SHAREWARE FEE IS $12.50 FOR ELECTRONIC DOWNLOAD OR FROM OTHERS
$17.50 FROM ME WITH FULL DOCS.
I AM VERY BAD AT ANSWERING ELECTRONIC MAIL, PLEASE DROP ME A U.S. MAIL
LETTER OR NOTE OR GIVE A CALL. THANKS.
ChecksPak v1.2 (c)1986,87, 88 by J.D.Kolata (703)323-7777
9212 Lake Braddock Drive, Burke, Virginia 22015-2029
CompuServe 76474,674
GEnie J.D.KOLATA
REQUIREMENTS
The program is designed for a Mac 512E or a Mac+, using the HFS file system, and a 800K internal drive. An external drive is not required.
PURPOSE
The idea behind this program was my frustrations with various programs that are very good if you have all your various figures to answer their questions. I still had to sit with a calculator and add up my car expenses, product purchases, and a host of other expense and credit categories so that I could use the various tax schedules properly. With three check books going, plus cash purchases entered in my diary, plus using plastic money I had paper flying around for about a week. I don't have a staff to take care of tracking my records. I also don't sit down every day and "balance" my books - in fact I maintain a very large box which is the repository of all receipts, bank statements, credit card statements, and so on. At the end of the year (sometimes monthly) the figures in the box get posted to a calculator and similar pieces of paper get stapled together to form my tax receipts. Now all goes well until I or my wife forgets to enter a check in the check book, or forgets to say who we paid the check to, or forgets to add in a $5.00 bank charge for someone else's bounced check. That's some of the problems. Here you have a program that you can use every day, end of the month, or once a year. Its designed on the debit side to track up to five check books, nine credit cards, cash purchases of your choice, payments that you have authorized any of your banks to make through a bank draft, check overdraft protection plans, and withdrawals from machine tellers. On the credit side it tracks all of your deposits along with the checks that make up your deposits. This is not a spread sheet. The trouble with spread sheets are that I have to buy a couple of books to find out how to use them. All I want to know is how much I spent on my car for business purposes, or how far I got in helping my doctor get out of hock in starting up his practice, or how much I've contributed to Notre Dame so I can see if I qualify for the alumni football ticket lottery.
Also I wanted to be able to balance my check book and get nice print outs of my check books, expenses categories, and deposits with their types of checks. I also want print outs that have very little use, but will let me show them to my neighbors. Then they will finally find out the answer to their insistent question of "What do you do with a computer?". Any thought on their part would have revealed the answer in a flash. I really use a computer to produce long print outs that are absolutely meaningless. A great by-product is having a lot of material available to use as package stuffing when I send disks to others -- who like myself use computers.
There is always trade offs in writing programs. Because most of us do not yet have a check book or credit cards that are linked directly to our computers we usually enter our checks into a paper check register after we write a check or bring home the paper credit card receipt. Also I don't think it is very efficient to start up this program, enter one check, and then quit the program. For those reasons I have taken the option of having the check number generated automatically by the program. You specify the starting number for the period you're interested in. This means that if you have an idea of the amount or payee of your check you can take a guess and then correct the check when you receive your statement. If you want you could even specify a debit category for guesses. That would certainly highlight guesses on your print outs.
FIRST THINGS
If you got this program via your modem then you're not a novice and I assume you will be following these instructions with a working disk. If you received this program directly from me please make a copy of the disk and follow along with the copy, not the master that I sent you. If you received the disk from me it will be set up as below except for the System Folder, which you must transfer to your working disk. Hard disk users can transfer the folder 'ChecksPak ƒ' to the desk top of their hard disk. If you have an external disk drive then don't move the system folder to the ChecksPak disk - just use the ChecksPak disk in the external drive and your system disk in your internal dirve.
I suggest you name the disk ChecksYYYY (YYYY = year of checks)
Your desk top will have to be set up as follows:
System Folder (if you are going to run off of single floopy drive)
Finder (v5.3 or greater)
System (v3.2 or greater) with the following only
Disk accessories
Alarm Clock (you must have at least one DA)
Chooser
Control Panel
Fonts
Chicago 12 point
Geneva 9 and 12 point
Monaco 9 point
Imagewriter
Institutions (make a folder and give it this name)
(this folder will contain your data bases once you have
designated your financial institutions.)
Support (make a folder and give it this name)
CatsPayees (debit categories & payees)
Places (names of your institutions & starting numbers)
ChecksPak v1.2 (this is the main program)
For you hard disk users I'd suggest you put the ChecksPak v1.2 application and the folders 'Institutions' & 'Support' in a folder titled 'ChecksPak ƒ' and then put the folder 'ChecksPak ƒ' on your desk top.
P.S. For most of us it is not smart to spend 5 minutes to load blank computer checks into our printer, print one check, and then replace the checks with our regular computer paper. When using a computer we must ensure we don't work for the computer. As I write my checks through out the month I feel that I'm more efficient writing my checks rather that depending on my machine to print them out. This is a good semi-automatic expense and income tracking system.
