Clerk: Version 4.0 Clerk is the fruit of frustration. Frustration at wanting to use my Amiga for something besides games. Frustration at the high price and incompatibility of commercial business software for my Amiga. And frustration with myself for not doing anything about it... With this program, I've done something about it and hopefully with the good response I've received, some REAL programmers will take notice and provide us with a wealth of business application programs for our needs. I thank you, the registered user, for your support in this effort. APPLICATION To derive benefit from this program, a general understanding of its design is necessary. Clerk is divided into modules. They are Receivables, Payables, Cash Register and General Ledger. The other modules File Cabinet and Information are not essential to the operation. Most business' send or give bills to their customers, owe bills to their suppliers, and make and receive cash payments. Receivables tracks who owes you money, Payables tracks whom you owe money to, the Cash Register tracks your cash (vs. check) transactions and the General Ledger ties all this information together in a neat package. To effectively use this program, you must simply keep in mind what these various accounting aspects of your business are and enter your transactions in the proper module. Clerk will do the rest. As an example (I'm big on examples), suppose on Monday you receive a bill from supplier abc for $50.00. You also give customer xyz a invoice for $100.00 for services performed. You also receive a C.O.D. delivery for a typewriter ribbon and you give the U.P.S. person $5.31 in cash. This all happens after you got back from the bank where you deposited $500 in your checking account. Your bill from supplier abc for $50.00 is a payable. You would therefore click on the payable module and enter the supplier's name, the date, amount of the bill and the category number this bill falls under. You would then go to receivables and enter the invoice for $100.00 to customer xyz by following the prompts. You would then go to the Cash Register and enter the cash payment you made to U.P.S. for your typewriter ribbon. Finally you would enter the bank deposit you made also in the Cash Drawer. Now that you've entered your days transactions in the proper modules, here's what Clerk will do. If you wish to know how much money you owe your suppliers, go to Payables, click on the Payables report and sure enough there's that fifty bucks you owe supplier abc. Now you're thinking how much do I have coming in to cover my bills, so you go to the receivables module and bring up a receivables report and (you guessed it) there's the $100.00 customer xyz owes you. But let's suppose you'd like to pay supplier abc his fifty bucks today. Simply go to the General Ledger, click on the Current Balance and you see you've got a bank balance of $500.00 (from the $500.00 you deposited on Monday). You write a check to your supplier, enter it in the General Ledger and Clerk stores the check and adjusts your bank balance. Now the phone rings and it's your accountant who wants to know if you've started keeping track of all those little cash payouts you've been making for tax purposes. You smile contentedly, go to the General Ledger and click on the Check register. Sure enough, there's that little $5.31 that you payed U.P.S. listed as a Cash Transaction on your books. All in a days work for the Clerk. Just remember, computers (even Amiga's) are dumb machines. They are good at storing and manipulating information (data). If you don't supply the correct information in the proper place they are useless. Garbage in, garbage out. OVERVIEW The best way to become familiar with Clerk is to use it. It will not lose your records and if you make a mistake, there are revise and delete functions that will allow you to correct it. Because this program was designed not for an accountant but for a hassled business person it deliberately lacks certain sophisticated functions that some commercial software incorporates. As an example, your books SHOULD balance to the penny if you use the program correctly and make no entry errors. However, Clerk will not stop you from continuing or delete entries if things don't balance exactly. Clerk takes a common sense approach that if you faithfully enter your transactions it will not be too difficult for your accountant to figure out what your tax liability is and all those other necessary things at year end. This program is not designed to replace a good accountant. It will make his job easier, thereby saving you money and headaches. I also like to think Clerk is a fun program. Very few business people would put up with running their own show if they didn't enjoy the challenge. With Clerk you will now have a record of where you are, where you've been and how to improve your bottom line. I have tried to make this program as user-friendly and hassle free as my limited programming abilities and free time allow. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Many times I've wondered about the programmers who have written software I've used. In case you wonder about who I am, read further (if not skip this section). I am a small business owner of a restaurant called Elliott's Deli in suburban Chicago. I have been in various business ventures for about eleven years now ever since abandoning the Corporate life of a national account executive for American Can Company. My decision to "do my own thing" was reached after realizing that I was rapidly crossing that fine line between a corporate maverick to a misfit. My compulsion to do it my way also lead to my thinking I could whip out a business program for my Amiga in a few evenings. Well this little effort took about two years and this version is far from being the final product. I am married (at least I still was the last time I came out of my office), have two daughters and am 43 years old. CHART OF ACCOUNTS Probably the biggest misunderstanding people have about business accounting is the use and abuse of the chart of accounts. Computers and accountants like numbers. If my accountant had his way he would probably