Version 1.3

All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced in any form without written permission of Adarian Software, LLC. All screen shots in this document are simulated by running Expense Diary SC on either Palm OS Emulator or Palm OS Simulator. Actual results when run on a real device may be different.

Adarian, Adarian logo, Expense Diary SC are trademarks of Adarian Software, LLC. Palm, Palm OS, and HotSync are registered trademarks or trademarks of PalmSource, Inc. or its affiliates. Sony and Clié are trademarks of Sony Corporation. Microsoft and Microsoft Excel are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other product and brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Screen Layout and Forms

Edit Form

Summary Form

Chapter 2. Basic Concepts

Working with Expenses

Working Set

Chapter 3. Entry Menu

Chapter 4. View Menu

Chapter 5. Options Menu

Appendix. To Get Help

Chapter 1. Screen Layout and Forms

Welcome to Expense Diary SC!

Expense Diary SC is an expense logging program designed for Palm Powered™ devices. It helps you keep track of your daily expenses and gives summary reports on your expenses. All the operations with Expense Diary SC are done in one of the two forms (or modes):

Edit Form -- this is the form where you work with expense entries, such as adding/deleting/modifying expense entries, sorting, setting Working Set, etc.,

Summary Form -- this is where you can get various summary reports of your expenses,

To switch among these two forms, just tap on one of the two icons shown at the upper right corner of the screen (see the picture on the right). Next we will explain in detail about how to use these forms.

Buttons to Switch Forms

Edit Form

On the right is a screen shot of the Edit Form. At the upper-right corner of the screen are two icons that allow you to switch among the two forms. The Range pop-up trigger above the table lets you chose a date range to view the entries. Choosing a Date Range To select a range of dates to view the expense data, just tap on the Range pop-up trigger and a pop-up menu will show. In this menu, you can choose any month, week, day, or even year-to-date as your viewing range. Moreover, the two triangular icons to the right of the Range pop-up trigger are the Date Range Navigation Buttons. They let you easily flip through your data. When your current view range is a month, tapping on these buttons will shift the date range by one month; similarly, if you're viewing one week's or one day's data, tapping these buttons will shift it by one week or one day. If you have chosen a custom date range of, say 10 days, then the shift amount will be 10 days. Entry Table In the middle of the form is the Entry Table that shows all entries in the current Working Set. Each column in the Table corresponds to one of the expense attributes assigned to each expense. Columns shown in this picture are, from left to right, Check Mark, Date, Category, Amount, and Note. You can choose to show or hide a column by using the Columns command, or sort the entries, change the colors, and use filter commands to show/hide part of the entries. Export command can be used to export expense entries to Memo Pad in CSV format. (CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. This format is widely accepted by many financial/accounting software on Microsoft Windows, such as Microsoft Excel.) Total Amount In the footer of the table is the total amount of entries currently displayable in the table (called Working Set.) Expense Diary SC calculates the sum only for entries in the current Working Set, entries that are not viewable are not counted. In our example, the total of 29 viewable entries is $2,537.22. This total amount is always displayed in default currency. Total Amount In the footer of the table is the total amount of entries currently displayable in the table (called Working Set.) Expense Diary SC calculates the sum only for entries in the current Working Set, entries that are not viewable are not counted. In our example, the total of 29 viewable entries is $2,537.22. This total amount is always displayed in default currency.	Edit Form
To change column widths, just drag a vertical separator in the table header (the red circles in the picture on the right) . To check/uncheck entries, you can tap on the first column (the check mark column) to check/uncheck an entry.	Column Separators
To review notes, just tap on a note icon when the Note column is showing. This will bring up a text box which shows the first three lines of an item's note. This gives you a quick way to review notes. To close the text box, just tap anywhere on the screen. To change the note text, however, you'll have to use the Modify button at the bottom of the screen. Double-tapping You can double-tap on an entry to bring up the Modify dialog box, this is the same as using the Modify button. But note that don't tap on the check mark column or Note column, because tapping on these columns has already been defined as explained earlier. At the bottom of the screen are three buttons that let you add, modify and delete entries. Note that you have to have an entry selected before using Modify and Delete buttons. To select an entry, just use your stylus to tap on any entry in the table.	Review Notes
Number of Entries At the lower-right corner of the screen shows two numbers: the denominator is the total number of expense entries in the database, the numerator is the number of entries in the the Working Set. Only entries in the Working Set are displayed, others are hidden. In this example, there are a total of 44 entries in the database, but only 29 are of them in the current Working Set and thus displayed in the Entry Table. The rest of the 15 entries are hidden. All menu commands work only on entries belong to the current Working Set. You will never accidentally do anything that can affect entries that you can't see.	Number of Entries

Summary Form

Tapping on the second icon located at the upper-right corner of the screen switches to the Summary Form. This form gives you summaries of entries by different criterion: by category, by account, by date (total expenses in one day), or by month. All you have to do is to tap on the "Summarize by" pop-up trigger and choose the summary criterion you want.

