Home Accounts



I wanted this program to be as simple and easy to use as

possible but at the same time flexible enough to be able to

cover a variety of accounting methods. I also wanted to be

able to store enough accounting data in the 19K Spectrum to

make the program worthwhile.

  The program allows you one master account and several

expenditure accounts. All sources of income are entered

into the master account which also, automatically, contains

the balance of each expenditure account. Each expenditure

account contains details of expenses relevant to that

account. This arrangement ties in with most people's income

sources and a wide variety of expenses which may be divided

into categories. Income sources must always be entered into

the master account, and might typically be a salary,

interest on savings and the occasional gift. Expenses must

be entered into the appropriate expenditure account. There

is never any need to enter expenses as negative amounts

(such entries will be ignored anyway) because the program

realises that all entries in the expenditure accounts are

to be debited from the master account.

  The program is flexible in that it allows you to decide

how many expenditure accounts you want, and what you want

to call them. Careful thought should be given to this

decision as, once it is made, it cannot be altered without

destroying the details that you subsequently enter into

these accounts. In practice, of course, giving yourself a

lot of expenditure accounts doesn't allow you to spend

more, as the latest balance in each one is entered into the

master account as a debit. Perhaps less obvious is the fact

that the more expenditure accounts you have, the smaller

the number of entries you can make in each. I suggest that

you don't have more than 15 expenditure accounts and that

you make one of these into a miscellaneous account. You are

sure to find ways of spending money that don't fall neatly

into the categories that you have given yourself.



Starting the program

  Your first task is to decide upon your expenditure

accounts and to give them names. To conserve memory you are

only allowed a 6 character mnemonic for each name. You must

also enter the date which will be taken as the starting

date for your first accounting period. You will then be

given a menu with four choices.



1. Make an Entry

  You must select the account into which you wish to make

an entry. Only sources of income must be entered into the

master account. You must enter the date of the entry as a

month and day number. I have assumed that you will make

entries into each account in chronological order. If you

don't, no harm is done, but the entries will appear in the

order in which you enter them, they will not be sorted. The

master account first contains the current balances in each

expenditure account with the date given as the date of the

last entry in that particular account, all income entries

are displayed after that.

  You must give a 6 character identifying mnemonic for

each entry and you must enter the amount as a decimal in

pounds, e.g. £14 is entered as 14.00, 36p is entered as

0.36 or .36.

  You are given a chance to check the data you have entered

and reject it, otherwise it is entered into the appropriate

account whose current status is then displayed.



2. Display an account

  Simply select which account you wish to display. You may

get a printout too if you have a ZX Printer.



3. Save onto tape

  Every time you make some entries, which might typically

be 3 times a week, you must save the program and data onto

tape. You will, therefore, need at least one, and prefer-

ably several, blank tapes. After saving, the computer will

ask you to rewind the tape and play it back to verify the

recording. You may wish to make several recordings, one

after another, to ensure that if one gets damaged you have

back-ups. An additional security method, which is standard

practice in business circles, is to have a small number

(say 3) tapes that you rotate. Call the tapes 1, 2 and 3,

say. After day 1, save your program onto tape 1. On day 2

load the program from tape 1, make your new entries and

save it onto tape 2. On day 3 load from tape 2 and save on

tape 3 but on day 4 load from tape 3 and save onto tape 1

again. Continue rotating in this fashion. If one of your

tapes gets destroyed you can always go back one day and

re-enter the previous day's entries. In fact, if you rotate

n tapes, you can lose n-1 tapes and still all is not lost.



4. Start a new accounting period

  The choice of accounting period is entirely yours but is

limited by the number of entries that you can make in each

account. Typically you may choose to start a new period

every month.

  Before starting a new period, you must save the current

program and data onto tape. You may wish to build up a

library of such tapes, one for each month. You will be

asked to enter the starting date. You will still have the

same number of expenditure accounts, with the same names as

before, but all entries will have been removed. The only

information carried over from one period to the next is the

final balance in the old master account which is entered as

"brought forward" in the new master account.



  Finally, this program will have no time for halfpennies,

but I will gladly supply a list of charities if you

accumulate a bag full.