Bookkeeping Made Painless Version 2.3 A Complete Single Entry Bookkeeping System Copyright 1990, 1991 by Emerald Coast Software 2707 East 6th place Panama City, Fl. 32401 Phone (904) 785-8946 * * * * * "Let your Bookke be your bookkeeper" * * * * * Bookkeeping Made Painless is a complete, very user friendly, full featured, fully functional, professional quality, easy to use, bookkeeping system which uses the Internal Revenue Service approved single entry method of recording all expense and receipt transactions for any business or profession. Bookkeeping Made Painless is an essential program for any small or medium sized company that dread the task of entering, or has to hire someone to enter, their expenses and receipts into a complicated to use double entry bookkeeping system ( that they really don't need anyway ). Bookkeeping Made Painless is especially useful, at a reasonable price, for any person that itemizes their deductions for IRS and State income taxes. 12/30/90 Corrected bug that would not allow you to save your expense if you added an account name and also if you had added a name that was not on your list of frequent creditors, would not ask if you wished to save the name to your list. ------------------------------------------------------------------ This is not a bug. Note: If you enter an account number that is not on your list of accounts and when asked if you wish to save it to your list, you answer no - the expense WILL NOT be saved to disk. The reason for not saving to disk is that when your expenses are calculated, there will be no account number to assign to the expense and therefore the expense will not be counted. Each expense MUST be assigned to an account number and name! ------------------------------------------------------------------ 12/30/90 Removed the sample 'BOOKKE.CFG' configuration file from the compressed 'BOOKKE13.EXE' archive. This was done so you would be forced to enter a 'data drive' for YOUR computer configuration. Placed the sample expense & receipts files in "SAMPLE.EXE" which is a compressed self-desolving archive. Compiled with Turbo Pascal version 6.0 which resulted in much tighter code and a smaller program size on disk. 01/01/91 When "starting a new account year" you are given a choice of keeping your "List of Accounts", "List of Customers" and "List of Creditors" or starting a new list. You will probably wish to keep your existing lists but now you have a choice. Changed the way the index files (IDX) are used which results in much faster checking and calculations. The size of the index file on disk is now one-half the size of previous index files. more information ---------------- 1. Records of expenses and receipts may be entered in any order as long as records for each month is in cornological order - that is - May must follow April, July must follow June, etc. You cannot enter records for June and then enter records for May, etc.! Example: You may enter a record for June 21, 1991 , a record for June 3,1991, a record for June 25, 1991, then a record for June 1, 1991, etc. This is acceptable. You MAY NOT enter a record for June 21, 1991, a record for June 3, 1991, a record for JULY 8, 1991, then a record for June 25, 1991, etc. ( Note: JULY is out of order ). This is NOT ACCEPTABLE! 2. * * Before attempting to add expenses and receipts you MUST have the data (.DAT) files existing. You may either create them from the Setup Menu or use the sample data files. Either way, they must exist PRIOR TO ADDING EXPENSES, etc. * * 3. Added error routines to detect incorrect dates entered in the expenses and receipts dates fields. 4. Added record number to the on screen listing of receipt details to aid in editing a record if necessary. (Thanks to Henry Baker for the info). 01/02/91 1. Added the ability to look at the account numbers and creditors at any time ( without changing your selection ) while you are in the expense entry screen. ( Thanks Henry Baker ). You must now have your cursor on the "Enter creditor name" screen row in order to change that selection. If your cursor is any other place on the screen, your selection will not be changed. You must now have your cursor on the "Enter account number" screen row in order to change that selection. If your cursor is any other place on the screen, your selection will not be changed. When you press F1 or F2 to look at the creditors or account numbers you may now highlight the blank space and press or without having your previous selection change even if you are in the "Enter creditor name" or 'Enter account number" position. Note: If you create a new "ACCOUNTS.DAT" or "CREDITOR.DAT" file, you will need to enter a blank line as the first entry in your files for the above to work correctly. 