Click the Select (left) mouse button on the 'Apps' icon on the left side of your icon bar, and from there double click Select on the !Help application.
Every icon in Personal Accounts has information on it which can be viewed by running !Help as above and moving the mouse pointer over the icon you need help or information on.
INTRODUCTION & TUTORIAL
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This tutorial has been written to get you going as fast as possible. The first section gives you an insight into what Personal Accounts does. The second section shows you the basics.
PERSONAL ACCOUNTS
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One of the most crucial aspects of personal accounting is to find out, having received and spent your money, how much you have left (or don't have!) in your bank, building society and credit card accounts.
Just as important to many people is to know what you will have left after your standing orders and overdraft or credit limits are taken into account when looked at to a certain point in the future (say, the end of the month).
Another aspect is to know where the money came from and what you have spent it on, also, if you have set budgets, how much you have left to spend on certain categories.
Personal Accounts does exactly this.
You could calculate the above using pencil and paper, or a calculator. You could also work them out using a computer spreadsheet, BUT none of these methods will be as efficient as a dedicated application designed specifically for the purpose.
The concept behind Personal Accounts is very simple: you enter the name of your bank, credit card and other monetary accounts in one window. You enter some analysis headings (such as 'Petrol', 'Mortgage') in another, then you open the entries window and type in your transactions.
As soon as you type in anything, Personal Accounts calculates and updates all the relevant totals and windows automatically.
Therefore if you were to enter a CREDIT CARD payment for PETROL, you would see your credit card account and your petrol heading total instantly updated.
This makes for a very intuitive system.
The big difference with Personal Accounts is that it can handle MORE than one account at a time. So a SINGLE entry can pay off a CREDIT CARD account from your BANK account.
Up to 24 accounts can be managed within a single file and the total memory requirement is minimal: even on a 1mb standard machine you can still fit in roughly 3000 entries (for the average user this represents about six years worth of accounts).
You can of course start off a new file whenever you want to, and Personal Accounts will not only create it for you, but it will also re-calculate all your new opening account balances automatically.
When it comes to analysing your income and expenditure, up to 184 analysis headings can be created.
The reporting and data exporting side is extremely comprehensive. Reports can cover just about anything and over any period. They can be exported direct to most applications in most formats, saved as a file, printed DIRECT as straight text or printed using the RiscOS printer drivers with your choice of fonts.
Data can also be imported in CSV format. Although the demonstration version does not allow you to save your work, it does let you do everything else, so if you have some data in CSV format and are interested in seeing what it looks like in Personal Accounts please contact us for more details.
TUTORIAL
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Assuming you can see the !Personal3 icon in the floppy disc window, double click on it with the Select (left) mouse button.
This will run the program, placing its icon on the right hand side of the icon bar, and open Personal Accounts main menu.
Personal Accounts has options which allow you to alter its set up when loading a file. For instance, you could set it to always start with the Entries and Accounts windows opened for you. It also remembers the window positions, so your ideal working environment can be created.
A wide screen mode is recommended for Personal Accounts, such as 1024x768, click Select on the Monitor icon on the right of your icon bar then click Menu on the Resolution option, click on 1024x768, then click on the Change option.
A wide mode will let you have various different windows open at the same time - which is very useful when trying out Personal Accounts for the first time.
Press the function key F2 or click on the Accounts option in the main menu. This window is where you can not only name your accounts, but also see what their STATEMENT, CURRENT and FORECAST balances are.
The caret will be flashing in the first field. Enter the name of your bank account here.
Press F2 again, or click on the small square button icon to the right under the column headed 'I' (for Info). You can enter more details about this account here, including its opening balance and any overdraft or credit limit you may have.
Pressing the Escape key will close the current window you are looking at and re-open the previous one. By using the function and escape keys you can move around Personal Accounts without the need to use the mouse if you are a little mouseophobic!
You will also find it makes entering your accounts a lot quicker. Almost all the mouse actions are emulated on the keyboard if you prefer using it.
