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!PENNIES DEMO GUIDE =================== This guide will take you through a quick tour of the basic facilities offered by !Pennies. GETTING STARTED For this tour you will need to de-compress the demonstration program !Farthing - to do this read the instructions in the Read_First file. To run the demonstration simply double click over the !Farthing icon. The !Pennies demo will load then run, with the demonstration accounts data being loaded, whilst this is happening a status window will be shown. Any standing orders that are updated will result in a 'beep' being emitted each time an entry is made - the status window will also report this. The !Pennies icon will appear on the icon bar and the status window will show 'Ready'. HELP Every facility in !Pennies has its own help text which is immediately available by clicking over the standard help icon in each facility's window, these texts are then loaded into !Edit and run. This method is used thoughout the application and allows the texts to remain on the screen whilst you use the application. You can use these texts to amplify the information within this guide. If you have RiscOS2 then make sure that !Edit has been seen before using the Help function. Acorn's Interactive Help is also supported and will assist with this tour. This tour does not explain all operations in detail but the help texts do - use these if you wish to go into more detail at any stage. DATA All transaction data is saved automatically to disc as soon as it is entered. All data is stored within a predefined directory structure in the form of text in data and text type files which can be viewed in any text editor (such as !Edit). ICONBAR ICON Click menu over the iconbar icon, a menu will appear with entries of: *Info *Help: *Quit© *Quit Selecting Info will open the status window with boring information in it (click over it, or the icon bar icon to remove it). Selecting Quit will shut down the application, Quit© would quit then copy the data to a backup store but is disabled in this version. Move the pointer over the Help entry to open it's submenu, and then click over Help. At this point !Edit will start and load a text called Help which describes the help facilities within !Pennies. The other help texts available from this menu are general ones which give an overview of the facilities etc. which you can read at your leisure, however the Technotes helptext in this version explains it's limitations compared to the full version. To carry on with the tour click select over the !Pennies icon and a TOOLBAR will open over the left half of the icon bar. This TOOLBAR gives access to all the !Pennies facilities by either opening a window directly or opening another menu from which a window will be opened. This tour will take you through the facilities in turn going from left to right along the TOOLBAR. THE TOOLBAR =========== SEE ACCOUNT - THE ACCOUNTS DISPLAY Clicking over the first icon will open the 'Accounts' menu which appears throughout the application in various forms - it lists all the accounts known to !Pennies. You will see that accounts are divided into 7 groups, the first 5 are: Cash, Invest, Insure, Pay and Spend - some of these have further subdivisions which will be seen by moving the pointer through the menu structure, an account is defined at the end of each branch of the menu, each end submenu also has a 'New' entry from which new accounts can be started. There are 2 other accounts groups on this menu; Fixed and Index; Fixed contains 5 accounts: Find, Indexlink, Budget, Sum and CalcAcct; and Index contains 1 account; RPI. These will all be described later - note that any accounts entry that has a sub-menu finishes with a ":". Move the pointer over the Cash sub-menu and select 'Bankacct'. At this point the data from 'Bankacct' will be loaded and displayed in the accounts display window which will appear. !Pennies accounts files can also be dragged to this icon for display in which case they are treated as 'Archives' and no changes can be made to them from within the display. The account display consists of 2 parts, the top pane contains general information and the lower area contains details of every transaction on the account. Clicking menu over the top 'pane' of the window will bring up a menu with 'Edit' and 'Fulldata' on it, click on 'Fulldata'. The top part of the window will change to reveal a display of database type account information. Click menu over this and another menu will appear, 'Smalldata' will take you back to the original pane. Note the account transactions beneath remain the same. Now select 'Edit' from this menu, the New Account window will appear allowing you to edit the basic account data, this is also where you will define new accounts, but for now just exit this window by closing it or clicking on the Exit button. Back in the accounts display, click select over the textual part of any transaction entry and it will be marked and a menu offering 'Edit' and 'Delete' will open, ignore this and click over the amount part of an entry - this will toggle the checked (#) character