What follows is the same Range pop-up trigger as the one seen in the Edit Form. You can use this pop-up trigger to set up your Working Set. Summary Form calculates totals only for entries in the current Working Set; entries that are not displayable in the table are not included in the calculation.

Note that Edit Form and Summary Form share the same Working Set. That is, once you have set either the date range or the filter in one form, this change will automatically be applied to the other form.

Colors used in the table can be customized by using the Colors command; entries in the table can be sorted by the Sort command or exported by using the Export command.

Summary Form

Chapter 2. Basic Concepts

Working With Expenses

Expense entries are the basic operating unit of Expense Diary SC. Each expense entry has the following attributes:

Date is the date when the purchase was made,
Amount is, when it's a positive value, the money you spent, like paying a bill, purchasing an item, giving tips, etc. Expense Diary also accepts "negative expenses" which are money that come your way. For example, income, refund, or somebody returning you money. Negative amounts can be displayed using minus signs or parenthesis by checking or un-checking the "Use minus signs" option in the Options> Preferences dialog box.
Category is the purpose of the expense, for example, lunch, grocery, hotel charges, ... etc. Categories can be customized by using the Options> Categories command.
Account is where the money came from, for example, it can be from a savings account in the bank, a credit card account, or cash. You can define your own through the Options> Accounts command.
Check Mark is a special mark you can use to flag an expense entry. The meaning of the check mark is entirely up to the user. For example, you can check an expense to indicate that it should be reimbursed.
Note is a short text to further describe the expense. It can be up to 255 bytes.

New/Modify Expense To add an expense, use the New button at the bottom of the Edit Form.

To enter negative expenses, just put a minus sign in front of the number. If you want to edit the definitions of categories or accounts at the time of creating or modifying an entry, just taps on the corresponding pop-up trigger, this will bring up a list of selections for you to choose. At the bottom of the list, there is an Edit command, choose this command and you will be brought to another dialog box which allows you to edit the definitions. (Please refer to the Options> Categories and Options> Accounts commands sections for details on those dialog boxes.) Once you have done with editing, the modified list of categories or accounts will be available in the corresponding pop-up list.

To modify an expense entry, use the Modify button at the bottom of the Edit Form. This brings up the same dialog box as the New button.

New/Modify Dialog Box

Working Set

Expense Diary SC is designed to be able to handle tens of thousands expense entries. It's easy for the user to have several hundreds or even thousands entries in the database after a few months' use. It's inefficient to let the user face with these many entries on a palm-sized device. Therefore, Expense Diary SC allows the user to limit the number of entries that can be shown in the table of the Edit Form at a time. This is done by choosing a proper Working Set.
The Working Set is a subset of all the expense entries stored in the database, it is defined by two things: a date range and a filter. A date range is a range of dates, e.g., from 5/1/2003 through 5/31/2003. A filter is a test on entry attributes, e.g., Amount >= 200, or Category is Grocery. If an item's date is within the date range AND it passes the filter test, it belongs to the Working Set. When the date range is set to All and there is no filter defined, then the Working Set equals to the entire database.
Only entries belong to the Working Set can be displayed in the Entry Table; conversely, Entry Table shows only entries in Working Set.

Date Range To set the date range, use the Range pop-up trigger (located above the Entry Table) to choose a date range. You can choose from several pre-defined ranges such as This Month, This Week, Year-To-Date. Using the navigation buttons is another quick way to flip through the data. By tapping on one of the navigation buttons to the right of the Range pop-up trigger, you can shift the view range by one month, one week, one day, or any number of days.
Or you can specify a range of any date by selecting the Any Dates command from the pop-up list. The picture of the Date Range dialog box is shown on the right.
Filter Another criterion that defines the Working Set is the filter. For example, users can set the filter so that the Entry Table shows only entries whose Category is Breakfast, or entries whose Note text contains the word "Starbucks." You can use the View> No Filter command to remove the filter and View> Define Filters command to define a filter.

