PREpARE A PROfESSiONAl TREASURER'S
REpORT
by RON FETZER, AC CONTRibUTiNG AUThOR
The Job No One Wants
If you belong to a computer club, civic association, sports club or charitable organization you probably know how difficult it is to get a member to accept the position of club treasurer. Are your club's finances in a mess? Is your treasurer's report written on the back of an old envelope? Well, help is on the way! Just use the Treasurer's Report Program (TRP) and all your troubles are over. Check out the TREASRPT.COM file on ACs February Software Disk.
This program makes it so easy to be a club treasurer that you'll have members climbing over each other to volunteer for the job. [Offers of free food/liquor also help. -Ed] TRP prints a professional report that's easy to read and understand without being an accountant. It's written in modular TurboBASIC-XL and runs only on the Atari XL/XE computers.
Treasurer's Report is intuitive and easy to use. It's also heavily error protected to prevent typo mistakes and wrong entries. The program accepts up to 200 income items and up to 200 expense items. I've served as Treasurer of the Ol' Hackers Atari User Group for some years now, and with that wealth of experience behind me I put everything into TRP that a club treasurer could ever want. TRP is completely driven by self-explanatory menus. Upon booting up TRP you'll see a main menu that gives you eight options: Directory, Start Program, View On Screen, Print, Save, Load, Erase A File, and End. Straightforward stuff, really.
Your New Career: Treasurer!
To start using TRP, just select option #2 (Start Program) on the main menu, which will pop you into the Information Screen. Here you'll have to answer some prosaic questions like today's date, your name, the club's name, etc. When you're finished, the "Income" screen will come up. First you enter a description of the income item and then the amount of the income. Do not use a comma (,) or dollar sign ($) in the entries. When you're finished entering your income items and want to leave Income section of the program, just leave the INCOME NAME blank and enter "00" for the INCOME AMOUNT. (There's a prompt at the bottom of the screen to remind you of this.) You can even type in a name for this last item if you'd like (such as "END" etc.), but it won't be recorded by the program because you entered "00" for the amount. You can also erase the last entry by putting "**" into the description prompt.
Immediately upon exiting the Income section you'll enter the Expense section, which works exactly like the Income section. You just enter all the expense items by Description and Amount. When you're finished you enter "00" for the amount of the last entry, and you'll be directed back to the main menu again.
Massage Those Files!
Now you can view your data on the screen, print it, or save it to a disk. With the Save, Load and Erase A File options you only have to enter a filename without a disk drive designation. TRP assumes that it is Drive #1. A loaded file can only be VIEWED or PRINTed.
With the View On Screen option I inserted scrolling stops into the program so you can examine your report conveniently. With this option all the essential income/expense data is displayed on your screen.
The Print option gives you a fully formatted professional treasurer's report printed out in hardcopy. It will have your club's name as the headline, the date of the report, the old balance and date, and the income and expense items with a running current balance. It will also show you the Total Income as well as Total Expenses on your report. The penultimate item will be the new balance and its date, followed finally by the name of the person who prepared the report. You can also specify how many copies of the report you'd like to print. Take a look at the Directory option. It gives you much more information than just a directory listing. I included a provision to erase MEM.SAV in the D8: RAMdisk in order to give you more free RAM space. This option also checks which revision of AtariBASIC is installed in your computer. Since TurboBASIC-XL isn't a built-in BASIC, the directory option says "NO BS". There are some other features you'll also see with the Directiory option.
Customizing TRP
The print routine in Treasurer's Report Program was written for Epson and compatible printers. If your printer isn't Epson-compatible you can easily change the few printer control codes to your printer's codes. They are clearly indicated in lines 1330 - 1380.
If you live in a country other than the U.S.A. you might want to change the "$" to your country's currency symbol. The "$" appears in lines 530, 630, 790, 1000, 1010, 1040, 1120, 1130, 1160, 1170, 1520, 1580, 1600, 1640, 1670, 1690 and 1700. This will make the program useable in other countries as well. [Editor's Note: you can make a custom self-booting TRP disk by copying the files TREASRPT.COM and TREASRPT. ARB from the AC February '94 Software Disk onto a formatted disk containing AtariDOS 2. 0 or 2.5 (NOT SpartaDOS!). Rename the TREASRPT.COM file to AUTORUN SYS to make TRP self-booting. To examine the TurboBASIC listing for maldng your own customized version of TRP, press the BREAK key after booting up TRP, which will dump you directly into the TurboBASIC editor. Type LIST <CR> to see the program listing, using CTRL-1 to start/stop screen scoffing. -BP]
Wrapping Up
If you or someone you know belongs to a club or an organization then give them the Treasurer's Report Program. They'll love it. Being a treasurer with this program makes the job easy. Not only will you save a lot of time, but you'll also receive compliments on the clarity and completeness of your treasurer's reports. You won't have to struggle with spreadsheets, databases, check balancing programs or calculators. You can sit back and enjoy your club and bask in the prestige of a job well done. But watch out-- with the secret of TRP now public knowledge, you may have to fend off competitors for your treasurer's job at the next club meeting!