2. Added the ability to escape from the expense entry screen without your entry automatically being save to disk. You will now be asked to confirm saving or not saving. If you answer N or n then your record WILL NOT be saved to disk. 3. Added the display of your current data directory path, as listed in the BOOKKE.CFG file, on the main menu screen. This way you are always aware of where your data is stored. You may have multiple data files stored in different sub-directories and for different applications if you wish. Of course, these files WILL NOT be added together when doing computations. They will be computed separately. NOTE: You MUST have a BOOKKE.CFG file IN THE DIRECTORY FROM WHICH YOU ARE OPERATING and Bookke.Exe MUST be included in a "Path" statement in your autoexec.bat file in the root directory. 4. Added the ability to look at the customers at any time ( without changing your selection ) while you are in the receipt entry screen. Note: If you create a new "CUSTOMER.DAT" file, you will need to enter a blank line as the first entry in your files for the above to work correctly. You need to sort your "CUSTOMER.DAT" file after each session of new entries. 01/03/91 1. In listing or printing expenses or receipts, added the default starting date of 01/01/YY and the default ending date of today's date. If these dates are satisfactory, just press and the results will be listed on screen or printed on the printer ( printer must be ready ). 2. Added the ability to escape from the "Enter frequent customer", "creditor" and "account number" without automatically saving the entry to disk. You are now asked to confirm save or not save. Added the ability to look at your existing list of accounts, customers and creditors without updating your screen. Note: After pressing , or and popping up your lists of creditors, account numbers or customers, you may use the Page Up, Page Down, Home, End or Arrow keys to look at or highlight your selection. You may also use the FIRST LETTER of an Account name, Creditor name or Customer name to quickly locate your desired selection. 3. Added the capability of selecting a single Customer/Client and listing on screen or to the printer a detailed listing of all receipts for that Customer/Client. Identify your best customer. 01/04/91 1. Minor bug fix - When you were editing an expense or receipt record and asked for a record number greater than the number of records in the file, you would get a disk read error ( because it was attempting to read past the end of the file ) and bomb out. You will now be returned to the Maintenance Menu. 2. Added the feature that lets you show on screen all payments made to a selected creditor for any time period during the account year. See where your money went. 01/05/90 1. Fixed a bug that would not delete the dollar amount if you were editing a file. It would instead add ( or subtract ) from the gross totals the amount corrected but it would also keep the previous amount. 2. Many enhancements added. Made some purely cosmetic changes. I will attempt to include in version 1.6 of Bookkeeping Made Painless a better set of docs although I think that anyone could probably run this without any documentation at all. I tried to make it as user friendly as possible but, you still have to press the right keys. 01/10/91 Version 1.6 Things are moving so fast and I'm adding so many enhancements that I haven't had time to revise the documentation to reflect the changes. Most of the features need no description. Look at the selections on the menus and follow on screen directions and I don't think you can go wrong. I wanted to get Bookkeeping Made Painless to you so that you would be able to start your new year out right and not have to go through the pain again of the paperwork or double entry type systems. The following are a few of the enhancements in version 1.6. Added the ability to create a data directory from inside "BOOKKE" if it does not exist ( you have a choice to create the directory or not create it. Changed the date validation routine in enter expenses, enter receipts, edit expense and edit receipts so it would check for a valid date before asking if you wished to save the record. Changed the procedure to check if the program is registered so it would not indicate that you were not registered upon entering your registration and validation code for the first time. Made some minor cosmetic changes. Added the ability to delete an expense record. Added the ability to delete a receipts record. Added the ability to sort the expense disk file and the receipts disk file. You may enter your records, edit your records or delete a record, then sort the file and records will automatically be placed in chronological order based on the earliest date of the records in the sorted file. ( In other words, just put them in order ). Your registration number is now placed on the Main Menu Screen. Added numerous error trapping routines. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of the enhancements to be made on future versions are: Change to a 3 digit account code. You will be able to use your existing files. I will furnish a conversion routine to convert your existing 2 digit code to 3 digit. Possibly add a DOS shell. Add the ability to delete an expense or receipt record. You may delete a record now by editing the desired record and blank out all fields and save it back to disk. When you print or list all records, it will show up on your screen or paper. I will furnish a conversion in later version to delete this record entirely so it will not show up at all. * * * * And here it is! NOTE: Version 1.6 - If you have deleted some records as above, edit those records, and in place of entering a name in the name field, enter "DELETED RECORD" ( without the "" marks) (USE UPPERCASE LETTERS !!!!), sort the disk file which you have edited and your records that you wanted to delete will be gone. They will not show up on the screen or printer after you have run the sort. * * * * Add the ability to enter your assets, etc. so that you will be able to see at a moment's notice, your net worth. