HB Help Contents
Home Budget Contents

Home Budget Summary

Why Use Home Budget over other packages?

Getting Started

Tool Bar Buttons

Setting up Accounts, Budgets and AutoPayments

Account Book Window

Account Summary Window

NetWorth Window

Working with Transactions

Moving Around Accounts

Date Range Setting

Generating Charts

Printing

Optimizing the Database

Purging old Transactions

Merging archived Transactions

Backing up the Database

Setup options

Tips and Shortcuts

Copyright Information


Getting Started

First you need to create a new Home Budget database. To do so, simply select the File Menu and Pick New. Then enter the name of the database (with no extension).

Once created you need to Add Accounts using the Setup Accounts under the Setup menu. Once the accounts are created you can define a budget using the Budget setup also under the Setup menu.

A sample database is included with Home Budget called Sample you can select this database using the File Open command and have a look at a typical setup. Even try out the Graph module on the database.

For more information on setting up accounts see Setting up Accounts


Home Budget Summary

Home  Budget finance program  is based around the tradition envelop style budgeting system. It allows you to set aside at regular or non regular intervals, a portion of your funds. It has no real concept of monthly or weekly time frames, but allows complete flexibility of budgeting or analyzing results during any given time period.

Basically you create accounts of either real source funds (such  as BANK account or CHEQUING account), or expense accounts  that  allocate  a  portion  of  the  funds (i.e. UTILITIES, GROCERIES  and  so  on...).

This method easily gives you the ability to set aside a portion of your income each (month/week/year) for different  expenses. For example you may budget $100 a month for  UTILITIES, since that is the average amount spent, or you may put $200 a month away for a holiday being planned for 10  months away for which the cost is expected to be $2,000. This way when the money is needed it will be available.

This design gives Home Budget a real advantage over many commercial financial packages that miss the basic budget and save design that Home Budget uses.

With each transaction entered TWO accounts are involved. The  first  is the current account being  displayed,  the other is called the 'SOURCE ACCOUNT' (displayed under the 'Account' column of  the transaction) and is entered as the transaction is typed in.

Conveniently  you  can  be in either account to enter the transaction. If  for  example you had bought a $100 in groceries  using    a    Cheque,  you  could  enter  this transaction  from  your  GROCERIES  expense  account  and record the 'SOURCE ACCOUNT'  as  Cheque or enter in under the CHEQUE account and record  the  'SOURCE  ACCOUNT'  as GROCERIES.  In either case one  transaction  is  recorded.

In order to  start  using Home Budget you must first Create a Home Budget Database using the File -menu and Select New, enter a name ie Budget and click Open. See Getting Started for more information.

Once you have created the database you must add some accounts. To do so, select the 'Setup Accounts' function from the Setup menu. Choose the 'Add' function. See Setting up Accounts for more information.


Why Home Budget
Why Use Home Budget?

Home Budget does not try to overwhelm you with so many features that just end up filling your hard drive and over complicate the program. Instead it uses a simple envelope style bugetting system taught by many home financial planning consultants.

Simply put, by dividing your spending into catagories of expense (Expense Accounts) and allocating (Budgetting) a portion of your income to each one, you can not only track your spending but continue to save for future planned expenses. Its like having an unlimited number of bank accounts each with its own purpose.

Home Budget has been in use by many for the past few years and has proven to be %100 reliable.

Features of Home Budget include a very fast and easy to use data entry system where each transaction is just one line and everything is point and click.

Notable features include:

Automatic Payment Transactions

Easy one line data entry

Visual Graphs

Reporting, summaries, networth, transactions

Reconcile using search and click

Adjustable date range view into database

Windows 95 32 bit version or Windows 3.1 version available

Fast and reliable (written in C++).


Tool Bar

Buttons in order:

Add / Delete Transaction

Reconcile / Unreconcile Transaction

Find / Find Next

Prev Account / Goto Account / Next Account

Print

Account book window

Account summary window

Networth window

Chart window

Calculator

From/To Range buttons


Setting up Accounts

To add a new Account click the Add button. To modify an existing account you can double click on the account or click the modify button.

Explanation of account fields

Account Name

Each account must have a unique name. It is best to keep them unique within the first 5-8 characters, as this will save typing later.

Date Open

Since Home Budget allows complete control over reporting and allows a view of your  budget for any given period of time, it must know when accounts were created.

