Wednesday, February 23, 2005
StarFinance 2005 Review
Posted by Don Tolson in "SOFTWARE" @ 10:00 AM
To add a transaction, you move to the Add tab at the bottom of the screen.
Figure 4: Adding a new transaction.
Each transaction must be placed within a category. Categories provide a description of the type of transaction, or a way of grouping similar transactions together. StarFinance 2005 comes with a pre-loaded list of 5 categories that are available from the drop down box. By tapping on the + button beside the selection, you can add, modify or delete these categories.
Figure 5: Managing the Categories.
Although it won’t accept a category name of null (i.e. no characters), it did accept one with a space, so if you don’t really want to categorize your transactions, you get around it by assigning them all to this blank default.
Back at the transaction entry, descriptions are limited to 40 characters, and values are limited to 10 digits, including the decimal point. Only positive values (no negative signs) are accepted. Selection of the Income or Expense buttons controls whether the transaction is stored as a positive (Income) or negative (Expense) amount. The date of the transaction can be either typed in, using the default Regional format, or selected from a Calendar gadget.
When moving around in StarFinance 2005, it’s better to use the Back option in the menus, rather than the OK button at the top right. The OK button will take you back to the account selection screen, rather than to the previously viewed screen, as you might expect.
As transactions are added, the account View screen is updated with a list of the saved transactions.
Figure 6: List of transactions.
The list of transactions can be sorted by any of the major headings, using the dropdown list at the top of the screen.
Figure 7: Options for sorting transactions.
Unfortunately, the same is not true of the Filter menu at the bottom of the screen. The only option available is Date, but there are a couple of ways in which the date filter can be configured.
Figure 8: Configuring the Date filter.
