Help Menu
                                Bill Reminder Help

Introduction

The Bill Reminder is a utility for reminding you when Bills are due. This is a useful tool for allowing you to hold on to your money for as long as you can and effectively managing what you need to keep in your checking account.

The program bill.exe can be installed anywhere.  In the directory where it is installed, it will open a file called billyyy.dat that contains all the billing information.  If the bill.exe file is moved at a later time to a different directory, this file should be moved as well.

Usage

For bills that are mailed to you, simply record the bill (for the first time with the Add menu option) the date that it is due, and the amount in the labeled edit boxes.  Dates must be specified in dd-MMM-yyyy format, i.e. 14-Jan-1994.

Optionally, address, account and phone number information can also be provided in order that Bill Reminder can be used as a place to record this information.  Amounts must be specified as valid numeric strings with or without a decimal point.  If a date or amount is not specified, the bill is marked as paid.  If an invalid date or amount is specified, an error dialog will be  displayed.  Otherwise, assuming that there is more than a week until the bill is due, the bill will be displayed in the main window as pending and colored black.

When the bill becomes due within a week, it will turn color from  black to blue.  If the bill is not paid within a week, it becomes late and will turn color from blue to red (You don't need many of those).  It also tells you how much you need to pay late, due, and  pending bills.  A bill can be paid in two different ways.  By using

the Pay Menu Option, the status of the bill will be toggled between paid and not paid, assuming that paid bills have valid data fields. The other way pay a bill is to do it via the Change Menu Option.  When the bill appears in the edit dialog, check the Paid box.  When the bill is paid, It will be listed as paid and grayed on the screen.  It remains in the bill list, however, so that when it is received the

next time, it can be reinitialized.

For bills that are not mailed to you, i.e. your mortgage or your car payment, simply enter it for the first time as you would a mailed bill.  When you pay it, however, simply update the date in which it is due again to make it pending (It's always pending until you pay it off).

Bills can be deleted using the Delete Menu Option (I wish they all would go away).  Bill Reminder keeps a 12 month history of all bills that are kept under the program.  To see a bar graph of this history, select the History option. The Help menu option provides information about the Bill Reminder program.

Keyboard Controls

The controls are pretty straight forward.  The mouse can be used to point to a bill for selected use.  A single click makes the bill selected.  A double click opens an edit dialog for the bill.  Bills can also be selected using the up/down arrows.  Pressing the enter key after a bill is selected also opens an edit dialog for the bill.

There are both horizontal and vertical scrollers for the Bill Reminder main window.  The mouse can be used to access these controls.  The <Home> key puts you at the top of the bill list.  The <End> key puts you at the end.  The <PgUp> and <PgDown> keys move you up and down through the bill list respectively.

Bills that are in the paid state are in alphabetical order.  In order to quickly find a bill, as long as you know the first letter, press it and bills the first bill that begins with that letter will be presented. From here, it should be very simple to find the bill that you are looking for.