on and off and will adjust the 'checked balance' figure in the top pane allowing you to simply check bank statements. Clicking menu anywhere over the transactions area will open the 'Misc' menu offering a variety of further facilities: Printall, Print50, Interest, Find, Archive, Index and Budget - these facilities are explained later. TRANSACTIONS The second item on the TOOLBAR is the TRANSACTION icon, click over it to open the TRANSACTION window. All transactions except Standing Orders are made by using this window, the layout of the window is similar for all accounts but it adjusts itself as accounts and transaction types are entered. Most data entry is accomplished through the use of menus which ensure that data entry is quick, logical and error resistant. New accounts and new menu entries are also initiated whilst entering transaction data. All amounts are entered in Pounds and pence. When using foreign currencies the appropriate equivalents are used. With the TRANSACTION window open, note that it is designed so that data entry is logically from the top down. *date The date is simply changed and can be reset at any time during entry. *from The 'from' account is entered next - moving the pointer over the entry box changes it to a menu shape, this convention is used whenever a data entry is by menu, clicking any mouse button will open the 'Accounts' menu from which the 'from' account is selected, select 'Cash:Bankacct' from the menu and note that 'Bankacct' appears in the 'from' box and a £ sign appears next to it - this indicates that the account currency is £. Click over the £ sign and note the 'Forex' menu that appears , click on US$ and the Forex window will open - we will deal with this later - for now click over the Clear button in the Transaction window and it will close the Forex window and leave 'Bankacct' in the from box. *transaction Now click over the 'transaction' box and a new menu appears, in this case it is 'Cashtrans' and it details the transaction types available from Cash accounts. In effect these all take money away from the 'from' account and send it to the 'to' account unless 'Internal' is used in which case the transaction is purely internal to the 'from' account. For now just select 'Debit'. *to Click over the 'to' box, the 'To' menu appears, select 'Spend:Cowfood' from this menu then move the pointer over the 'amount' box. *amount The pointer changes to a 'caret' over the amount box indicating that you have to type in the amount, click over the box and type in the amount - to enter £100.00 type in '100.00' or just '100'. Simple calculations can be done here also.(eg 112.78/12<Return> gives 9.40) *comments Now click over the comments box; the caret will move allowing you to type in a comment if you wish - they are not essential. However, clicking menu over the comments box will also open the 'Cashcomments' menu which allows you to enter common comments quickly (guess where we go shopping). This comments menu is simply amended in use. *Enter To enter the transaction click over 'Enter', the transaction will be saved to disc and most of the data will be cleared from the TRANSACTION window. The 'Clear' button will also clear the data from this window without entering the transaction and the 'Exit' button will clear and close the window. If you still have the Bankacct account display open you will see the new transaction entered in its correct place chronologically, if not you can open it now to see it. *KeySet With the Transaction window still open press the F1 function key, you will see that a complete set of transaction data has been entered into the window. This facility enables common transactions to be entered with one keystroke. Tru some function keys - defining them is simply done by clicking over the KeySet button and selecting a key from the menu - any data in the TRANSACTION window when this is done will be remembered and copied into the window when the selected key is pressed in future with the window active. NEW ACCOUNTS All new accounts are created through the NEW ACCOUNT window, which can be opened from the SEE ACCOUNT menu or the TRANSACTION menus. To see this, select 'New' from the 'from' account box menu for the account type that is appropriate - try Cash:.New. This will open the window which allows you to define new accounts and edit existing ones. Whilst this window looks complex in fact you only need to give the account a name to define it, the rest of the data can be added later, the 'Computing Functions' section at the bottom of the window can be used to define 'one off' accounts, however Functions are all set to default values appropriate to the account type whenever a new account is created so there is no need to consider them normally. All items except the account name can be entered or reset later. Once an account has been named - use up to 10 characters with no spaces and try and start with a capital letter (because your account will appear on menus and Acorn say that these should all start with capitals!) The account is initiated by clicking on 'Enter', this will set up the new account and its name will appear on