Home Accountz For Dummies

By Quentin Pain, David Bradforth and John Taylor

Take control of your home accounting!

Accounting from home can be a difficult task—but not an impossible one with the right tools. Home Accountz For Dummies shows you exactly how to use the UK's number one home finance software to look after household expenditures and effectively budget for a positive future. Author Quentin Pain shows you the ins and outs of managing your money with Home Accountz and this easy-to-understand book provides you with the tools you need to predict future financial capabilities.

• Explains installation, setup, creating accounts, and connecting to banks
• Teaches you how to effectively understand accounts, import data from other software, and set up budgets
• Explores importing data from software such as Microsoft Money, Quicken, or spreadsheets
• Covers dealing with transactions in foreign currencies
• Addresses setting up automatic transactions
• Shows how to watch where your money goes with customizable reports

Home Accountz For Dummies is a fun, easy to use guide that takes the chore out of home accounting and puts you in control of your money.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Oct 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781119940562

Book preview

Part I

The Big Picture

9781119968924-pp0101.eps

In this part . . .

In this first part, we give you a basic understanding of the principles of accounting. We highlight a few sources from which you can get help to manage your money better, and then we go a little bit techie by showing you the procedure to follow to install Home Accountz on your computer.

We also take a look at the Home Accountz Desk Diary and Calculator, which you can use to help manage your money with Home Accountz.

Finally, we explain how you can customize and configure different aspects of the Home Accountz software to better suit your needs.

Chapter 1

Accounting for Your Finances

In This Chapter

arrow Knowing why you need to account for your money

arrow Understanding how best to manage your accounts

arrow Applying the principles of home accounting

arrow Finding help, links, and resources on the web

You’ve got hold of a book called Home Accountz For Dummies and, we assume, you’ve also bought or are looking to buy Home Accountz and have an interest in keeping track of your finances.

We don’t make any assumptions about which computer you have because it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a PC or Mac. We’ve used an iMac to prepare the majority of this book, but if you’re using a Windows computer, the interface and the screens for Home Accountz look very similar because it’s written using a universal programming language called Java.

In this chapter, we guide you through some of very basic accounting techniques, look at why you should use Home Accountz to keep track of your finances, discuss some of the options for managing your money, and explore the principles of home accounting. We conclude with a look at some of the resources available on the Internet to help you with the Home Accountz software and to help you understand home accounting.

Why Account for Your Money?

There are more than a few reasons to account for your money:

check.png Paying for expensive items: Think back to when you first started working. It was probably tempting to go out and buy everything you’d ever wanted. However, it’s more rewarding to save up your money for the more expensive items you actually want, rather than spend it on two or three smaller items you think you want. If you want to buy an iPhone, for example, why not consider budgeting — splitting the cost of the phone over five months and putting aside that amount per month for five months? At the end of the five months, you have enough money to buy it without disrupting your cash flow.

check.png Cars and consumables: It’s sensible to look around before buying a car. But cars are expensive: You not only have the financial commitment that comes with buying the car, you also need to pay any taxes due, insure it, and then buy fuel for it. You can’t have a car without paying for all the other on-the-road expenses. To give yourself a chance to see the true cost of buying and running a car, you need to account for all this money somewhere.

check.png House purchase or rental: Whether you’re looking to buy or rent, or indeed already own or rent a home, you must keep track of many upfront and ongoing bills, and make sure that you have the money in your account when it comes time to pay. If you’re buying a house, you need a deposit, money for professional fees, and a sum of money upfront to help you get settled in your new home. Amassing a pot of money for the deposit on a house purchase is a serious commitment because it’s probably a huge amount of money (not something you can pull from your monthly salary). You might also need a substantial percentage of your salary for a rental. You need to keep track of the payments to have a roof over your head, but how do you get this money together and keep an eye on it so that you don’t spend it on something else?

check.png Starting a family: There comes a point in many of our lives when our thoughts turn to starting a family. This is a long-term commitment that must be sustained, regardless of your financial situation at the time you made the decision. For the first years of their lives, babies have needs that can’t be ignored — food, drink, clothing, toys, a place to sleep, medicines — and these are in addition to any commitments that come with things such as renting a home. Tracking your finances means that you can allow for these costs and still ensure you have enough to live on.

check.png Sending teenagers to college/university: Higher education is expensive. You must pay yearly tuition fees, and earning a typical degree represents a substantial investment; then, on top of that, you have to consider costs for rent, food, drink, and the traditional entertainment side of university. If you’re going to assist your child with his or her university costs, you need to ensure that you can do so without disrupting your cash flow. Many families plan ahead and start college funds when children are still babies, putting away a regular manageable amount that builds up over the years. Keeping track of this fund is vital.

check.png Weddings: If your son or daughter is getting married and you want to contribute to the costs, you may find you need many thousands of pounds. Can you allocate a certain amount each month towards this expense? The simplest way by far to make this decision is by viewing all your finances together and deciding how long before the wedding you need to commit to saving. That way, you easily can see how much you can afford and hence not over-commit yourself.

remember.eps Life is a journey, and your financial circumstances change while you progress along that path, as the preceding list suggests; it just makes sense to keep track of your finances. You never know what’s just around the corner.

