Accounts & Loans User's Manual

Table of Contents

1. Requirement

• PalmPilot Personal or better
• Palm OS 2.0 (or later)
• MathLib.prc (this file is needed only if you need the loan calculation capability)

2. Installation

3. Removing the program

To uninstall the program, just use your PalmPilot's memory manager or other Palm series' delete app menu option to remove it. If you are using an old Palm Desktop program, you may also want to goto your desktop's backup directory (/palm/[username]/Backup/) and manually remove the following files: AccsNLoans.prc, ANLListDB.pdb, ANLTransDB.pdb, and ANLRecurDB.pdb.

4. Setup

4.1 Currencies

Main Screen	Edit Currency Menu	The home currency has the default symbol of "$". You may change this to any other 4-character long symbol. To do so, goto the Main Screen, then tap on Menu, then choose Setup, then Currency List.

Currency List	Currency Entry	Doing this will popup a screen showing a list of currently defined currencies. Then you can select the "$" currency and hit OK. A dialog box will popup and you can change its default symbol to something else. You can also add new currencies, modify the exchange rates, or delete the defined currencies in this "Edit Currencies" screen. NOTE: If you are deleting a currency, any account entries that uses it will be changed to home currency.

Account List	New Account

4.4 Memory (Description) List

The memory list can be used to memorized frequently entered transactions. But note that it is also being served as a description list. When you enter an exist or a new item, a transaction entry form will appear. You can use this form to enter a frequently entered transaction or just the description. See section on entering transaction to learn how to get the memorized transaction during data entry and how to get just the description portion of the memorized transaction during data entry.

Tip: When you're entering a transaction, you can also quickly save the description (or I should say the entire transaction) into the list just by going to Setup Menu, then tap on Save To Memory.

4.5 Options

The scroller setting will control whether the Account statement screen, loan screen, and the recurring transaction screen will scroll one line at a time or one page at a time. Setting the backup check box will make sure that the next time you hotsync, all databases used by this program (ANLListDB.pdb, ANLRecurDB.pdb, and ANLTransDB.pdb) will be backed up in your Palm Desktop's backup directory (\palm\[username]\backup). The "Lock app" setting will prevent this program from running if the Palm Organizer's "Hide" setting is on or if you've chosen the "always" lock selection. To enter the program, you'll need to supply your Palm Organizer's password. Note: This option has no effect if you didn't set a password for your organizer. Confirm deletion check box controls whether a confirmation dialog box will popup or not whenever you try to delete an entry or perform a data purge operation. Checking the "Use -/+ instead of DB/CR" will change all the DB/CR into -/+ symbols in all entry forms. The "Use separator" instructs the program to display all numbers with a separator in either of the following 2 formats: 10,000 or 1,0000. The "Inform auto trans on startup" checkbox is to instruct the program to pop up a message if automatic transactions are added by the program during startup. The default time selection dialog box is similar to the one in your device's preference setting screen. But if you prefer to use Date Book's time selection dialog box, you can activate that here. By default, all check boxes are not set (except the backup checkbox).

Tapping on the "Next" button will bring you to the next option screen.

Checking the "Show cheque#" option will add the cheque# in the description column in account statement screen. The "Always Start in Acct Statement" will skip the main screen and jump directly to the account statement screen on start up. The "Use check mark instead of C / R" checkbox is for the account statement screen. It tells the program whether you prefer to have a check mark symbol to indicate a cleared / reconciled transaction instead of the C and R letters. The "Mark trans. cleared if reconciled" means if you mark an item as reconciled during account reconciliation, that item will be marked as cleared automatically at the same time. See section on account reconciliation for details. Checking the "Remembers prev. trans. date" option will tell the program every time you enter a new transaction, the date will be set to the previously entered (or viewed) transaction date. By default, all check boxes are not set.

5. The Main Screen

This screen is the starting point of the program. From this screen, you can choose to enter a quick entry, view the account statements, goto your loan list or recurring transaction list, and view various kinds of reports.