the appropriate menu, 'Exit' or closing the window will cancel the operation. Close this window. STANDING ORDERS The third item on the TOOLBAR is the 's/o' icon, clicking over this will open the 'Standing orders' window listing all current standing orders. These are created, printed, edited and deleted from here. Selecting 'Create' will open a form which functions in a similar fashion to the TRANSACTION form, standing orders are automatically actioned when !Pennies starts up, a 'beep' is emitted each time one is actioned and the status window will indicate that standing orders are being processed. Close both s/o windows. GRAPHS The next item on the TOOLBAR is GRAPH, graphs can be plotted of any account, including Archives, and up to 8 accounts can be plotted on the same graph. Line graphs plot the balance or value of each transaction against it's date and bar graphs sum the amounts of all transactions over a sub-period (typically one month) and then plot these as bars for the whole period. Bar graphs are most suitable for 'one-way' accounts such as most Spend accounts where the majority of transactions are only into, or out of the account. All graphs are drawn with amounts plotted vertically and with time increasing from left to right. Axes are re-scaled automatically as accounts are added. Click over the 'GRAPH' icon and the 'Graphdata' window will open. The end and start dates are set by default to today and one year ago, selection of accounts is by clicking over the 'Account' box and then through the normal accounts menu or by dragging an account onto this box. Clicking on the 'line' or 'bar' button will select this option if not already selected and clicking on 'Plot' will plot the graph. The 'shareprice' and 'sharevalue' options allow the share price or value of the holding to be plotted. The 'plot relative' option allows accounts to be plotted relative to their value at the start date - very useful for comparisons. Select 'Cash:Bankacct', 'line' and then 'Plot'. A line graph will appear. Click menu over this graph and you will see that you can add further accounts and in the full version you can print the graph or save it as a sprite or drawfile. Click select over the graph and you will be able to draw a line as in !Draw, this is a measuring tool which allows you to measure growth rates etc. When you first draw a line a set of icons appears at the bottom right of the display showing the 'line data' results. Clicking over the 'percent' box will toggle through the data available. Close the Graph window. BALANCES The fifth TOOLBAR item is BALANCES, clicking over this opens another menu with a list of accounts groups, selecting a group from this menu opens a window summarising the current state of all accounts in that group. Selecting ALL summarises all accounts. UPDATE ensures all accounts are re-calculated to be up to date. Select ALL to see this facility at work, when the window opens you will see that you can PRINT the display, if you click over an amount in the CHECKED or BALANCE columns then it will be discounted from the relevant total and shown in light grey (the disc will also be accessed as the text for printing-which is held on disc-is also altered). Click over any amount to see this effect. Close this window. SUM The black PLUS sign on the TOOLBAR indicates SUM, this function allows you to add the balances of selected files together at set intervals over a selected period. For example all Cash accounts could be summed to produce a running total over the year. Up to 100 intervals are allowed, so over 3 months the balances would be computed daily, over a year the interval would be weekly (intervals are set automatically) Select 'SUM' from the TOOLBAR and the SUM window opens. Start and end dates are set in the normal fashion and clicking over any of the 'Accounts' boxes brings up the normal Accounts menu. However, in this facility groups of accounts can be selected together, thus clicking on 'Cash:' selects all the Cash accounts. Archived files can also be dragged to the window. To see this select 'Cash:' from the menu using the 'Adjust' button (the right mouse button) and note that Cash: appears in the top 'Accounts' box and the menu remains open. Now select 'Invest:' using the Select button, Invest: appears in the next Accounts box and the menu closes. Select the start and end dates to 20Jun94 and 20Jun95 then select 'Sum' to start the computation, the disc is accessed and a new window showing the results appears. This window can be examined to see the results and can be printed out by clicking on the 'Print' button. 