eliminate people and populate the world with numbers that he could crunch and compile. A compromise between people and accountants has been to use a chart of accounts for business accounting. First, a chart of accounts IS NOT a listing of your business customers. It is like a group of individual buckets with each one holding information about a certain type of business activity. As an example, account 410:RECEIPTS is for all the money your business takes in (your money-in bucket). Account 821:PRINTING would be the account (bucket) to hold all the records for your printing expenses. Clerk allows for 22 accounts in your chart of accounts and what this does for you is to allow you to categorize exactly what comes in and where it goes to the penny. Very handy. OPERATIONS To begin using Clerk, simply begin entering your records in the appropriate modules. PAYABLES: PRINTED REPORTS FUNCTION Prints two types of reports. (V) Vendor reports will print bills owed to a specific supplier. (P) Payables reports will list all bills owed to all suppliers. ENTER BILLS FUNCTIONS This is the area to enter your Payables (bills). You will be asked for eight areas of information. They are Inv. #, Vendor, Date of bill, Amount, Payment, check number, payment date, and category number. Upon receipt of a bill, you would enter Inv.#, Vendor, Date, Amount and Category number. You would click the mouse in the appropriate box and type in the information. When finished, press return and the information is stored. PAY BILLS FUNCTION This is the area to enter your payments to your suppliers. You will first enter the Invoice # of your vendor's bill. Next follow the prompts and enter payment amount, payment date, and your check number that you pay the bill with. Clerk will then acknowledge your payment, change the record in Payables to reflect your payment, post the check to the General Ledger and deduct the amount from your bank balance. SEARCH FILES This for searching your files and finding a particular record. You may search by your vendor's invoice number or by the name of the vendor. DISPLAY RECORDS You may review individual records with this function. It will review forward, in reverse, fast forward and in fast reverse. VENDOR REPORTS Vendor reports will output to your screen a summary of all open invoices from a specific vendor. PAYABLES REPORTS This will output to your screen a summary of all bills owed to all your vendors. DELETE FUNCTION This function will permanently delete a record from your files. As a safeguard, you must know the number (not invoice #) of the record to find and delete. You may go to the display records functions to look up the record number. CREATE FILE FUNCTION This function should only be used at the beginning of your fiscal year AFTER you have made a backup copy of all your files. It will permanently delete all your payable records. Caution... RECEIVABLES: ENTER INVOICE This function is for the entry of customer invoices. You will enter the invoice number, customer name, date, amount and any payment made (such as a down payment). If you wish, you may also have the Invoice generated (printed) at this function. Clerk will store the record. SEARCH You may search the receivable files by customer name or by invoice number. Upon a successful search and retrieval you will be offered the option of revising the record or returning to the receivables menu. Should you choose revise, you may then revise the invoice or delete it. ENTER PAYMENTS Upon receipt of a payment from your customer, you would use this function to record it. Enter the invoice number to retrieve the record and then enter the payment amount. CREATE FILE Use at the beginning of your fiscal year only. Backup files before using since this option will delete all files in the receivables module. RECEIVABLES REPORT This will output to screen all open invoices and all customers. RECEIVABLES AGING This will output to screen the age of all open invoices. REVISE INVOICE Enter the invoice number and you may change the invoice. PRINT STATEMENT Enter the customer name and Clerk will print a customer statement listing open invoices, age and balance due. DELETE INVOICE You must supply the record number of the Invoice to delete. This can be found by using the search function. Once a invoice is deleted it cannot be restored. GENERAL LEDGER: CREATE FILE Use at the beginning of your fiscal year ONLY. (Unless you wish to change your bank balance). This option will create a new GL file and erase all previous entries. NOTE: if you need to change or correct your current bank balance, click the box to continue after the first warning message and enter your correct balance at the "Your beginning balance ?" prompt. At the next requester DO NOT CONTINUE FURTHER, unless you really wish to create a new file. REVISE CHART OF ACCOUNTS This is the area to change your account names. If for instance you don't need a category for RENT, but you could use a category for LEASE PAYMENTS, you could change the name with this function. Be sure to follow the instructions for the account format; i.e, Number (3 digits), Colon: Account Name. NOTE: you cannot change category 410:RECEIPTS as this would do terrible things to my program. It is also inadvisable to change categories 750 or 810 although you may do so at you own peril. SEARCH You may search by Description or Check number. A description search will provide ALL records with that description. DISPLAY RECORDS This will display individual records. CURRENT BALANCE You may want to use this before you start passing out checks. This will display your current bank balance. CHECK REGISTER The check register will display all check and cash transactions either by month, YTD, or category number. You may also reconcile your bank statement with this function. REVISE RECORD This function is to change General Ledger entries. Clerk will locate records to change either by check number or by record number. To obtain the record number, use the display records function. ENTER TRANSACTIONS All checks written should be entered here. Follow the prompts and enter your data. The chart of accounts is listed for your convenience. CHART