Setting a date range

Determining if a Working Set is in Place
The best way to identify if a Working Set is being applied is to check the numbers shown at the lower-right corner of the Edit Form: the denominator is the total number of expense entries in the database, the numerator is the number of entries in the Working Set. If the numerator is smaller than the denominator, then either a date range or a filter or both is being applied to the table. To remove the filter, use the View> No Filter command; to remove the date range, choose All from the Range pop-up trigger located above the Entry Table.

A Few Things to Note

Number of entries

When you add or modify an entry, it's possible that the newly added or modified entry "disappears" from the table. This is because you have assigned the values such that the entry does not fit in the Working Set. For example, if the current date range is all entries in This Month, and you added an entry whose date is in last month, then you won't be able to see it even though it's been successfully added to the database. You have to change the date range in order to see it. When this happens, an informational message pops up to tell you that the added or modified entry is not visible.

All menu commands work only on entries in the current Working Set. Entries that are not displayed in the table won't be affected by any menu command.

The total amounts shown in the Edit Form and the Summary Form include only entries in the Working Set; entries not in the Working Set are not counted.

Entry Made Hidden

Chapter 3. Entry Menu

Change Signs Command

At first, most users use Expense Diary to keep there expenses. For them, it's natural that they use positive numbers for expenses, because there are only expenses in the database. But later on, some people find that they can use Expense Diary to keep their incomes too, so they started to enter incomes into Expense Diary. But because expenses are entered as positive numbers, they'll just have to use negative numbers for incomes. This is of course against our common sense about money.

What this command does is to change the signs of the entries in the current Working Set, positive to negative and negative to positive. With this command, you can easily change positive expenses to negatives. Or, if you find if you prefer, you can change them back any time you want!

Export Command

The Export command allows you to save expense data into Memo Pad's records in CSV format. (CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. This format is widely accepted by many financial/accounting software on Microsoft Windows, such as Microsoft Excel.)

Data are exported in the same format as the table is currently showing. To make sure the data you want get exported, you should first use View> Columns command to choose the columns you want to export. If you're in the Summary View when this command was activated, the data exported will always be the Name (or Date) and Amount columns.

Name of export set -- Because of the size limit of Memo Pad records, the exported data may have to be broken into several records. In order to let the user know exactly what records in Memo Pad were exported from Expense Diary SC, the user can give a name for the set of records. This name will be shown in the first line of each record. Furthermore, a sequential number will be automatically appended to this name to identify them more clearly.
Currency symbols -- These three checkboxes allow you to decide how you want the currency symbols be exported. The choice is entirely dependent on how you're going to do with the exported data. If you just want to print them out, then you may want to choose the middle one which exports amounts in the same format as we usually see them -- dollar sign followed by amount. If you want to use the data in another software, then you have to think about how well the software handles currency symbols, especially when there may be more than one kind of currency symbols. Take Microsoft Excel for example, if it encounters a currency symbol that is not its default, it'll treat the number as text, instead of numeric, value, which is probably not what you want. Check your software, and maybe do a few experiments to see which option suits you bets.

Export dialog box

Chapter 4. View Menu

No Filter Command

This command removes the filter set by View> Define Filter command.

Although all other menu commands work on entries in the Working Set, which is defined by a date range and the filter. But for this and the following three filter-related commands, they ignore the current filter, they will re-define the filer. That is, they work on all entries that are within the date range regardless the current filter, if any.

Define Filter Command

The Define Filter command allows the user to make entries that satisfy the test condition set in the dialog box be shown in the table, if and only if the date is within the set date range (an expense entry is displayed in the Entry Table if and only if it passes the filter test and is within the date range, see Working Set for details.) In the example shown on the right, entries that have the word "Robert" in the Note field can pass the test. Applying filter to expense entries not only makes the user easier in navigating through the table, but also speeds up processing speed for some operations.

Based on your choice in the Field pop-up trigger, you will be prompted to enter different values:

Field	Value to Enter
Category	If you chose Category in the Field pop-up trigger, a second dialog box will appear to let you choose the categories you want, see the picture on the right. Expense entries whose category is checked in this dialog box can pass the filter test. You can choose more than one category here.
Account	ditto
Amount	If you chose Amount, you can further choose from the Value pop-trigger a comparison operator: equal to, not equal to, greater than, ..., etc. Then enter a number in the editing field at the bottom.
Note	If you chose Note, you can choose either "Contains", "Not Contains", "Is Empty", or "Is Not Empty" from the Value pop-up trigger and enter a text if applicable.