Press F2 again if you accidentally closed the Accounts window and leave it open.
Press F6 or click on the Payments option from the main menu.
These are your payment analysis headings. You are looking at page 1. There are four pages altogether, and each has 23 headings available. You can view the other pages by pressing Page Up or Page Down.
The caret is flashing in heading 'A1' ready for you to enter a payment analysis name.
Enter the name 'Petrol' and leave this window open also.
Now press F1 or click on Entries from the main menu.
You should have the Accounts, Payments and Entries windows open on screen.
Open the directory on the disc called 'TutorFiles' and double click on the file 'Demo1'. Click on 'OK' when the message appears telling you that 'your current file is not saved'.
The caret is flashing under the first heading in the Entries window waiting for you to tell it the Date of the first entry.
The first entry will be the purchase of some petrol with a cheque from your bank account. Dates are entered with a full stop as a separator between each part of the date. You only need enter the last two digits of the year (ie. 94 means 1994).
Enter 5.4.94 and press the Return key. You will see the date has been formatted with leading zeros for you (O5.O4.94).
The next field, headed FROM, tells the system where the money has come from. In this case it is our bank account. The account code is number '1'.
There are FOUR alternative ways of telling Personal Accounts which account the money has come from:
EITHER:
1. Type in a 1 and press Return.
OR:
2. Click the Menu (middle) mouse button with the mouse pointer in the FROM field of THIS entry.
OR:
3. Drag the account you want from the Accounts window and drop it into the FROM field of THIS entry.
OR:
4. Start typing in the actual name of the account you want.
The last method is certainly the easiest, because you don't need to remember the account code. In the 'Demo1' file you are looking at, the account has been named 'Current Account'. So type in 'cur' (the case of the character is not important). These three letters are all it needs to find and insert the correct account.
When found, the caret will have automatically moved on to the next field.
Because we are buying petrol we want to send the money TO the Petrol Heading. Just like the FROM field, we can tell the system which account or heading the money is going TO in the same way, so type in 'pet'.
Ignore the hash (#) character which has been appended to the TO field. This is the reconciliation character which basically means this side of the entry has been checked against a statement and is correct. More on this later.
Again, the caret will have moved on to the next field. This is the Reference field. There is space here for up to 12 characters, though you can only see six at any one time on screen.
Enter the cheque number 0009 here and press Return. The next field is where you tell the system how much the transaction was. Enter 15.9 and press Return. You will see that the total field has also been formatted and now includes the trailing zero (15.90).
The final field is where, if necessary, you can add a description. Reports can be done on all the fields, so as well as pulling out a report of say, your Petrol expenses, you could also narrow the report down further by specifying only those marked 'Escort' in the description field.
Move the caret to the Date field of the second entry. Type in the number 6 and press Return. You will see that Personal Accounts has automatically appended the month and year of the previous entry to your date.
Had it been a different month as well, say June, then you only needed to type in 6.6 and just the previous entries year would have been copied.
The second entry will be another cheque from the same account, but this time for food. So, because it is the same account, you do not need to enter it again in the FROM field, just press Return and the previous entries account will be copied for you.
We haven't filled in a Food heading yet, we will do so later. Enter the character F in the TO field and press Return.
Now press Return again to the 'Ref' field without typing anything into it and you will notice that the next cheque number has been filled in automatically. Personal Accounts keeps track of all your cheque numbers independently for each account. You can of course over-ride this feature whenever you want or need to.
Enter 23 in the Total field and press Return.
You may have noticed that as you typed in the total of each entry, your accounts and payments window total fields also changed. This is the beauty of leaving these windows open as you enter your transactions. You can see what is going on as you type.
If you have made a mistake anywhere, simply place the caret in the field which needs correcting, and if it is connected with any of the balance or total fields of any other windows, they too will be corrected.
Another aspect of this is also about to happen. Press F6 to put the caret in the Payment window and use the Down arrow key to move the caret to the heading 'F1'. Now type in the word Food. As you type you will see the second entries TO field change to show 'Food'.
