$Id: 2-HowToUse.txt,v 1.1 2001/07/14 06:17:00 tundra Exp $ HOW TO USE HB ============= Before you dive into the code, it's useful to get a basic understanding of how HB works from a user's point-of-view. Budget Files ============ Before starting HB, you have to create a budget file with any old editor (one of the ways you might extend HB as a programming exercise would be adding the ability to create new budgets). This file is organized like this: Cash 3000 2343.44 Books 100 55.41 Creditcards 0.0 562.8 Dsl 39.0 0.0 Rent 1000.0 0.0 Savings 200.0 4320 Utilities 160.0 0.0 The first column is the the account Name. The second column is the amount you add to that account (the "Burn Rate") every month. For example, the Cash account has a burn rate of 3000 - that is presumably how much money you bring in to that budget every month. The third column is the current account Balance. You can either set this to be 0 intitially, and enter the amounts through HB, or prime the Budget with the amount you want. The columns should be separated with spaces and terminate with a single new line. HB does very little checking on the sanity of the budget file, so mis-formatting this file will blow up the program. Waddya want fer free? You then have to make one edit to the hb.py file and tell it where it can find its budget files. At the top of the program a very few variables that users should change. You'll see something like this: BASEDIR = "./" BUDFIL = "hb.txt" This says that the directory which holds HB budget files is the current directory, and the default budget files is called 'hb.txt' which is what HB will load when it starts up. Running The Program =================== Once it starts up, HB will show you a screen something like this: ------ HomeBudget - Version 1.71 - Fri Jul 13 23:10:33 2001 Copyright (c) 2001, TundraWare Inc. All Rights Reserved. Budget: hb.txt Books 55.41 Creditcards 562.8 Dsl 0.0 Rent 0.0 Savings 4320.0 Utilities 0.0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Cash: 2343.44 Total Debits: 4938.21 Available Cash: -2594.77 abandon alance redit ebit oad onthly

ay save+uit pint ave ransfer ndo Command? ----- The 'hotkey' to invoke a command is delimited by <>. If you key in an EOF at any point, the program will exit w/o saving If you key in a Ctrl-C, it does nothing under Unix, and aborts the program under Win32. If you hit Enter to any prompt (blank line) the program will abort the transaction underway and take you back to this main screen prompt. The columns above the separator line are your accounts. The sum of all these accounts is your Total Debits. Available Cash = Cash-Debits In this case you're running a big deficit, so you better either get more Cash, or quit reserving so much in Savings ;) Here's roughly what the commands do: abandon Exit w/o saving and recalculate budget. alance If you have more Cash than Debits, put the excess in Savings. If you have more Debits than Cash, move money from Savings into Cash. This feature requires there be a Savings account. If there is not one, the feature will not appear on the toolbar. redit Add funds to an account. ebit Remove funds from an account. oad Load a new budget. If you just hit Enter at the prompt, it will reload the budget you are working on. onthly Increase each account by its monthly Burn Rate amount. You typically do this at the beginning of a month in anticipation of getting paid and having your recurring bills show up.

ay Each account reflects an indebtedness or liability. When you pay from an account, the account balance is reduced by the amount you select and Cash is decremented accordingly (Unless your try to pay from the Cash account - then it only subtracts the amount once.) When prompted for an amount to pay, if you just hit Enter, HB understands this to mean you want to pay the entire amount in that account and does so. save+uit Ummm, it saves the current budget and quits the program. pint Print a report to the last used reporting file/device. Initially, by default, under Win32, this is LPT1: Under any other OS, it is a file called 'HB-Report.txt'. But, when you select this option it will prompt you for the name of an output file or device. If you just hit Enter, it takes the default, otherwise you can enter whatever you like. ave Save the current budget, but don't exit. ransfer Move funds from one account to another. ndo UnDo the last thing you did. You can keep UnDoing things until HB is back to the point at which it started. UnDo has no effect for Saves or Prints, but it does return to the state prior to loading a budget. Try it - it's fun.