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

[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.