Also, at any time when you see the small clock icon (such as the one shown beside the title), you can tap on it to get the current time so that you don't have to exit the program just to get the current time.

6. Account Statements

6.1 Entering Transactions

Main Screen	Account Statement	You can goto the item entry screen either by tapping on the "Quick Entry" button from the Main screen or tapping on the "New" button from the Account Statement screen.

Then the following transaction entry form will popup.

Tap on the "Account Statement" button from the Main screen to view is list of all transactions for the currently selected account.

This screen shows all the transactions for the account indicated in the top right corner of the screen. The letter "E" beside the amount as shown above means that the currency exchanged has been applied. The original transaction is in a different currency. Tapping on the little "E" will popup a dialog box showing the currency exchange information as shown above. To enter a new item, just tap on the "new" button. To go back to the main screen, tap on the left arrow beside the title bar. Also, note that if the date is older than today's date, it is shown in Bold font. To view/modify the details of each item, just tap on it and the full detail screen will be shown and you can start modifying the entry.

At the bottom of the screen, you have a choice to view the current balance, end balance, cleared balance, uncleared balance, credit remain, spending limit (current balance + credit remain), or the balance at a specific date of your choice. (NOTE: If you select a future date, this program will take into consideration of all necessary future recurring transactions or loan payments into the balance calculation even if it is not being displayed.)

The right most column in the account statement screen allows you to easily mark which item has been cleared or reconciled. Tapping on the "C" or "R" button will toggle the column between Cleared and Reconciled. I made a distinction between cleared and reconciled to allow you better keep track of what's going on. For instance, you may have checked your account balance from the ATM and realized that you check and credit card payment has been cleared, but you haven't receive your bank statement yet, so I let you check this separately.

In the option screen, you have an option to tie the reconciled flag with the cleared flag. If the option is set, then whenever you set the reconciled flag, the cleared flag will be set for you automatically. (However, the reverse is not true. If you unset the reconciled flag, the cleared flag will not be unset for you.)

From the menu in the account statement screen, there are a few options to remove old transactions:

• "Cleared" - Remove all transactions marked cleared.
• "Cleared By Date" - Remove the cleared transactions up to a date specified by you.
• "Reconciled" - Remove all reconciled transactions.
• "Reconciled By Date" - Remove the reconciled transactions up to a date specified by you.
• "All By Date" - Remove absolutely everything up to a date specified by you.

Say you need to make a credit card payment on April 20 and you want to remind yourself on that date. You can do this by going to the item entry screen (as shown on the left), then choose "Menu" - "Remind Me". At this stage, you have an option of putting a reminder in Date Book, To Do List, or Memo Pad.

The following shows an example of how the reminder will appear in Date Book, To Do List, and Memo Pad.

On occasions you may have forgotten to enter the transaction when it happened, or it is a joined account and you don't know transactions your partner have made. As a result, the current balance as indicated on the statement screen isn't quite what you expected. To correct this current balance, you can use the "Adjust Balance" menu option to quickly add a "Balance Adjustment" record (or change the very first "Balance" record) that take cares of the difference.

The following figures shows an example.

Say your Checking account's current balance is $1175.14, but you checked you account balance from an ATM and it shows $1100. To correct for that, you can choose the "Adjust Balance" menu option. this will bring up a dialog box asking you for a new balance. At this point, you can do either of the followings:

To add a new transaction showing the difference, select the "Add balance adjustment rec." checkbox, then enter the new balance, then hit OK. You will see that a "Balance Adjustment" record is added into the statement and the current balance now shows $1100.

At any time you are entering a transaction, you can save the entry to memorized list by going to Menu - Setup - Save To Memory.

7. Loans

To enter a new loan, tap on the "New" button from the loan list screen will bring you to the loan entry form.

After you've entered the frequency, you just need to enter 3 of the 4 loan calculation items (principal, annual interest rate, # of payment, and payment amount), check the one you want to calculate and then hit the "Calc" button to get the value.

