Repost: Spreadsheets and Accounting

Originally posted April 11, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the spreadsheets, bookkeeping, tax and accounting related section. In no particular order, the list as best I can remember…

Excel
Lotus 1-2-3
Quattro Pro
Multiplan
Quicken
MS Money
Quickbooks
Peachtree
Juris Classic and Next Generation
Juris Management Console and various utilities
Juris Time Sheet
Juris Expense Sheet
VisiCalc
DAC Easy Rapid Tax
Star Office
OpenOffice
First Choice
TimeForce Qqest time clock
Tranti time clock
XTreme Time Minder

There are probably others I’m forgetting. Some of the above were various versions. The funny thing is, I’ve done support for programmers who were working on accounting software packages, but not ever used the ones in question myself.

I’ve ended up using Excel regularly.

The Juris products are peculiar to law firms, where I have supported them, including a big migration from the “classic” DOS version using BTrieve data to a 32-bit version for MSDE or SQL Server. Which reminds me, I still need to get the classic edition running locally on the bookkeeper’s computer so she can access historical data if needed. The server it had been on crashed for good a while back.

With my accounting degree, you’d think there’d be a bigger emphasis on this stuff, but not really.

Not sure what’s next. Might be graphics and presentations. Might be communications. Might be database. The sure thing is it won’t be tonight. I never expected even to go this far today.

Update:
Added the two timeclock systems and the timekeeping software I used internally. For the Timeforce Qquest, I actually set it up, isolated the timekeeping machine on a separate network with the bookkeeper’s computer, helped figure out how to use it, and later fixed a polling problem. For Tranti I wrote documentation for the standalone timeclock, and supported the timeclock software integrated with the POS system. I wrote Time Minder for entering time and categorizing activity based mainly on the wishes of our large client, but such that it could also be used for any client and internal timekeeping. In an earlier, completely different version I had a stop/pause/resume/start measuring function I thought was cool but wasn’t as needed or useful as expected.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad