Conference hydra::amiga_v1

I use PHASAR. It commercial and I think about the best package for Amiga
home finance.

There is also "bankn" on a Fish disk and other commercial ones (Money Mentor).

Abel prices:


Phasar 4.0 ------------------------ Antic ----------------25 $ 89.95 $ 52.28
Money Mentor ---------------------- Sedona Software -------- $ 95.95 $ 53.98

john

    Re: .0

    Funny, I was just about to enter a note on this myself. I've tried Bankn,
    but the author's use of color is atrocious, I found it very awkward to
    enter the budget codes and it doesn't keep a running balance (only final).
    Doesn't help much when I'm trying to track down those subtraction errors
    in my checkbook register.

    If you're strictly looking for a PD checkbook balancer, in the latest 
    batch of Fish disks, there's a program called CheckBook on FF425. I just 
    downloaded it last night and only played areound with it for a short 
    while, but it looks good. Sports a WB2.0 style interface, keeps running
    totals for both your checkbook and against your statement, has on-line 
    help, easy to use budget categories, various views, keyboard shortcuts, 
    etc. Uses high-res, but the author's use of color (mainly gray) eliminates 
    the flicker. The only thing I can't quite figure out how to do with it is 
    insert a transaction in the middle; it always tacks them on at the end. 
    The author does mention that there are more features to come in V1.0 - 
    this is V0.9. Check it out :-)

    -Dom
    

    I use DeskTop Budget from Gold Disk. I've just completed a year of 
    full data entry (all spending greater than $1.00) and although the
    results were very interesting, I hope to never go through this ordeal
    again! This year I plan to use the package to track my bank accounts,
    Visa and Sears accounts, and any income sources.
    
    The program has many bells and whistles such as automatic double entry
    and deletion, year to date or monthly reports in list or graphic form,
    searches on entry date, $ value, or budget catagory, and many more to
    numerous to mention.
    
    The only caution I would give is to set up your credit card accounts
    as "chequing type" accounts. If you don't you will not be able to see
    any payments you make when you reconcile the account as they are
    automatically cleared when entered. The best thing about this package
    is that when you are done reconciling, is gives you a trial balance
    for the account, which always (for me) equals the bottom line on the
    bank, Visa, or Sears statements.
    
    All in all I am satisfied with the package and only wish I had gotten
    paid for all the data entry I performed last year.
    
    Regards,
    
    Murray Steeves
    

    I've used PHASAR for about two years now and I also think that
    it is the best package for HOME finance around.  I looked at
    others but Phasar seemed to be the most complete.
    
    md

    I've used PHASAR V2.0 for 4 years or so. I use it for home and small
    business accounting.  I find it meets my needs: 4 personal accounts, 35
    categories, 4 credit cards, and 1 business account.  It's like
    anything, once you figure it out you can make it work for you.
    
    ... Rich

    I have tried money mentor,and it worked well. Then I just let it go for
    some reason. I am now looking at bringing it back online or going to
    Phaser 4.0 . Money mentor was easy to use excelled in reporting,and 
    always told me I was spending too much money on Antique Marbles,and the
    Amiga. Otherwise it is a good package. I feel Phaser 4.0 is more
    powerfull but I really don't have a lot to track. I did like the
    results I had with money mentor. I thought it had died awhile back.
    Maybe Sedona Software has an update?
    							bill

    
    
    I have used Money Mentor and then switched to Phasar.  On the
    whole I favor Phasar because of the tax package.  I now project
    my taxes a full year in advance and adjust my W-4 form so I
    don't have to pay.  The only feature that I want that the
    packages don't have is the ability to create budget vs actual
    reports for only the checking acount.  Sometimes all I want
    to know is "did I spend more than I made this month from my checking
    account".
    
    Another failing is that the packages tend to view credit cards as
    being completly paid off each month and therfore a transfer of
    money from one account to another does not count in the budget.
    
    What I have done to get around the limitations is to output
    certain things to files and then edit the files to produce the 
    results that I want.
    
    One thing that I would recommend is to set up a dummy account into
    which you deposit any money that gets remove from your pay before you 
    see it and then pay out into expense accounts.  This will greatly 
    facilitate tax planning. 

    I've just started using something called Maxiplan. Its one of the software
    packages that came bundled with my Amiga 500, which I bought in December.
    I gather its not the full version, but an 'educational' (fewer features)
    version.

    The first couple of days with the thing were very frustrating. The first
    thing you have to do is create a bootable work disk, by running an install
    script. If, like me, you only have a single disk drive, this means a lot
    of disk swaps, and when I say a lot, I mean *A LOT*. After nearly an hour
    I finally had my bootable disk. 