The Date Open field should contain a date previous to the first  transaction that is planned to be entered into this account. If you set this date to  01-JAN-93, you will not be able to enter a transaction against this account for any date previous to 01-JAN-91. Also any reporting done for a date range previous to 01-JAN-91 would know to leave this account absent from any displays or reports. (As with any fields, this date can changed later if entered incorrectly).

Account Type

Bank	Use for any real bank/savings account. Holds real funds.

Chequing	A Chequing account. Tracks cheque numbers used. Holds real funds.

Income	Create at least one of these accounts to record your income. It is used as a door into your Bank or Chequing type accounts, while at the same time recording in one place, all income

Expense	These are the accounts used to allocate and  record transactions for  various  expenses. For example: Groceries, Utilities, Mortgage and so on. The number of these accounts you create  will  depend on how  much detail you wish to setup your budgeting and reporting. The  EXPENSE accounts are the accounts that will also show up later under the BUDGET SETUP where you will  determine  how much money each EXPENSE account should be allocated.

Asset	Asset accounts are used if you wish to track investments or Funds that are not part of your cash flow. For example, RRSPs, Stocks, Property. These account balances are not counted into the general Income or Cash flow totals, but are listed at the bottom of the NetWorth window and do Total into provide you with your Total NetWorth. See Tracking Assets for more  information.

Credit Card	Create one of these for each Credit card you use. Then any items purchased via a credit card can be recorded as such. This account becomes credited, by each debit from an EXPENSE account when entered as a credit card purchase thereby reserving the funds necessary to meet the inevitable credit card bill that will follow. The credit card bill then is entered against this account as a debit. In  other words, you end up moving your money over to this account as you purchase items with a credit card. Then when  the credit card bill arrives the money is sitting in this account, ready to pay the bill.

TIP: It is very convenient to organize all your credit card bills together, goto the credit card account say Visa, and then enter all the bills within this account. Note: Doing it this way you will need to enter each purchase as a credit to the Visa account, which then would debit the associated expense account.

Reconcile

Enable this if you wish each transaction entered against this account to be initially unreconciled. A *' will be displayed at the right of transaction. This also affects the Rec Bal field on the account totals which displays only the totals of the transactions which are reconciled. See Account Totals for more information.

Starting Bal

Set this field to the amount of  the opening balance of the account. If it is a real BANK/CHEQUE account this will be obvious. For EXPENSE accounts you may wish to just divide your current funds up to allocate a starting amount to each account. INCOME accounts would typically start at zero, but any  amount entered to the initial balance of these accounts has no effects on other accounts.

Date Closed

As with the OPEN DATE this allows  for a clear picture of the budget for any given  time period. If you had created say a short term expense  account to allocate some funds, then later finished with that account, you cannot actually delete it if it has transactions recorded against it. Instead you close it using this field. Then any time the date range is set to start after this closed  date, this account will be hidden from view. Yet if you set the date range back to when this account was active, you will again be able to view the past transactions for this account.

To close an account the Ending balance must be Zero. If it is not, create an entry to either debit/credit it to balance it to zero, using another account or using the special  'BUDGET' account name.


Setting up Budgets

In Home Budget, budget amounts are transferred into the various expense accounts each time you perform the  Do budget function. Typically this is done monthly or bimonthly depending on your income interval. This actually results in a transaction being created against the EXPENSE account with 'BUDGET' specified as the source account.  In other words you have Allocated or transferred funds for each specific expense account.

To enter a budget amount, highlight the desired account and click modify, or  just double click on the account. Then enter the new amount.

At the bottom of the display the total Budgeted amount is displayed as well as the remaining balance.

The remaining balance shows the amount of unallocated funds that will remain after creating the budget transactions.

If after creating the budget transactions you realize that an account needed more or less budget funds, you can goto that specific account and edit the BUDGET transaction that was just created.

Editing the budget amounts on the BUDGET setup screen only affects the amounts that will be allocated to each account when the next 'Do Budget Transactions' command is executed.


Setting up AutoPayments

AutoPayments are really just scheduled transactions. You can have these occur on a specific date, monthly, daily, weekly etc.

The transactions are not actually created until you select the Do Auto Payment button. This will then create all transactions that are due. You can select the Confirm box in the dialog that pops up to be prompted to confirm each transaction before it is created. That way you can skip by or postpone certain currently due transactions.

