From the "I'm better than MSFT, and I can prove it" department:

[digitaldiscipline]

So, for those of you I haven't bitched to prodigiously about being made responsible for doing the office's bookkeeping. . . I'm responsible for doing the office bookkeeping.

[Yes, you bet your collective heinies that I'm going to invoice for the $20 an hour difference between what I get paid and what our bookkeeper gets paid come payday this week.]

So, the boss and I hunted down some templates (the balance sheet one included in Office XP [okay, where the fuck is my CD? Must.clean.home.desk!] is really adequate, but locked down to ten transactions or less, period. I hatehatehate multisheet implementations, so a carryover balance is not an option, especially since I batch process expenses once or twice a month, and there are fifteen or so of those suckers). . . and, lo and behold, there's one on office.microsoft.com called "Checkbook Register," which is just what we want - enter date, transaction #, description, and amount, and it spits out a running balance. . . but, fuck, is it inelegant:
=IF(AND(ISBLANK(D6),ISBLANK(E6)),"",F5-D6+E6)
This increments up for each line. Ugh. Okay, I can see why you might not want a duplicate entry of the last item for the pending transaction lines [personally, I don't give a shit], but I like the simplicity of a single-cell running balance, as implemented by Yours Truly:
=SUM((SUM(C8:C102))-(SUM(D8:D102)))

Of course, we already have Peachtree, as well as our bank's online service center to track transactions, but, really, let's have one more place I need to enter all this shit every time we write a check or make a deposit. It's one more little thing for me to write down for the poor fuck who gets this desk after I bail.

Comments

[mpeace.livejournal.com]

g33k ;)

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

be sure to re-route all half cents to your paycheck.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

none exist.

but i don't really need to get 1337 about. . . who do you think cuts the checks? all he does is sign 'em.

[dark-angel-nic.livejournal.com]

I know where your coming from, I have just completed some engineering work (at work) but will not get anything for it.

I kinda have to do things for my job but I will be taking some time of for the extra time put in.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Actually, the first method will use less computation resources and run faster. (Says the girl who's been building a truly heinous 40+MB engineering spreadsheet (80+MB with pivot tables and charts) over the last couple of months.) Given the number of issues you've mentioned with your work machine, it's worth considering.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

there are. . . *checks* . . . 110 items currently listed. it weighs in at a hefty 22Kb (including pretty colors for each column).

I've ended up biting the bullet and using both methods - MS's to give a running total after each transaction [pointless, if you ask me, but the boss wants it], mine to give YTD totals for credits & debits.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

actually, mine ended up being even more simplistic than that. one column has =SUM(D8:D200) (credits), the debits is =SUM(E8:E200). the overall total is just =SUM(D7-E7), with one more cell added for the pre-existing balance to give the "truth" [which is still probably wrong, but it's not my job to care]

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty easy for Excel to handle. It's the column full of sums of everything above it that's a problem. I'm using something very like it in my ugly thing, and I was shocked and annoyed at how much resource it takes to compute it. Granted, I have 22k lines of data, and the function is a countif rather than a simple sum (so I'm sure that's part of the problem, but it's the only way I could figure out to do a particular thing), but still.

[the-tatyana.livejournal.com]

Been there... loved being hired to do marketing and then assigned 12 checkbooks to balance & bills to pay! Needless to say long gone from that job!