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The version with these enhancements will be authorized for use by Registered Customers with out additional charge so don't delay your registration. Start using Bookkeeping Made Painless and start saving yourself some time and effort. If I may qoute Henry Baker of Ft Myers, Florida... "Ed, Version 1.4 of Bookke is simply excellent: lean, mean, fast and beautifully functional. It should be all the system any small or medium sized business would ever need. It's so user-friendly that one should be able to hire virtually any dummy off the street and turn them into a bookkeeper in 30 minutes." Note: Version 1.5 is better yet. Ed. Version 1.6 is still better. Ed. 01/10/91 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 01/11/91 Version 1.7 Placed error trapping routine in the expense entry area to catch an error that happened if you pressed the key before any account numbers had been defined. Corrected the inputting of account numbers, frequent customers and frequent clients/creditors from the setup menu so you do not have to enter the info more than once. ( You still must enter it twice from the expense entry screen ). 01/12/91 Changed the format of total dollars printed on screen and printer so that commas are now used to delimit hundreds, thousands and millions. Corrected a "creepy crawler" in the print receipts summary to printer that did not correctly indicated the grand totals. It forgot to add December. Corrected another "slimy critter" that would cause the program to bomb if you printed the receipts summary to the printer twice in a row before performing another function. When editing an expense record, the date would default to "today's date" instead of reflecting the correct expense date. ( Thanks Tom Poturica ) 01/13/91 Changed the date validation routine to allow a backward date of down to 1989 so you can check out Bookkeeping Made Painless with a past years' expenses and receipts if you wish. Corrected a "flush keyboard buffer" routine that resulted in the Account Numbers file being overwritten ( even when asked ) when starting a new account year. 01/14/91 Made some correction, updates and additions to docs. 01/15/91 Changed the sort routine for account numbers, customers & creditor/client files. It is now approximately 20 times faster than previous sort. The sort commands remain the same. 01/16/91 Fixed a small bug that put trash on the screen instead of the account number if you went directly to listing expenses on screen by account number. Added the ability to search for a record by your check number then review and/or edit the record. Added the ability to search for a record by your invoice number then review and/or edit the record. Added the ability to search for a record by their check number then review and/or edit the record. 01/17/91 Changed "Maintenance Menu" to "Edit/Delete Menu" - the above search and edit enhancements are located in this menu. Created "Sort Menu" - the sorting of all records/files have been moved from the "Maintenance Menu" and will be here. 01/21/91 Version 1.8 Added a feature that allows your configuration information to be saved in your main file "BOOKKE.EXE". If you have an existing "BOOKKE.CFG" file, you should delete it from your directory. You will no longer have need for a "BOOKKE.CFG" file. In order to change the data drive, company address, etc. you will, however, have to be in the same directory as "BOOKKE.EXE". If you follow the information provided below, you may run Bookkeeping Made Painless from any directory or subdirectory in your system. Make a BATCH file in the root directory ( or a directory in your "path" as listed in your "autoexec.bat" file ) called BOOKKE.BAT as follows: DO NOT enter the quotation marks ( " ). Type from dos prompt > "EDLIN BOOKKE.BAT" and press . Type the letter "I" and press . Type in the following: "CD C:\BOOKKE" and press . "BOOKKE" and press . "CD\" and press . Now, press the and keys at the same time. Type the letter "E" and press . Meaning: The first line means - CHANGE DIRECTORY (CD) automatically to the DRIVE (C:\) and Directory (BOOKKE) in which you have the main file "BOOKKE.EXE". The second line is the name of the main file "BOOKKE.EXE" of Bookkeeping Made Painless. The third line will return you to the main root directory when you exit Bookkeeping Made Painless. By using the above Batch file, you will not have to worry about being in a certain directory if you change your data drive, etc. You will automatically be changed to the correct directory when you start BOOKKE. You must have a "PATH" statement in your "AUTOEXEC.BAT" file in your root directory. Example: "PATH C:\" or "PATH C:\BOOKKE" or "PATH C:\;C:\BOOKKE\" "PATH C:\" - The directory where "BOOKKE.BAT" is located. "PATH C:\BOOKKE" - " " " " " " "PATH C:\;C:\BOOKKE" - " " " " " " Bookkeeping Made Painless may now be run from any directory or subdirectory in your system by typing BOOKKE and pressing . You should go directly from the Main Menu to the Setup Menu and press "B" to enter your company information, data directory, etc.. 01/23/91 Added a DOS Shell - with 640 RAM you will have approximately 180kb of memory in which you may run an external program and when finished, type "EXIT" and press to return to Bookkeeping Made Painless. 