The AutoPayment dialog box displays each Schedule transaction. The Next Date column indicates the next due date of payment. A asterisk * will be displayed beside the date if the transaction is currently due.

The account column lists the owner of the transaction, this is the account for which the debit and credit are shown against. The From Account shows the source account from where the funds are being moved from.

To add an AutoPayment click on the Add button. To modify an existing AutoPayment click the modify button or double click on the desired transaction

See Adding or Modifying an AutoPayment for more information.


Adding or Modifying an AutoPayment

For adding or modifying an AutoPayment the following information is required:

Transaction Information

Account	This is the owner account of the transaction. For example if this is Utilities, then the debit/credit amount is against the Utilities account.

Payment Name 	A Description of the payment or scheduled transaction. For example Electric Bill. For AutoPayments a (A) is appended to the description to indicate it was created via the AutoPayment function.

Source Account	The account from which the funds are being with drawn. For example if this is your Chequing account then it will be debited by the amount of the Electric Bill (above).

Debit/Credit	Amounts that are debited or credited from the Account.

Schedule Information

Next Payment Date	Indicates the next payment date for this transaction. You must enter a valid date.

Occur Every	Select either Months or Days. For Weeks, use 7 Days, or for Bi-Weekly use 14 days and so on. For a monthly payment set the Next Payment date and then select 1 Month. This will produce a transaction on the same day every month.

Payments Remaining	Only this number of transaction will be created. Each time this number will be decremented, and once at zero, no more transactions are created for this AutoPayment. Leave this blank for indefinite.

Next Check Num.	If the Source Account is a Chequing account, and you wrote post dated cheques that were in order, you can enter the starting cheque here, and it will be incremented and recorded against each transaction.


Account Book Window

This window displays a particular Account, its Totals and transactions recorded against it.

The default is to sort by date, however you can simply click on the title of each column to cause Home Budget to sort based on that item. clicking again on the same column will reverse the sort order.

The Transactions and Totals displayed are directly related to the Date Range currently set. Any transactions that occur previous to the Range From date are not displayed as with any Transactions that occur after the Range To date. See Date Range Setting for information on changing the date range.

The various Totals are explained here:

Start Bal	This is the starting balance for the account. This will be the amount entered when the Account was created if the from Range is set to Earliest. Other wise it displays the ending balance for the date prior to the current From Range Date.

Budgeted	The total amount Budgeted during the current date range. (May not be applicable to all accounts i.e. Bank or Cheque book for example)

Debit	Total amount debited during the current date range.

Credit	Total amount credited to this account during the current date range.

Rec. Bal	The balance of the account using only the transactions that are reconciled (no asterisk). This may not be applicable to all accounts.

End Bal	The ending balance. If the To Range is other than Latest this indicates the Balance up to that point in time.

Transactions can also be sorted by various criteria, by using the Sort option under the transaction menu.


Account Summary Window

This window displays all the Accounts (that are open during the current date range) along with the Account type, and all the totals. For an explanation of the various totals see Account Book Window.

This window also allows you to sort the accounts by Name, Type and Budget amounts.

Double clicking on any account will bring forward the Account Book Window with that account selected.

Selecting Print will print these account summaries to the printer.


NetWorth Window

The NetWorth window is constantly updated to show your cash flow situation. Basically it summarizes the totals from your Bank and Chequing accounts, the amount Allocated by the various expense and credit-card accounts and the amount Remaining. It also displays  your income accounts and total amount recorded as income for the current period.

The Amount Remaining is basically cash that you do not have allocated for any expense budget.

If any expense accounts are over drawn or negative amounts, this is also displayed in the NetWorth window. The Amount Remaining has already been reduced by this amount to ensure that money is reserved for the potential of needing to cover even these overdrawn expense accounts.

This calculation of overdrawn expense accounts will be ignored if you have checked the ignore overexpensed in the options setup.

Any Asset account information are also displayed in the networth window, the remaining balance plus your Assets account give you a total networth amount.

Select Print while the NetWorth Window is active, will print the NetWorth report to the printer.