OF ACCOUNTS This function provides a quick list of your chart of accounts. If you wish to print your chart of accounts, this is the place. SALES ANALYSIS Provides a monthly and/or daily sales tally. The monthly analysis displays a graph of each month's sales, a percentage of gross sales by month and an average daily sales figure. NOTE: the daily sales figure is merely a rough average. The monthly sales to date is divided by the number of elapsed days in the month. If you do business five days per week and one week has elapsed in the month, your five days of sales would be divided by seven. The daily sales report will give you an exact recap of your daily sales. INCOME STATEMENT This function is a scorecard for your business activity. Clerk will first compute your sales for the requested period and then itemize by category (in dollars & percentages) your period expenditures. Should you choose, you may next view a breakdown of each transaction by category. To do this, click the mouse on the category name at the prompt. You may next project different figures if you desire. This could be helpful to judge what purchasing (or not purchasing) something could have on your bottom line. The next screen will present you with a tabulation of your debts versus credits. You may output the screen to your printer. CLOSE OUT MONTH/YR These functions are to speed up the program (especially for those of you without hardrives). As indicated they should only be performed at month end and year end. The month end close writes your monthly income statement to a sequential file. Thereafter should you wish to view or print a previous statement, Clerk will pull the file and display and/or print it. Without this feature, Clerk would need to search and compile every receivable, cash and General Ledger record to output a report... very time consuming as your records grow. The year end close deletes all your GL records, cash records and receivables records to prepare you for a new fiscal year. Obviously you should back up all records before performing this function. CASH REGISTER This module is for CASH transactions. CASH DRAWER This is also the place to store your daily CASH sales and deposits. Sales may take the form of credit sales (receivables) or cash sales, this function is for cash sales only, i.e. dollars, checks, money orders,credit cards, etc. If you issue an invoice to a customer and expect payment at a later date, this is a receivable and should be entered in receivables, not here. If you receive immediate payment it should be entered here in the cash drawer. All bank deposits should be entered here also. For a bank deposit you would enter the date, the category number (always 410 for a deposit), and the amount of your deposit under NET DEPOSIT. Your daily CASH sales would also be entered here in a separate record with the date and in the GROSS SALES box. To add clarity to what happens in this module, visualize what Clerk is doing to compile your General Ledger figures. When compiling your sales figures Clerk reads all your outstanding receivables in the receivables module. Next Clerk reads all your gross sales figures in the cash drawer. Receivables plus gross cash sales=total sales. Therefore it is important that you enter cash sales in the cash drawer and receivables in the receivables module. If you make a cash payout (anything EXCEPT a check) it also belongs here. For a cash payment, include all information except gross sales and net deposit which would not be applicable to a cash payment. REVISE RECORD This function is used to change a cash record. CREATE FILE This function is used to create a new file. MISC. You will notice many functions have little orange boxes. These are "click me to continue" boxes. Click inside the box and the program will continue. In the file cabinet module you will note three orange boxes. The right box will turn the page forward, the middle box reverse and the left box will return you to the menu. The file cabinet is mainly for telephone numbers and will hold a maximum of 300 records. The information module will tell you interesting things about memory and number of records stored as well as how to reach me. Regarding memory, I have 3Megs of memory but have used the program without problem on a 1meg machine. If screens begin to dissolve and other weird things happen you may have a memory problem that requires you to discontinue background programs and other memory drains. When the program boots it automatically allocates memory in relation to the number of records you have. What the maximum number of records Clerk can handle on a 1Meg machine are, I do not know. However, be aware that as your records increase, so do your memory requirements. I have heard from user feedback that different printers can sometimes do some weird things. I use a Epson printer without problem. If you encounter printer problems with non-Epson printers I can only tell you good luck, I never could understand how those things work. I have not made reference to the information module in my docs because I feel they are pretty much self explanitory. I should add however, that the Preferences section does not yet contain a function to change the screen colors. I intentionally left this out because (1) I like the colors the way they are and I don't want some Bozo in Peoria showing my program off with red and pink screens. (2) It's my program and I'm very vain about how it looks...You can choose to eliminate the thoughts for the day (even though I think they're cute)and to use or not use password protection. To the very best of my knowledge this version of Clerk is bug free. I also thought the Chicago Bears would win this year's Super Bowl. Should you find a bug please advise. I can't make bug fixes if I don't know they exist. As a final note, I didn't write Clerk to get rich from $25 user fees and if I'm sometimes slow in fixing a bug or if I simply don't have time to implement a suggestion you make, please be understanding that I have to make a living too. I do return phone calls (collect) and I do answer my mail. And finally remember "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." Sanford