Filter dialog box

Choose categories

Enter an amount

To remove the filter, use the View> No Filter command.

This command is accessible from both the Edit Form and Summary Form. When used in the Edit Form, it'll affect the number of entries shown in the table. When used in the Summary Form, only entries satisfying the test condition will be included when calculating the total amounts.

Sort Command

The Sort command sorts the entries displayed in the table. When the current form is the Edit Form, it sorts the expense entries in the current Working Set; when the current form is the Summary Form, it sorts the summary entries in the table. The keys shown in the Sort By pop-up list change according to the current form.

Sort dialog box

Columns Command

This command allows you to choose the columns to show in the Entry Table. You can not only chose which columns to show or hide, you can also change column widths by dragging the vertical separators in the table header, please refer to the Edit Form section for details.

This command is only available in Edit Form.

Columns command

Colors Command

This command allows you to decide what colors to be used in the table. Note that Edit Form and Summary Form use different sets of colors. When called up from Edit Form, it is used to define the colors used in the Edit Form; when called up from Summary Form, it is to define colors for Summary form. Using different colors in different forms help you better identify the forms.

The Factory Default button brings you back to what they were like the first time you installed the software.

Colors command

Chapter 5. Options Menu

Preferences Command

This dialog box has two "folders" that contain different options for you to choose from:

Symbol – This field defines the currency's default symbol.
After digits – If checked, the currency symbol is displayed after the digits.
Number of digits -- This is the number of digits after the decimal point when displaying amounts. For example, amounts in US Dollar usually have 2 digits, whereas Japanese Yen usually has no decimal digit.
Show currency symbol – If not checked, the program displays only the numeric value of amounts but without the currency symbol. This can save some screen area for you.
Use minus signs – When checked, negative expenses are displayed using a minus sign, e.g., -$13.38. By default, negative numbers are displayed using parenthesis, e.g., ($13.38).
Sales tax – This is to set up the default sales tax percentage that is used in the built-in calculator. It gives you a quick way to calculate how much the total amount after tax.
Tip – Also used in the calculator. It's for you to quickly calculate how much the tip should be.
Confirm – This option makes the program to display a confirmation message before deleting an expense.
User small font – This option shows only when you're using a SONY Clié series device which support high resolution. When checked, all the text in the entry table will be displaying using a smaller font and thus can show more rows and columns in the table. But it may at the same time cause legibility problem for some people. You can use this option depending on your need.

Preferences command

Database Command

This command shows you how much memory is used by Expense Diary SC's data for each month. Each row in the table in the dialog box is a month's data. You can choose to show the number of expense entries in or number of bytes used by each month. And at the same time, you can select a month and tap the Delete button to delete that month's data from the memory. This deletion is permanent and is not reversible.

Or, you can tap the Delete All button to delete all expense entries from memory. This deletes only the expense entries, other information such as list of categories, accounts, or preference settings are not affected.

Database command

Categories Command

This command lets you edit the list of categories. Category is one of the attributes of expense entries which describes what purposes the expenses were for, such as hotel charges, car rentals, dinners, etc. In the dialog box shown on the right, you can create, rename, or delete categories. You can also use the Up and Down buttons to set the position of a selected category in the list.

When you tap the New or Rename button, a second dialog box pops up which lets you give a name for the new category, or change the name of an existing category.

Categories command

New Category Dialog Box

Accounts Command

Operation of this command is the same as the Categories command. The only difference is you're working on the list of accounts, instead of the categories.

Calculator Command

This command brings up the built-in calculator. Operations of this calculator is much alike any ordinary calculators.

When tapped on the Enter button, the calculator window closes and the current value is returned to the caller of the calculator, if the caller can accept a value. If tapped outside of the calculator window or inside of the LCD display area, the calculator window closes.

Calculator command

Appendix. To Get Help

If you have questions about using Expense Diary SC, the best information source is to go to our web site at www.adarian.com. You can check out the FAQ section to see if your question has been answered, or go to our User Forum to see what others are talking about.

If you are a registered customer, you can also write to support@adarian.com for any product-related enquires. When doing so, please make sure to include your registered HotSync username and registration code. For all other enquires, please send to info@adarian.com.