Working With Transactions

The following topics explain various ways of working with transactions:

Adding

Deleting

Sorting

Splitting

Reconciling

Searching for


Adding a Transaction

To Add a transaction, first you must be in the Account Book window, viewing the account you wish to add the transaction for. (See Moving around accounts for various ways of selecting the account to view in the account window.) Then you can start the Transaction add process by Choosing ADD under the Transaction menu, Clicking the Add button on the tool bar, or the Ctrl+A keyboard short cut.

The following information is required for each transaction:

Date	This is the date that the transaction took place. You must enter the date format in DD-MMM-YY form, or any of the abbreviated methods that are permitted in any date fields within Home Budget.

Item	The description of the transaction.

Account	The Source or From account. This is were the funds are taken, or transferred from. If you are currently recording a Cheque in your Chequing account that was spent on Groceries, then the Source Account would be Groceries. You may use the Up/Down arrows to search for the account, or press the first letter of the account and the list will be moved to that position, or you can click on the arrow to drop down the list of available accounts. The account you choose must be different from the current account, and must of been open during this transaction date.

         Note: 	Entering SPLIT as the source account indicates that this transaction should be split into various parts, each part being recorded as a separate transaction. Against this transaction (first) you enter the total amount of the Transaction, after hitting return you then proceed to enter each split member of this transaction until the you have reached the total amount entered in the Split Owner. To split an existing Transaction see Splitting a Transaction.

Num	This is the Cheque number field. It is used for transactions written against a Chequing type account it indicates the cheque number It is also used to indicate a member of a split transaction. The cheque number field is optional, it will default to the previous cheque number entered plus 1. To leave the cheque field blank (and not affect the last cheque number remembered hit space key to blank the field and then TAB to advance to the next field).

Debit/Credit	Amount debited or Credited to the currently viewed account. The Source account will also be debited/credited the same amount. (If the source account was a Credit card account or if both accounts involved are the same type i.e. both Bank or both Expense, then the debit credit amounts are reversed for the Source account)

When adding a transacition paid by credit card while under the credit card account remember you have to add the amount spent as a credit to the credit card account. See Setting up Accounts for more information on Credit card accounts.


Deleting a Transaction

Simply highlight the desired transaction and then choose Delete from the Transaction window, or press the Delete key. You will be ask to confirm the action.

If you delete a split member transaction, its amount is moved to one of the other remaining split members. If there are no other split members the transaction is turned back into a regular (non-split) transaction. If you delete a SPLIT owner transaction it and all the split members are also deleted.


Sorting Transactions

Under the Transaction Menu you may sort via different methods. Note that when the transactions are sorted, the Balance column tracks the balance for the order of the transaction displayed and may not be too helpful if the account is not sorted by date.


Splitting a Transaction

To enter a split transaction you simply enter the Source Account as SPLIT. To turn an existing Transaction into a SPLIT owner transaction can either choose Split from the Transaction menu or Click on the Source Account field of the transaction and change it to Split. In either case you will be placed in Transaction Add mode and will need to add Split members to the account until you have totaled the amount entered in the owner transaction. Note that all Split transactions are force to have the same date.

If you delete a split member transaction, its amount is moved to one of the other remaining split members. If there are no other split members the transaction is turned back into a regular (non-split) transaction.

If you delete a SPLIT owner transaction it and all the split members are also deleted.


Reconciling a Transaction
Reconciling

Click the Reconcile button on the tool bar, choose the Reconcile choice in the Transaction menu or the Ctrl+R short cut; to reconcile the currently selected transaction.

You can reverse this by using the Unreconcile function.

Double clicking on the Reconcile column will also Toggle the Reconcile flag.


UnReconciling a Transaction
UnReconciling

Click the UnReconcile button on the tool bar, choose the UnReconcile choice in the Transaction menu or the Ctrl+U short cut; to unreconcile the currently selected transaction.

Double clicking on the Reconcile column will also Toggle the Reconcile flag.


Searching for Transactions

Select the Find button on the toolbar, the Find choice under the transaction menu or the Ctrl+F3 key to open the find dialogbox. You can then enter the text to search on. This can included any part of the transaction, i.e. Item description, amount debit etc. If found, this will become the currently selected transaction.

For a convenient way to reconcile credit card statements or cheque books using the Find command see Reconciling Bank Statements


Moving around Accounts

There are different ways that you can jump to different accounts. You can use the Goto account button on the toolbar, you can double click on the desired account in the account summary window, or use the shortcut Ctrl-G key from any window within Home Budget.