Managing Your Accounts

You can bring together your personal finances in a number of ways. You can use manual systems — essentially accounting books in which you put your income in one column and your expenditure in the next, which might look something like this table.

/Table 0-1

The amount carried over from the week’s shopping in this table is £126 (£350 – £224), of which you could allow an amount for savings.

Obviously, this is only a simple example and assumes you’re paid weekly, and nothing has been allowed for income from investments or other out­goings such as bank fees, car repairs, and so on.

warning_bomb.eps There are significant flaws in this system of financial record-keeping. For example, you need to manually update the figures every day; although you have to do this with an electronic system, too, the benefit of the electronic system is that it makes these updates somewhat easier. Another flaw in a manual system is the difficulty of editing. After any edit, you then need to manually recalculate all totals.

Understanding the Principles of Home Accounting

The key principles of home accounting are very simple: You use it to ensure that you have

check.png Enough money to pay the household bills

check.png Enough money to eat

check.png Enough money to travel

check.png A little money for entertainment

Most of us don’t live to work, we work to live — and as such, work and the money it brings are important for a healthy lifestyle. Whatever job you do, you need to balance work and play. Home Accountz uses a system of accounts to keep track of your money. These accounts are merely containers for money. In Home Accountz, everything has its own account — each of the people or companies to whom you pay money need an account, as well as people or companies from whom you receive money. For example, when you pay your mechanic for fixing your car, you might create an account called Car Maintenance and allocate the payment to that account. When you pay for your groceries, you can create an account called Food.

In fact, all transactions that involve money need to be allocated to or taken from the appropriate account.

Chapter 7 takes you through the process of creating and adding accounts and organizing those accounts into logical groups. You can use these accounts to manage your money and design reports whose views can help you compare your budgets with your actual balances and set a forecast for the future (which we talk about in Chapter 18). That way, you can ensure that you have enough for each upcoming bill.

Finding Accounting Help Online

Home Accountz has a built-in Help feature (which you can access by choosing Help⇒Help). This Help feature reflects the online Help available by choosing Help⇒Online Help. The online Help is constantly updated and may better reflect the current feature set of the application.

tip.eps The built-in Help is useful, but online Help is both flexible and dynamic. The information contained online encompasses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), user forums, and video guides. This online Help tends to be more up to date and to address real issues that users have with the software.

Accountz.com Limited

At www.accountz.com, you can find the homepage for the developers and publishers of Home Accountz 2012. This site is worth a visit if you have an interest in any aspect of accounting. The company offers a number of solutions for businesses looking for accounting software, in addition to the Home Accountz product.

Also, look for user forums that contain the answers to the most common questions, an accounting glossary so that you can look up technical terms, and online technical guides for Accountz software.

Accounting for Everyone

Quentin Pain, the designer of Home Accountz and the chairman of Accountz.com Limited (and one of the authors of this book!), has produced a free 12-week course explaining accounting in depth. If you have an interest in understanding bookkeeping and generally want to make more of your home finances, you’ll find much of interest here. You can sign up for this course at www.accountingforeveryone.com.

Home Accountz User Forums

In the Home Accountz User Forums, located at www.accountz.com/home/homeforum, you can immerse yourself in a community where other users can help you, and where the designers and programmers of the Home Accountz software don’t just lurk — they get involved.

remember.eps Unlike some products, Home Accountz has been developed entirely within the U.K. The support available for the product therefore has a certain bias towards the U.K. market, meaning that the people providing the support understand the types of situation you may find yourself in if you’re based in the U.K. They also have an understanding of the way in which the U.K. economy works, particularly when it comes to managing money.

tip.eps The user forums are truly global, and if you can’t find the answers you need from the official support offerings, ask the global community — someone can probably help.

YouTube

Located at www.youtube.com/user/accountz99, this YouTube account features a number of training videos for the Accountz software packages. Although the information in the videos may relate to an earlier version of Home Accountz than the one you’re using, because of the underlying structure of the software, it’s easy to work your way through the videos and to gain a better understanding of the package.

Chapter 2

Getting Started with Home Accountz

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding the system requirements for Home Accountz

arrow Installing Home Accountz

arrow Running Home Accountz for the first time

Whether you download a trial version of Home Accountz or purchase a retail boxed copy, this chapter takes you through some of the primary considerations when purchasing Home Accountz. In this chapter, you can find a quick guide listing the system requirements for Home Accountz so that you can reassure yourself that the program will run smoothly on your computer. The chapter also helps you quickly get started. It has a simple installation guide, as well as instructions about how to use a license key to activate your copy of Home Accountz. And you can follow a short guide through the installation process.

Understanding the System Requirements for Home Accountz

Most computers purchased in the last few years have a system specification that can easily accommodate the needs of Home Accountz. The requirements of the package are so basic that, regardless of whether you’re using a PC or Mac computer, the computer can most likely run it:

check.png For PC users: Windows XP, Vista, or 7 with 1GB of RAM installed and 350MB of space on the hard drive

check.png For Mac users: 1GB of installed RAM, an Intel processor, and 350MB of hard drive space

In each case, you need an Internet-connected computer because, to activate the program, you need Internet access. When first installed, Home Accountz runs in trial mode until you complete the activation procedure.

The following sections tell you how to identify the specifications of your ­computer.

Discovering your Mac’s specifications

You can find your Mac’s specifications by choosing Apple Menu ⇒About This Mac. The About This Mac window that appears (shown in Figure 2-1) displays information about the Mac operating system, processor (you need Intel), and memory (anything over 1MB is fine). The computer in Figure 2-1 has a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of SDRAM, which more than meets the specification required to use the software.

Figure 2-1: The About This Mac window can give you details that let you make the most of Home Accountz.

9781119968924-fg0201.tif

Digging into your PC’s specifications

Follow these steps to figure out your PC’s specifications:

1. Click the Windows Orb (or Start) icon on the taskbar at the bottom-left of the desktop.

2. In the Start menu that appears, right-click Computer.

Computer appears in the right column of the menu.

A pop-up menu opens.

3. Click Properties.

The View Basic Information about Your Computer window opens, as shown in Figure 2-2, offering basic information about your computer. Within the System section of the window, you can see details of your system’s specifications.

Figure 2-2: This computer meets the specifications for Home Accountz.

9781119968924-fg0202.tif

The information in this window allows you to view a report of your computer’s vital statistics. Listed in this report is the current hardware information, information about which Windows system is installed on your computer, and its current version (for example, Windows XP).

4. Locate the System section.

This section contains information about your computer’s processor type and speed, as well as indicating how much random access memory (RAM) is installed.

5. Look for Installed Memory (RAM) to find out the amount of memory installed in your computer.

For example, you might see Installed Memory (RAM) 4.00GB.

technicalstuff.eps The computer in Figure 2-2 has an Intel Celeron processor clocked at 3.33 GHz and 1.50GB of RAM (meeting the minimum specification), and is running on a 32-bit operating system. In practice, the 32-bit/64-bit operating system variants have little bearing on Home Accountz because the application has been written in a programming language called Java, which works just as well on either platform.

Installing Home Accountz

You can get Home Accountz either as a download (if you order it via the Internet) or in a box that contains a Quick Start guide and a CD-ROM version of the software. In the following sections, we discuss the installation process for Home Accountz on a Mac or a Windows PC.

remember.eps Whether you’re downloading Home Accountz or installing the software from a CD-ROM, you need your computer to be connected to the Internet.

Installing on a Mac

To install Home Accountz on a Mac, follow these steps:

1. Insert the Home Accountz installation CD-ROM into your computer.

If you’re installing from a download, skip to Step 4.

2. On your computer, open the Home Accountz CD-ROM folder.

The Home Accountz folder contains two folders named Pre OSX Lion 10.7 and OSX Lion 10.7+.

3. Double-click the folder relevant to your operating system.

If you don’t know the system you’re running, see the section Discovering your Mac’s specifications, earlier in this chapter.

4. Locate and double-click the file install_home.dmg.

The Installer file appears.

5. Double-click the Home Accountz Installer file (see Figure 2-3).

A dialog box may appear, asking your permission to run the file.

6. If the dialog box appears, click Open to continue.

The Installation Wizard opens. For details on the wizard, see the section Using the Installation Wizard, later in this chapter.

Figure 2-3: Double-click the Home Accountz Installer file to install the software.

9781119968924-fg0203.tif

Installing on a Windows PC

Follow these steps to install Home Accountz through Windows:

1. Insert the Home Accountz installation CD-ROM in your computer.

If you’re installing from a download, skip to Step 4.

If the installer starts automatically, skip to Step 5.

2. If the wizard doesn’t automatically begin, choose Start⇒Computer.

The Computer window appears.

3. Right-click the CD-ROM drive and select Open from the pop-up menu that appears.

The CD-ROM is represented by a red circle with a white Z.

4. Locate and double-click the Home Accountz installer file (install_home.exe).

If User Account Control is activated on your PC, Windows prompts you for permission to install the application.

5. If the dialog box appears, select Continue to proceed.

An Install dialog box appears, explaining that the Installation Wizard is being prepared and will guide you through the rest of the installation. A status bar keeps you informed of progress.

6. Follow the Installation Wizard steps, as described in the following section.

Using the Installation Wizard

After you start the installation process on your computer (as described in the preceding sections), the Home Accountz Setup window launches and displays the wizard’s welcome screen. Follow these steps to complete the Installation Wizard:

1. On the welcome screen, click Next.

The Select Destination Directory page appears.

2. Select the folder on your hard drive in which you want to install the Home Accountz software (as shown in Figure 2-4).

If you have multiple hard drives, you can select an alternative drive that has enough free space available.

remember.eps You may want to use the default selection because it keeps your applications installed within the same location on your computer. Alternatively, you may want to change the location to allow portability — for example, you can install Home Accountz on a memory