'New' closes this window and opens the 'Sum' entry window again for a new sum. Whichever 'Sum' was performed last becomes the 'Existing' sum file and can be accessed from the Accounts menus as Fixed.Sum for display. This file can also be plotted as a LINE graph directly through the GRAPH function, but it cannot be plotted as a BAR graph since it is merely a list of balances and has no amounts going into it or from it. Initial Balance. The sum account will initially show the actual balances but this can be changed such that the initial sum balance is zero, this is achieved by selecting 'Null' (this button was not called zero because the 'z' key on my keyboard was worn out - probably by my kids playing games!). This option will initially be set to 'Actual' for new Sum accounts, in this state the actual balances are shown. If 'Null' is selected then the balances are reset to the difference from the initial balance, the first balance figure is thus set to zero. The option selected is automatically used to save the Sum account and it will be used in the Graph facility in this state. This option can be toggled between the 2 states at any time. When an existing Sum account is loaded the buttons reflect the stored state of the Sum account. Close the Sum window. PROJECT Click over PROJECT on the TOOLBAR (the icon with the arrow pointing to a question mark) to open the PROJECT window. This function allows you to analyse accounts over a selected period and project the results over a future period. Every entry in each selected account that occurs within the period is checked and an analysis is made in accordance with the Project Computing Function selected for the account when it was set up (set to default values for the account type initially). The resulting analysis is projected using appropriate rates of growth which are entered in the PROJECT window. A summary of the results appears in this window and the full text is saved as a Report which can be viewed or printed out from within this window by selecting See or Print. With the PROJECT window open, the start date is simply set, the analysis and projection periods can be set to a number of either months or years. The analysis is done for the period up to the start date and then projected from the start date. The values for the various rates are entered in the boxes provided, if left blank then a zero rate is used. The account categories are all selected 'on' to start with but are simply turned off by clicking over them. Once the parameters have been set up clicking on 'GO' starts the analysis. To demonstrate, select the date to 20Jun95, leave the periods set to 1 year, enter some figures in the 'Set Rates' boxes and then click on 'GO'. The disc will be accessed and as the accounts are analysed a list of results will appear in the 'file' column together with a number in the 'rate' column, as this list fills up or as a new account category is started the entries are overwritten from the top. To see the full results of this, or any projection click over the 'See' button in the 'Report' area, another Edit window will open with the Report text displayed, this report can be printed by selecting 'Print' instead of 'See' in this window at any time. Close this window. OPTIONS OPTIONS is selected next on the TOOLBAR. (The icon that looks like a selector switch - it helps if you are imaginative!). A window opens in which you can reset certain basic options that govern the running of !Pennies. These all default to sensible values and there is no requirement to reset any of them. Any change you make here will only take effect if Set is clicked. In this version Options parameters can be changed within the window but changes will not be actioned when Set is clicked. Close this window. DELETING ACCOUNTS DELETE ACCOUNT is the next item on the TOOLBAR and is the only way to delete accounts from within !Pennies. Clicking over this option opens a window from which the normal accounts menu is accessed by clicking over the entry box. Clicking over 'Delete' will then delete the account from the active menu structure and the account file will be transferred internally within Pennies and then Squashed (in the 'oldpennies' directory). This allows the deleted account's file to be viewed at any time or deleted using normal desktop filing methods. Close this window. EXPORT This function allows you to export !Pennies files in a variety of formats for use in other applications such as Text editors, DTP and spreadsheet programs. Clicking over the icon will open the Export window. Accounts are selected as for the Sum facility. The export file type can be chosen from a menu and the amount of data exported can be selected between the data normally displayed by !Pennies or the whole data stored within !Pennies. By default, export files are created in a directory called PennyXport within the !Pennydata directory in use. (In this version the !Pennydata directory is inside the !Farthing application directory). You can create an alternative export directory anywhere by dragging the directory icon to a filer window. A full description of filetypes is available from the help text within the Export window. CALCULATOR The Calculator function allows you to compute interest, repayments and totals for savings and loans. A full account - Fixed.CalcAcct - can be created for analysis purposes. Click over the Calculator icon and the window will open, it is fairly simple but the help text provides a comprehensive description. select 'Loan', enter 10000 into the Sum box, leave Lump sum selected, enter 10 in the Rate box and click on Calculate. The rsult shows the monthly repayment over a year and the total to pay (876.95 and 10523.41). Now click over the Interest only button and Calculate again, the interest only repayment will be shown. For the full repayment calculations a delay of 1 month is assumed between loan and first repayment. This calculator can also generate an account (Fixed.CalcAcct) to represent the savings or loan. With the same data as before select Make account and then click over the Create button (it changes to Create from calculate in this case). The same result will be shown but if you now select Fixed.CalcAcct from the See Account menu the account that was generated will be displayed. Transactions can be edited and deleted on this account and new transactions can be made in the full version of !Pennies. This allows you to evaluate financial products by creating accounts and then running !Pennies facilities such as Interest on the whole account for a variety of periods and interest rate structures. HELP Clicking over the Help icon will open a help file summarising the purpose and actions of the TOOLBAR selections. THE ACCOUNT DISPLAY FUNCTIONS ============================= Open the Cash.Bankacct display and click Menu to open the Misc menu. -Printall and Print50 - would normally print a report of all or the last 50 transactions. -Interest - opens the Interest calculation window with interest rates already entered. Select Interest then click on Calculate to see the results. Click on the Help button for further information. -Find - opens the Find window allowing you to search for transactions and save these to file if required. Click on the Help button for more information. -Archive - opens the Archive window allowing you to reduce the size of accounts by transferring old entries to an archive file. This file can be viewed by !Pennies by dragging it to the See Account icon on the Toolbar. Click on Help for more information. -Indexlink - opens the IndexLink window which allows you to see the effect of indexation on a file by combining it with an Index file such as RPI (which is included). Click over the File box and select RPI from the menu and the RPI Index file will be shown. Click over the Help buttons in these windows for further information. An example Indexlink file is included and can be viewed by selecting Indexlink from the See Accounts menu. -Budget - opens a window allowing you to Build, Update or Use an Analysis file to run a budget procedure. To run a new Budget file click on the Budget button - a new account will be generated using actual account data, Analysis data and Standing order data. This will then be displayed. To see the existing Budget file at any time select Budget from the See Account menu. The Help texts explain further. EDITING & DELETING TRANSACTIONS Witn the Bankacct display open click select over a line of text to the left of the 'amount' column, the transaction will be marked and a menu with 'Edit' and 'Delete' will appear, clicking adjust over the transaction would remove the marking and the menu. *Delete Selecting 'Delete' from the menu will bring up a warning message with the option to cancel or confirm your deletion, if you select OK you will irretrevably delete the entry from this account and any associated account, at the same time all balances will be recalculated. *Edit Selecting 'Edit' will transfer the entry to the TRANSACTION window for editing. Try this for any entry - the entry will not be altered unless you re-enter it and then you will be warned that it will overwrite the existing entry (if it has been altered), just alter the comments and then re-enter it (by clicking on the 'Replace' button) you will then see this in action. Selecting Reset clears the TRANSACTION window without altering the entry, Leave closes the TRANSACTION window without altering the account. FURTHER FACILITIES ================== This text is not intended to cover all the facilities in depth. To investigate all the facilities select the Help:Facilities text from the iconbar menu. This lists all facilities and how to get to them. All facilities have their own help texts associated with them which explain further. The full version has complete Tutorials which do cover all aspects of the application. EXAMPLES ======== The directory Examples contains 2 graphs saved as Drawfiles and 2 real accounts. To see the graphs just double click over them to load into !Draw - they will appear at half scale. To see the accounts or to use them in graphs just drag them to the See Account icon on the TOOLBAR, or into the Graphdata window or onto any active graph. Note that they are treated as Archive files and so cannot be altered in the account display. YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS ================= To run this version of !Pennies with your own data you will need to replace the demonstration data with a new set. To do this open the 'New' directory on the original disc and follow the instructions provided there. In the full version you can simply create and run as many sets of data as you wish, this version has been configured differently to allow it to fit onto one 800k floppy and it is thus not quite as versatile as the full version.