When viewing an account in the Account Book, you can use Shift Right arrow or Shift Left Arrow to move to the next or previous accounts. The accounts are sorted alphabetically.


Date Range Setting
Date Range

To Change the Date Range click on one of the Two buttons on the right side of the Tool Bar, select Date Range from the Account menu, or use the shortcut Ctrl+D key.

Home Budget provides the concept of a window into your finances, where only transactions created during the given date range are displayed. This removes a lot of the clutter when all you are  interested in is for example the last couple of months.

The totals displayed for each account are also affected by the date range. The Starting balance is always the ending balance for the period prior to the new From Range date. The debit / credit amounts show totals for the transactions created during the currently selected date range.

This also becomes useful as you can set the range for example to be January to December for the previous year, goto any account or the account summary window, and immediately get totals of spending/budgeting/income etc. for that given year. These totals can then help you fine tune your budgets for the next year.

When starting Home Budget it will set the To range to blank (Latest) and set the From range to the number of months back as specified under the Options settings.


Printing

Any window can be printed from within Home Budget by first ensuring the desired window is active, and then selecting Print from the file menu. You can also select Print Preview which will show you an exact representation of the printed page for your specific should you choose to print.

If for example you wish to print all transactions for the past 12 months for your Groceries account, first goto the Groceries account under the account book, set the date range goto back 12 months, and then select print.

You can also use the Account Summary window for example to just show the Expense accounts and their Balances (using the Account Menu functions) and then just select print.

You can also select landscape printing to print on the long edge of the page if you are finding that some columns are truncated.


Generating Graphs and Charts

Home Budget has very flexible and convenient Chart generating interface. It can report against all accounts, just income accounts, just expense accounts or any specific account.

It has its own date range controls so as not to affect your current settings under the account book window.

Click on the window icon, or select the Graphs window under the Window menu.

You can size the chart window to any size and the charts will be rescaled to fit. When printing, the maximum size that will fit the paper is used. Also for some graphs you may even get better results by first selecting landscape mode under Print Setup.

To set the parameters for the graph click on the Set Parameters button. To change the type of graph shown you can click on the graph type display shown beside this button.


Graph Parameters
Setting Chart Parameters

Graphs consist of data elements represented in Rows and Columns. Normally Columns are represented Left to Right along the bottom (X axis) whereas Rows are show as depth (Z axis). The Y axis, or up/down left part of the Graph usually displays the number (amount).

Controls:

Dates

You can use the Quick drop down Dates selection to quickly set to the standard reporting dates, or enter your own custom dates in the From / To fields.

From	All transactions or accounts created since this date are selected.

To	All transactions occurring up to and including this date are selected.

Columns:

Expense	All Expense accounts are listed along the bottom

Income	All Income accounts are listed long the bottom

Month	Each month is reported along the bottom.

Years	Totals by year. Years listed along the bottom.

Rows:

Total Only	Total Spent or Budgeted for All or a Specific Account for either entire period or by month, depending or column setting.

Budget vs Actual	For all expense accounts, or a specific expense account this shows the Amount Budgeted vs the Amount Spent for either each year or month.

Income vs Budget	For each month/year provides a summary of how your income compared to the total amount budgeted. The column setting must be set to either Months or Years.

Months	Each row point represents a different month. Column must be set to either Expense or Income. Which means along the bottom of the graph will be either income or expense accounts and there will be multiple Row points per account to represent the amount spent or budgeted for each month for that specific account.

Years	As above except the Row values are divided up into Years rather than months. If displaying more that two years worth of data in this format, the months display can be rather cramped the by Year Row display maybe better in this case.

Income Accounts	The column display must be either Months or Years, and this Row display will divide the Amount of Income for each income account per each Month or Year selected within the date range.

Expense Accounts	Shows either total Budgeted or Total Spent (depending on expense type setting) for each month or year.

Ending Balance	Displays the ending balance for the specific account at the end of each month, or year. The column selection must either be set to, Months or Years. You must also select a specific account, it cannot be set to all accounts.

Expense Type (for expense accounts only)

Budget	Amount Budgeted for the period.

Spent	Amount Spent (Debit - Credit) for the period.

Tips:

If the Row type is set to Months displaying more than 2 years of data may cramp the display if you have many accounts. Try viewing by Years instead.