Double Click on the second file in the 'TutorFiles' directory called 'Demo2'. This is how the file you are working on should have looked.
Let us suppose you now receive some money from some work you have done and you pay it straight into your building society account.
Having loaded the 'Demo2' file you will find the Entries, Accounts and Payments windows open and the caret will be flashing in the date field of the third entry.
Don't enter a date, just press the Return key. The system has now copied the whole of the previous entries date into the date field. Enter the character W into the FROM field (we haven't named the INCOME analysis heading yet). Press Return and enter the number 2 into the TO field.
We might as well name both the Income headings and the building society account, so press the function key F5 or click on Income in the main menu. The income analysis headings have the same look as the payment headings, the only difference is that they record and breakdown your income as opposed to your payments.
Move the caret down to the heading 'W1' (use the Down arrow key or press the 'Ctrl' and Down keys together). Type in 'Work'. Now press F2 and enter 'Building Society' in account number 2.
Press F1 again to place the caret in the Entries window, press Return until the caret is in the Total field and enter 100 as the total received.
If you now look at the accounts window you should see that account 1's CURRENT balance stands at -38.90 and account 2 shows 100. At the bottom of the window the grand total of all the account balances are shown, which gives you a net total of 61.10.
Double click on the third file called 'Demo3' if your figures disagree with this tutorial to see how it should have looked.
The STATEMENT balance shows zero because although the HEADINGS are automatically reconciled, the ACCOUNTS are not and so far we have not received a real statement of account from either the 'Current Account' or the 'Building Society' which will allow us to check off the entries.
Reconciling an account (or in English: checking the banks statement with your own figures) is actually very easy to do and there is a quick method of selecting just one of your accounts and reconciling it independently of the others, but it is beyond the scope of this quick tutorial guide to Personal Accounts.
If you look at the Payment headings you will see that you have spent 15.90 on Petrol and 23.00 on Food and your total payments are 38.90. Have a look at the income headings again (press F5) and you will see a total of 100.
One other entry you might like to try is paying some money from FROM one account direct TO another. Double click on the fourth file 'Demo4'. This has another account set up - a credit card account, and a further entry. This entry is a cheque FROM bank account 1, direct TO the Credit Card account (3).
Also, all the entries from accounts 1 and 2 have been reconciled (using the # character) to give you an idea of what a reconciled entry does to the STATEMENT balances in the Accounts window.
Whilst you have been inputting this information, Personal Accounts has been recording all your key presses. There are two function keys used to 'playback' this input. These are function keys F8 and F9.
F8 'undoes' what you have typed and F9 're-does' it again. Therefore if you accidentally overwrite a total field, DON'T PANIC, simply press F8 until you have undone your mistake. Personal Accounts even keeps track of the windows which were open, so if the 'undo' operation is in another window, it will automatically open it.
Please note though that it will not undo what was already in the demo files, only what you type into them afterwards.
A FEW KEYBOARD SHORT CUTS
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KEY ACTION
Insert Takes you to the first free entry
Home Takes you to the start of the entries
PageUp Moves a page at a time back through the entries
PageDown Moves a page forward through the entries
Ctrl+S Swaps the case of the character at the cursor
Ctrl+V Copies the field above the one you are in (entries)
F4 Places the caret in the 'Find' section of the entries
Ctrl+PageUp Searches backwards
Ctrl+PageDown Searches Forwards
END OF THE TUTORIAL
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There is obviously a lot more to Personal Accounts than you have seen so far, but the tutorial should get you into the swing of things, and if you like what you see please contact us and we will rush a full copy of the program to you.
APRICOTE STUDIOS
2 PURLS BRIDGE FARM
MANEA
CAMBS
PE15 OND
Telephone: O1354 68O432
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To print this tutorial, press the PRINT key at the top right of your keyboard (make sure you have a printer driver loaded on the icon bar and that your printer is turned on).