If you selected a valid account to withdraw the money from, entries will be added to that account automatically (starting from payment number 1).

If you don't want to add all the old payments in the withdraw account, you can enter the number of payments already made. To do this, hit the "Details" button to get the details dialog:

Then enter the current payment number. In this dialog box, you can also specify how many advance entries to show in the account statement screen, and add auto-reminder in date book, to do list, or memo pad. The purpose of the "reset" button is to update the principal to the balance as of last payment, the date to the last payment date, and reset the current payment number to 1. You probably want to do this first before you start modifying the numbers.

7.3 Delete Existing Loans

To delete a loan, first select the loan from the loan listing screen. Then just tap on the "Delete" button will delete the loan from the list. Note: If you removed a loan from the list, the corresponding loan payment entries from the withdraw account will not be removed. You have to remove them manually.

8. Recurring Transactions

To enter a new recurring transaction, tap on the "New" button from the above screen. Then the following entry form will appear.

Say today's date is April 15, 2000 and you want the first recurring transaction to start on this date, then you enter April 15, 2000 as your starting date. Also enter the frequency of this transaction, amount, category, and account.

Leave the current transaction number to be 0. This field is here just to show you how many transaction has been added and executed since the start date. If you leave it to 0, a "Cable Bill" transaction will be added for you in the credit card account and this transaction number will be incremented to 1. If you now goto the account statement screen and examine the details of the "Cable Bill" transaction, you'll notice the current transaction number is also associated with this record.

After a while this transaction number is going to become very big. So, the purpose of the "Reset" button in the entry form is to allow you to reset the number to 1. It will also adjust the date to the last transaction's date and the transaction numbers for all the old records will be removed.

Also, you can modify the number of advance entries and add an auto reminder records in To Do, Memo Pad, or Datebook in the details dialog box as shown below.

9. Reports

If you choose category summary report, a "Details" button will appear. If you then highlight a category and then hit the "Details" button, another form will pop up showing all the records with the matching category and matching accounts.

If you don't want to see the "Unfiled" account in your account report, you can hide it by going to the menu. Then tap on "Hide Unfiled Account". This will prevent the "Unfiled" account from showing up in the report.

The purpose of the "Export" button is to export the summary data on screen to Memo Pad.

Note: The "Scroll Page" and "Scroll Line" checkbox will only affect the device's physical button.

10. Data Export/Import

10.1 Data Export

To export account statements, account information, recurring transaction list, or loan list in CSV format, goto the main screen and tap on "Menu", then "I/O", then select the appropriate choice.

The CSV format of the exported data are shown in the table below:

Currently, you can only import transaction data listed in Memo Pad. All Memo Pad records with "ANL Import" as the first line will be considered for data import. The program expects the same account statement CSV format as shown in the above Data Export section. Account, currency, and category records will be created when necessary. When a currency is created, its "use decimal" flag is decided based on whether the associated amount has a decimal symbol or not.

Consider the following Memo Pad record as an example:

After the import operation, an entry for "US Checking" is created in the account list. The symbols "L." (with use decimal flag turned off) and "US$" (with use decimal flag turned on) are added to the currency list. A new "Test Category" is also added in the category list. See below. (Note that the exchange rates for the created currencies are always 1:1, you will have to correct that yourself.)

Account List	US Checking	Category List

Currency List	Italian Lira (L.)	US Dollars (US$)

Finally, the following transaction record will be created by the import operation.

11. Security

12. Details on Quik Budget Support

13. Legal Stuff

14. Questions And Answers

14.1 I've crashed my handheld, how do I restore ANL's data?

AccsNLoans.prc
ANLListDB.pdb
ANLTransDB.pdb
ANLRecurDB.pdb

Once you've done that, just re-install these files into your device using the Palm Install Tool that come with your device (don't use third party install tool).

The other possibility is if you're using a Mac with an older HotSync program. There is a bug in the Install Conduit of one of the older Mac HotSync program. It modifies the record's unique ID while it is not supposed to. Try to upgrade it to the latest version.