If you wish to Graph just One particular Expense Account you must set the Row selection to either Total only or Budget vs Actual.


Optimizing the Database

This operation is only really needed when the Database seems slow to load or Sort. It cleans up the file, and rewrites it back in optimum sorted order. If for some reason the Optimize fails (i.e. out of disk space) the original files are saved as OLD.trn, OLD.acc and OLD.atp. You will need to use the FileManager to remove any partially created new files and rename these back to the original names.


Purging Old Transactions

If you wish you may remove transactions that you no longer need to view or report against out from the active database into archived files. You can later Merge them back in if you wish, or even use the  Open function under the file menu to treat them as a separate Home Budget Database which the exception that no modifications can be made to archived Databases.

Since Home Budget can load quickly even 10 years worth of data in only a few seconds, purging transactions is really only useful for machines with limited amount of memory (i.e. less than 4 Megabytes), or to keep the finance program small enough so as to fit on a floppy disk.

To Merge you must supply a Date. All transactions previous to this supplied date are purged. Note that however, all transactions during this period must be reconciled. If Home Budget finds any transactions not reconciled, it will let you know which account, and abort the purge until you have reconciled these transactions.

It is recommended that you first Backup your database before perform the Merge function.

Note:	Currently the Archived files are written to the same location from where the budget files was loaded. For safe keeping you may wish to move these to backup disks using the FileManager. The file names will be the first 6 characters of your budget name with the year (YY) appended followed by the extensions .TRN .ACC. ATP


Merging Archived Transactions

This function will merge back all Transactions starting with the specified year back into the active database. The files that are used are based on the budget name with the Year appended. For example if your budget name is BUDGET.trn then and you entered the Year 92. Then the files Budget92.* and Budget93.* and so on are used until all archived transactions have been merge back in.

It is recommended that you first Backup your database before perform the Merge function.

Note:	Currently the Merge function checks the same location on your drive from where the Budget file was loaded. If the Archived files are in a different location, you must first move them into your budget directory with the FileManager.


Backing up the Database

It is a good idea for whenever you have finished entering any transactions into Home Budget to backup the database before exiting the program. If you like you can have Home Budget prompt you to perform the Backup each time you exit the program after making any modifications. See Setup Options for more information.

The default location for the Backup is A:\budgetname.trn you can change this or click the browse button to location


Setup Options

The follow options can be set:

From Range	The number of months back to set the Date From range upon starting up Home Budget.

Password	This is optional. Set this to a password of 8 characters or less. You will not be able to access this budget without first entering this password. If you later wish to remove the password protection just blank this field.

AutoPayment Reminder

This will prompt you each time you enter the load the Database if any AutoPayments are due to be created. Select the Setup-AutoPayments function to view and execute the due AutoPayments.

Backup Prompt 	Checking this box will cause a Backup Prompt box to be displayed each time you exit the program and have made any modifications to the Database. This is recommended.

Ignore OverExpensed

Normally Home Budget will account for expense accounts that are in the Red (overdrawn)  in the networth calculation for remaining balance. If you check this box, this changes the default behavior not to reserve funds from the remaining balance to cover the overdrawn amount(s).


Tips and Shortcuts

Entering Dates

Reconciling Bank Statements

Tracking Assets

Quick Sorting


Entering Dates

You may enter any of the following formats for any date fields within Home Budget

DD-MMM-YY, 	example: 21-May-94

DDMMMYY	example: 21MAY94

DDMMM	example 21May

DD	example 21

The remaining portions of the date, if not specified are extracted from the current date.


Sorting
Quick Sorting

By clicking on the Title Box a column will in the Account Book window or the Account Summary window you can cause Home Budget to resort based on that column. Clicking again on the same column will cause a reverse sort.

Alternatively you can use the Transaction menu or the Account menu to sort. No matter which method you sort by the menu will have the Check mark against the column that is currently being used to sort against.


Reconciling Bank Statements

The easiest and fastest way to reconcile your bank Statements.

Chequing accounts:

1.	Goto you Chequing account, and set the range back only far enough to be within the oldest cheque to reconcile.

2.	For each chequ, use the Amount or Cheque number and enter this into the FIND box.

3.	Verify that the transaction found is indeed the same cheque and if so Enter Ctrl+R to reconcile it (or double click reconcile column). If it is not the correct cheque hit F3 to find the next occurrence of this Amount or Cheque number.

