Loadstar 128 14/q14.d81/t.tax boot

Text File | 2022-08-28 | 6KB | 126 lines

                            T A X    T R A C K E R

                              by Barbara Schulak


     Taxes.  It's Chico Marx's favorite state.  In fact, his favorite city
in Taxes is Dollars.  Dollars, Taxes.  It's a state we all find ourselves in
this time of the year and if we're prepared, it's a mighty fine state,
indeed.

     The secret is preparedness.  If you add up all of your deductible items
during the year and find that the total amount is larger than the standard
deduction the IRS allows, you will be better off itemizing your taxes.  One
way of figuring out how much you spent on deductible items is to save all
your checks and receipts and muddle through them at the end of the year,
sorting them and adding up the totals.  Now there's another way.

     With TAX TRACKER you can keep track of your deductible items as you
accumulate receipts or cancelled checks.  The program will total it all up
and print out everything in a nice, formatted style.  You can search through
the files (which are arranged in categories) for any specific record, or
even just a word or number anywhere on that record.

     The first thing the program asks you to do is enter the last two digits
of the year in question.  This is used as a suffix for category filenames.
If you want to look at records from one year but work with another one, you
can change the year from the main menu.

     The program allows you to place your items into any of 14 categories,
which can be changed to suit your needs.  The categories are saved in a file
which the program reads.  The categories in the file supplied on the
LOADSTAR disk are:

 Medical
 Tax
 Interest
 Contributions
 Casualty
 Moving Expense
 Job Expense
 Miscellaneous

The rest of the 14 are called "Open" and are available for you to name.  You
can easily change the categories above, too.  Just choose "Edit Categories"
from the main menu, move the highlight bar to the category you want to
change, press RETURN, enter the new name, press RETURN and exit from the
window.  The new categories file will be saved to the disk.

     Two of the main program options are LOAD FILE and SAVE FILE.  Whenever
you choose one of these the categories window will open so you can choose a
category.  You will have a separate file for each category, per year.

     Entering your deductible data is easy.  Select EDIT FILE and record
#001 will be displayed.  Along the bottom of the screen you'll see something
like:

Menu Edit Add Delete Search Goto F1/F2 +/-1  F3/F4 +/-10  F5/F6 +/-100

MENU takes you back to the main menu.

EDIT places the cursor on the record, ready for you to enter data.

ADD allows you to set how many records you plan to add to the list.  The
number is not critical.  If you have a dozen or so checks you want to enter,
just enter, say, 15 -- any number large enough to cover them.  If you enter
a number too small, you can always add more.  If you enter a number too
large, all it will mean is that when you cycle through the records you will
have some blank ones to go through before "wrapping around" from the last to
the first, or the first to the last.

DELETE allows you to erase any single record.  You'll be asked for the
number of the record to be deleted.  All the records with numbers larger
than the deleted file will have their numbers decremented by one.  No blank
record will be left in the list.

SEARCH will ask you for the field to search by: DATE, CHECK NUMBER, PAYEE,
or DESCRIPTION.  You may then enter any string and the program will display
every record that contains that string, one at a time.  You don't have to be
at record #001.  All records will be searched.  The search is
case-sensitive, meaning that "Tax" will not be found if you entered "tax".
For this reason, it is a good idea to be consistent with your upper and
lower case entries.

GOTO takes you directly to a record.  Just enter the number you want to go
to.

The FUNCTION KEYS zip you forward or backward through the records.  F1 and
F2 move you a record at a time.  F3 and F4 move you ten records at a time.
F5 and F6 move you 100 records at a time.

     The PRINT FILE option from the main menu will print the category that's
currently loaded.  It will print a nicely formatted list of each record with
the record number, date, check number, payee, description and amount -- one
line per record.  The total of the amounts is printed below.  Make sure your
print head is at the top of the form if your category has more than 62
records so it will skip over the perforation correctly.

     From the main menu you can also clear a category out completely and see
the total money amount for the current category.  Three other menu items are
DISK UTILITIES, INSTRUCTIONS and EXIT.  The utilities menu allows you to:

 See the directory
 Initialize the drive
 Rename a file
 Scratch a file
 Format a disk -- be careful!!!
 Change the drive number -- any drive from 8 through 32 is supported.
 Validate a disk
 Read the error channel -- this will stop a blinking drive light.
 Switch between 1541 and 1571 disk formats
 Return to the Main Menu

The instructions may come in handy while you're in the program.  EXIT will
take you back to LOADSTAR 128 if there's one in the drive.  It will return
you to BASIC 7.0 if not.  It's a good idea to exit the program through the
EXIT option so that the font and other things are reset to normal.

     Barbara Schulak used Jon Mattson's CONTROL 80 (published on LOADSTAR
#10) which made some of the features easier and better working.  I find her
code very easy to read, understand and modify.  If you're interested in
writing a database-type program for yourself or LOADSTAR 128, I can't
recommend CONTROL 80 too highly.

FT
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