    Using the package isn't so bad, and the disk swapping is only as frequent
    as you'd expect. However, this package has a more serious limitation...
    The manual is *really* poor. Trying to find out how to do things was a
    major source of annoyance. It looks like they wrote the thing overnight
    with a word processor and a crate of Budweiser. 

    Another slight drawback is that it uses a standard US font which is not
    compatible with my British keyboard (no �)... but I expect if I were to
    try hard enough I could convince it to use another.

    Having said all that, I'm reasonably happy with the software itself, which
    has full spreadsheet capabilities and a number of different graph formats
    available. It can also 'talk' to you, though I haven't found a use for
    that so far. The user interface is very good. They recommend 1 Meg, 
    incidentally, which I fortunately have with a � Meg expansion board.

    D���

    
    
    I've not done this in over a year but  ....
    Assuming this is resembles current versions of Maxiplan, there is a
    "currency" option in the format menu which allows you to change the
    $ to �.   When I tried it, it allowed you to change from $ to �
    "on the screen" but I've not been able to make the � replace the
    $ on the printer.
      
    Frank
    

    Hmm.. I thought I'd tried that. Problem is in finding a � on the 
    keyboard. Many of the punctuation characters are in the wrong place,
    (but since my Vaxstation has an American Keyboard I can usually
    find them from memory).
    
    The '�' key comes up as a '#', I think.

Try note 1539, lots of discussion there...

    Re: .2 (CheckBook V0.9 on FF425)

>    The only thing I can't quite figure out how to do with it is 
>    insert a transaction in the middle; it always tacks them on at the end. 
>    The author does mention that there are more features to come in V1.0 - 
>    this is V0.9. Check it out :-)

    CheckBook Accountant V2.0 is on FF 515. The author's been hard at work,
    fixing the above problem and adding tons of new features. I've been 
    playing around with this for about an hour and am very impressed. An 
    incredibly nice piece of PD software. Kudos to the author, Jeffrey R. 
    Almasol.

    -Dom
    

    Re .12:
    
>   CheckBook Accountant V2.0 is on FF 515. The author's been hard at work,
>   fixing the above problem and adding tons of new features. I've been 
>   playing around with this for about an hour and am very impressed. An 
>   incredibly nice piece of PD software. Kudos to the author, Jeffrey R. 
>   Almasol.
    
    I've been using CA 2 for a week or so and I'm also duly impressed. 
    While it would be nice to have SEPARATE preferences for each checkbook
    (I'm tracking three of them), the program is quite good.  I've only run
    into two serious bugs (one moreso than the other), but neither has cost
    any lost data or visits from the Guru.
    
    1.	In Batch mode (RAmiga-~), using the RAmiga-A shortcut to Add a
    	record leaves the transaction window blank (no fields displayed)
    	instead of refreshing it, as the Add button does.  Now that I've
    	entered several hundred transactions, I tend to stay out of batch
    	mode and do everything with the keyboard shortcuts (which are well
    	thought-out and intuitive).
    2.	More seriously, I simply CAN'T add transactions to groups.  I can
    	name/create the group, but when I add a transaction to it, junk
    	appears on the line in the group display window.  C'est la vie!

   Re: .13
    
>    1.	In Batch mode (RAmiga-~), using the RAmiga-A shortcut to Add a
>    	record leaves the transaction window blank (no fields displayed)
>    	instead of refreshing it, as the Add button does.  Now that I've
>    	entered several hundred transactions, I tend to stay out of batch
>    	mode and do everything with the keyboard shortcuts (which are well
>    	thought-out and intuitive).
>    2.	More seriously, I simply CAN'T add transactions to groups.  I can
>    	name/create the group, but when I add a transaction to it, junk
>    	appears on the line in the group display window.  C'est la vie!

   Yeah, (1) was about the only nit I found last night. I figured that
   the keyboard shortcuts would be the way to enter an existing checkbook
   ledger and having the transaction window come up blank would make it
   tough if you wanted to stick to keyboard entry. Switching back and forth
   between the mouse and the keyboard can be painful. He does document the 
   deficiency in the help screens, and suggests clicking into the main
   window (which of course pushes the transaction screen to the rear), then
   clicking in the transaction screen to refresh it. So it goes.

   Can't help with (2) at this point. And I agree, it is good enough to pay 
   for, as good as any piece of commercial software I've seen.

    -Dom
   

I had a look at Checkbook over the weekend. Is there any way to get it
out of hi-res mode, cos with my DIGITAL monitor it's unusable!


Greg

I also looked at CheckBook Accountant. Nice interface. I haven't looked into
it's capabilities yet.

I was concidering switching over from PHASAR V4.0. Any ideas on how painfull
this would be? Does CA handle most everything PHASAR does (like categories etc)?

john

    Re .16:
    
>   I was concidering switching over from PHASAR V4.0. Any ideas on how
>   painful this would be? Does CA handle most everything PHASAR does
>   (like categories etc)?
    