03/01/91 Version 1.9 Changed the Edit/Delete Menu name to Edit/Delete/Backup Menu Added the ability to back up the data files from within the program if you are using two drives. If you are using one drive, you will still have to use the nornal DOS procedures to make backup copies. Made some changes to the way you are asked for comfirmation about saving your information. Less "hand movement" is now required. Added a calendar procedure that you can access from the main menu. 05/15/91 Version 1.9 Changed the format of the zip code to accomodate the format of all zip codes up to 10 characters. This is especially for our Canadian friends. The USA 5 or 9 digit format is still ok. 06/15/91 Corrected a minor bug in the expense and receipt entry procedure that would not allow you to enter more than 11 entries in expenses and 6 entries in receipts before you were returned to the Main Menu. All of your entries were saved and no data was lost. Just a little inconvinence of having to return back to the entry screen. Added an "Overview.TXT" file to the archive. 06/21/91 Updated some of the support files, including this one. Added a "Users.TXT" file which lists some of the comments of a few of our users. 06/25/91 Added the ability to define the start of YOUR financial year. Previous versions defaulted to January 1 of the present year but could be changed to other dates. Your data files will not be affected by this added feature. Your screen and print-outs will list records starting with your financial year. Any screen or print out which shows totals for months will still list January first and December last regardless of your financial year start. All data will still be correct. 06/26/91 Added a note to the documentation ( page 24 ) to set your printer to 12 characters per inch for all printing operations. 06/27/91 Changed the procedure for backing up the data files to be a faster and more reliable backup with the option of making a second backup. 06/29/91 Changed state abbreviation to three characters. Some like to use a 3 character abbreviation and some ( like our friends in Australia ) must use three characters. 07/11/91 Version 1.9.3 Corrected a bug that would not allow the default dates for listing entries to show in the correct color. No files are affected. 07/13/91 Version 2.0 Added READIT23.EXE to the Bookke19 archive. READIT23.EXE is a self-desolving archive of our program to allow you to read, browse or search documentation files, text files, on disk manuals, readme type files, etc. All documentation for software packages developed by Emerald Coast Software will take advantage of the "go to line #" and "go to screen #" features of READIT. READIT is free to all registered users of any software package developed by Emerald Coast Software. 07/21/91 ReadIt Version 2.4 Fixed a bug in ReadIt that would not allow it to display correctly on monochrome systems. It was OK on color systems. 07/28/91 Bookke Version 2.1 Added an install program that makes it easier to install Bookke. 09/07/91 Release date of Version 2.2 Added error trapping to all printer routines. Fixed minor bug that did not allow the company information to be read just after entering your registration code. It worked ok after starting Bookke the second time. Fixed the Install segment to install correctly on floppy drives. Added a reminder ( when using floppy drives ) to insert your data disk into proper drive. Added READIT version 2.5 to this release. ReadIt is now in color for those with color screens. 09/15/91 Release of version 2.3 See README.1ST file. *** REGISTRATION *** You may try Bookkeeping Made Painless at no cost, but if you like it and decide to continue using it beyond a reasonable time, then you must license it at a cost of $17 per computer. Registration will bring you your registration number and code that when entered into the software will remove all notices of "Un-licensed". If you are in a hurry and have mailed your registration fee, you may call me on the telephone and if I have received your registration fee, I will give you your registration number and code. Registration will also bring you unlimited telephone support for a period of up to one (1) year from date of registration. Payment must be by check or money order on a US bank. Register by sending $17 per computer to: Edward E. Nolin Emerald Coast Software 2707 East 6th Place Panama City, Florida 32401 Phone (904) 785-8946