4.	If the Cheque was not found, you missed entering it. So enter it now and immediately reconcile it (Ctrl+R, or double click Reconcile column).

5.	Repeat steps 1-4 for each cheque. Once complete the Recon Bal displayed in the Account totals should match the ending balance from your Bank statement.

Credit Card Statements

Use the same procedure as above, except you will only be able to search on the Amount (since no cheque numbers are involved). Be careful to ensure you have match the correct transaction as possibly multiple transactions may have the same amount. Use the description or place of purchase also to be sure.

Tip:  Since any unreconciled transactions have an asterisk * displayed you can use the find function to search for the asterisk to locate any unreconciled transactions.


Tracking Assets

To Track your assets such as RRSPs, Stocks, investments, etc.. you can create various Asset accounts and record any income against these accounts.

To record income into the Asset account you can record the source account as a income Account or as the special account name ASSET. When you add a transaction against the asset account using the source account of ASSET no other real accounts are affected. On the other hand if you wish an income account to also reflect the income from this asset account, specify the source account as the income account instead. Keep in mind though if you do  use an Income account that any reports or graphs against budget vs Income will included this asset income which may not be part of your regular income/expense cash flow.

Example to Track RRSP investment:

1.	If you have not already done so, create an expense account to allow you to budget for the amount that is to be spent on RRSP per month. Lets call it RRSP. If the amount to be put in RRSPs per month is $200, then set the budget amount under Budget Setup to $200 for this account.

2.	Create an Asset type account that will monitor the growth of your RRSP investments, lets call it RRSP_Investments  Set the starting balance to the your current RRSP amount per your bank statement.

3.	Assuming that your $200 RRSP_Investment is taken from your chequing account on the 15th of each month, create an autopay transaction, with the first account listed as RRSP, the source account would be your Chequing account and the debit amount would be $200.

4.	The autopayment created moves the money out from your RRSP account via your Chequing account to purchase the RRSPs. But it did not have any affect on your RRSP_Investments asset account. To show the money in your RRSP_Investment account you must create another AutoPay transaction for the same date specifying the first account as RRSP_Investments and the source account as ASSETS. This amount would typically be the same, ie $200, but it does not have to be, in-fact if you have a service charge for example of $5.00 this can be deducted and the transaction recorded as $195 credit to this account.

Summary: The above procedure allows for Budgeting of the RRSPs, deducts the amount from Chequing on the 15th of each month, and records the appropriate amount in your RRSP_Investments asset account.

What about the interest earned?

To record any growth in the RRSPs you can record this as a transaction that you enter from information from statements showing interest, or if its a fixed rate you could use AutoPayments to add transactions of the appropriate amount to the asset account. Later any reports or Graphs against this asset account will give you a clear picture of how it is growing.

What about cashing an Asset?

If for example you cash an RRSP you basically repeat the steps above but this time debit the RRSP_Investments account against the special ASSETS source account, and record the Credit to your Bank or Chequing account against the appropriate Income account. Or the alternative if you do not wish your Income account to reflect this income you could create one transaction against the RRSP_Investments account that moves the money directly into your Bank account.


How to Register

You are granted use of this program for an evaluation period of 30 days. After which you must register with the Author. Registration costs only $15 U.S. or $20 CDN.

Being registered means you are supporting the ShareWare concept and allows you to receive updates, provide wish lists for new features and that generally warm and fuzzy feeling that you did the right thing.

To Register Send Check or Money order in U.S. or Canadian Funds to:

Steven Drew

216 MacEwan Valley Mews N.W.

Calgary, Alberta

Canada

T3K 3T3

Please also Include:

1.	Your name and Address

2.	Your and Email address (if you have one)

3.	The version of Home Budget (from About Box)

4.	Where you found Home Budget.

You will be sent a registration code (by EMAIL if you supply one or by postal mail if not) based on your Name that will be displayed in the About Box indicating that you are running a registered version of the program.


Copyright
Copyright  Steven Drew 1995

Steven Drew	403-295-3601

216-MacEwan Valley Mews N.W.

Calgary Alberta

Canada

T3K 3T3

Shareware $15 U.S. or $20 CDN.

See How to Register for more information.

For comments Internet Mail to:  drew@nowhere.mtroyal.ab.ca