    I'm not sure that CA is fully comparable to Phasar.  It has a budgeting
    function, but I haven't used it.  It claims to be able to distribute
    checks among multiple budget accounts but I don't see how from the
    basic entry interface.
    
    I don't have the discipline to go through the entire budget process. 
    (That implies staying current on checks/deposits as they're made,
    rather tha"n catching "up periodically.)  I'm using CA to help get our
    checkbooks back in balance (it's a long time between reconciliations at
    my house and our subtraction is often suspect).

    I hate to say it but IMHO none of these even come close to quicken 4.0.
    
    This is the only thing I use my wife's PC for.  The thing is I don't
    think the quicken interface is all that great.  It just works SO well
    and does all the things you'd want.  I have everything in there related
    to money.  All credit cards, bank accounts, checking accounts,
    mortgage, loans, income dispursement, stock investment accounts.  What
    more can I say.  The program came with her computer, but I think
    it only retails for about $40.
    
    sigh...
    
    steve

    Re: budgeting

    I figured out the trick to this one, after much head scratching. From
    the transaction (check) requestor, click on the Budget... gadget to
    bring up the Budget Distributions requestor, click Add... to bring up
    the default list of budgets. Select one, then Okay... (or double-click
    on one). When you return to the Budget Distributions requestor, the
    cursor will (sometimes) be displayed in the boxed field. The secret
    here is to press Return to accept the amount which will be equal to
    the check amount (or you can use a smaller amount and distribute
    the rest over another budget). Then click the Okay... gadget. If you
    don't press Return and just click on Okay..., all your work is for
    naught, and the money won't be budgeted. 

    I also found that it's best to set large budget amounts via the Budget
    List menu item. I figured I could just leave them all at $0.00 (since I
    was just interested in how much I spent in a particular category, rather
    than seeing how close I was to the limit). When you do this, you're
    forced to acknowledge notices when you reload your checkbook which tell
    you every single category which is overbudgeted.

    To find out how much you've spent in any particular category, just
    bring up the Budget list via the Budget/Budget List... menu item, and
    click on each individual category. The amount you've spent will be
    displayed for each in the area at the bottom. There are 2 amounts - one
    for the entire checkbook and the other for any time period you wish. 
    You use the same Budget List to add new budget categories as well.

    Re: other than hi-res mode

    I don't think it's possible. On my C=2002, I just turn the brightness
    down to eliminate the flicker.

    Re: the add check to reoccuring transactions group bug.

    Tried it last night and got the same thing. A line full of @'s when you
    add the transaction to the group.

    I spent about 3 hours this past weekend entering my checkbook register
    since last March. Reconciled it, and balanced it within a penny. 

    -Dom

    CheckBook accountant does not run on my system. Well, actually it seems
    to run fine except that when the OPEN, SAVE, or SAVE AS options are
    invoked, my system GURUs immediately after the file requestor appears.
    It does this under 2.0 AND 1.3.3, so it must have something to do with
    my specific hardware configuration. Here's my specs in case someone
    has the same problem:
    
    3000 (UXD), 9 meg memory, KS/WB 2.04 or 1.3.3
    5 disk partitions, 1 floppy, RAMdisk, RADdisk
    Under 2.0, I run an overscan screen of 676x444 (I thought this could
    have been the problem, until I tried 1.3.3)
    
    Can anyone shed light on this? It seems like a real good program!
    

Re .20:

WAG:

I don't have the program you're having problems with, but I wouldn't be
surprised if it's using one of the commonly available requester libraries, like
req.library. Mayhap you have an incompatibile version of such a library, or
perhaps a totally different library than the one expected by the program, using
the same name (unlikely, but possible).

Perhaps other users of this program could supply the identifying info for
their requester libraries, if my WAG isn't totally off the mark.

Cheers,
	Bob

    According to the docs, it was tested on a 3000 with the following
    KS/WB revs:

    Kickstart 36.143 / Workbench 34.20
    Kickstart 36.209 / Workbench 36.102

    You do have the kd_freq.library which it uses for the file requestors
    installed, correct?

    Can't be of much more help as I'm running on a 3 meg A500 under 1.3.2.

    -Dom

    Re: -.1
    
    Yeap; I saw that. I'm running V2.04 (37.mumble) of 2.0 - but
    it also doesn't work on my system under 1.3.3 (same problems). The
    kd_freq.library was in libs:. Since it fails under both OS's, and it
    does so on the file requestor, I assume it has something to do with
    that library; perhaps in relationship to my specific hardware
    configuration (memory, disk partitions, ...). A VERSION command reports
    that the library is 2.0.
    
    Has ANYONE else tried this on V2.04? Perhaps it only works on 2.03?
    
    Keith