Q: How are budgets setup and reported?  Are there any special things that I need to be aware of?

Budgets are set up in the Account Master File Maintenanace Change/Inquire Accounts. You must go into each account and step through the three screens of information. Budgets are purely informational and appear on reports that request them. There are no tools for easing the manipulation of budget figures. You have to bite the bullet and go in and enter/update the budget figures manually. There is one budget figure for each accounting period, 12 per year. Normally budgets are only used on Income and Expense accounts, but that's an accounting thing. The Balance Sheet accounts also have budget fields which are normally left empty.

Q: Exchange rates, can they be changed more than once a month?

Yes, as often as desired. The system does a "reconciliation" and recalculates the base currency equivalent for each foreign account any time you change the rate. The only reason it may be done once a month in SIM fields is an accounting policies decision, not a system requirement.

Q: The PC that they were using for the Business Package (486-33, Win 3.1) died  so I  hooked up the HD to a newer machine (586-133, Win95) and copied off all of their files.  It appears that the HD got corrupted and even some of the Business Package data files. I used the DBL utility IREBLD to rebuild the ISAM files, and was then able to run the BP.

A: I'm not even familiar with this one. I use ISLOAD to load and unload to ascii.

Q: It was discovered that there were bogus transaction records in the system.  I assume that the problem is that some of the records were overwritten with spaces. If I am unable to restore the files from backup, what suggestions do you have?  Is there any way that I can reset the account balances and start over at the start of the fiscal year (July 1) with an empty transaction file?  Do you have any recovery tools that will allow the bogus records to be removed and account balances reset?

A: The ISLOAD utility will unload an ISAM file to ascii text. You can edit the text to do surgery on the records. Generally if there is a corrupt index I recommend UNLOADing the file, deleting the .ISM and .IS1 files, finding a known good copy of them, doing a CLEAR on them and then doing a LOAD.

There should be clean copies of the isam files on the CD-ROM. If they are running an older version of the package, it might be easiest to unload all the files, delete everything, copy in a new copy from the CD-ROM, and reload the files. There were no changes to the data format at any time in the evolution of the software, and there should not be any noticeable functional changes.

If you have to use BLDISM to create a file, there are instructions in the manual on page 20-11.