of preparing an extended trial balance and nominal ledger. It does not boast a scrumptious GUI (Graphical User Interface), and all activities must be done through the CLI and a text editor. If a large number of transaction files are needed to make up a set of accounts, then keeping track of things can be a bit problematical. Maybe this will improve with later releases of etb - it depends on whether I feel a personal need to include it, or whether I get encouragement from other users. Here are some of the things that etb lacks: + a GUI + a way of managing complex projects easily + tailoring to certain control accounts Of all the points, I think the second one is the most important. It would be nice to have a way of collating all the files together to form a single project. A GUI would be nice, and is perhaps next on my list of things to do. As to the third point - one can easily construct control accounts within the ledger file. So support for control accounts is perfectly feasible. What I am really referring to, though, are the 'fancy bits' that you would get with, say, a Debtors Control Account: aged debtor analysis, contra-ing of payments with invoices. On the plus side, I think that etb is highly functional. I like it better than one other PD accounting program that I tried - it had a nice GUI, but at the end of the day, it's only use was to keep a running total of the balance of one account. Well, you can do that in your cheque book, anyway! My program does a bit more number-crunching than that - so I hope people will find it more useful. §ep9 SYNOPSIS ======== etb [?|info] or etb [-d] [-n] [-l ledgerfile] Straight-forward keyboard entry of the transactions at the CLI is not recommended. It is better to use redirection; as in the following example: etb <transactionfile >outputfile -n §wo+ §ep5 OPTIONS ======= ?, info : print a short description of the etb program §wo- -d : generate detailed processing information. This is a useful debugging option for when things don't go so well. -n : generate a nominal ledger as well as an extended trial balance. The default situation is to print only an extended trial balance. -l ledgerfile : read the ledger file description from ledgerfile. The default situation is to read in a file called "ledger.dat", which must be in the current working directory. A ledger description file is necessary, even if you only want to generate an extended trial balance. The USER directory contains a default ledger format file, which you are free to adapt for your own purposes. §ep5 INPUTS ====== LEDGERFILE - this describes the nominal ledger - it is an ASCII file containing ledger lines. Each ledger line is separated by the RETURN key, and consists of two fields : ABBREV, and HEADING. The fields must be separated either by the TAB key, or the RETURN key. ABBREV can be at most 5 characters long. HEADING can be at most 41 characters long. ABBREV stands for abbreviation - it is a code to identify each nominal ledger account. HEADING is the long-form description of the account. TRANSACTION RECORD - (normally a file) - a list of financial transactionlines. Each transaction line is separated by RETURN, and consists of 3 fields, in the following order: ABBREV - the ledger code (see above) - it may contain at most 5 characters DESCRIPTION - a useful description of the transaction (e.g. date, cheque number, payee, etc.) - at most 47 characters may be used AMOUNT - an integer number. It corresponds to the amount of the transaction. Enter the amount in pennies (or cents, if you like). A debit entry is entered as a positive number. A credit entry is entered as a negative number. So, a credit entry of £50.00 should be entered as -5000 . Do not attempt to enter it in any other format. Each field should be separated by a TAB. DESCRIPTION =========== etb allocates the transaction lines contained in the transactionrecord to the nominal ledger accounts described in the ledgerfile. etb tries to match the ABBREV coNtained in each transaction line with an ABBREV of a ledgerline. If a match cannot be made, the transaction line is allocated to a special account called 'UNALLOCATED ITEMS'. etb then summarises the account totals (this is what an extended trial balance is). Details of account entries are printed (the nominal ledger) if the '-n' option is given. §wo+ §ep12 EXAMPLE ======= Suppose 'small.ledger' is a ledger description file containing the following items: Bank Bank Account 1 Cash Cash Wine Wine expenses GIRL Women song Song §wo- §wo+ §ep9 Suppose 'trans.file' is a transaction file containing the following items: Cash Jan95 total cash expenses -7000 Cash Jan95 refund from woman (poor quality) 500 GIRL 10.1.95 Lovely Lucinda 1500 Wine 11.1.95 expensive booze-up 2000 GIRL 11.1.95 Invoice 00251 2650 Song 12.1.95 wandering minstrel company 350 §wo- §wo+ §ep16 Typing the command: etb