BILLS.BAS is a program I whipped up a few years ago to help me keep
track of who owed how much for what in our household. Since at one point we had
six people paying shares this is not a trivial task!
	It can handle up to 15 different categories of bill. The number of
categories is the first number in the DATA statement in line 65000. It is used
to DIMension some of the arrays, as well as for the READ that loads the category
names & flags into the appropriate arrays from line 65010.
	Line 65010 *must* start with 0,Payment followed by the bill flags &
names. Flags are either 0 (false) or -1 (true). If they are true then that bill
category will be listed when <E>nter is chosen from the menu. The name follows
the flag. There *must* be a comma between them. And if the bill name is more
than one word it should be enclosed in quotes.
	Up to 16 people can be handled. The number of people is the second item
on line 65000.
	Line 65020 contains the flags & names for the people. If someone moves,
just change their flag from -1 to 0. This will mean that they will no longer be
listed as a choice for <M>ake Payment or <P>rint Bills.
	After changing lines 65000, 65010, and 65020 to fit your circumstances,
you need to initialize the system. From BASIC type:

	OPEN "0:BILLS.DAT" FOR OUTPUT AS 1
	CLOSE

	This will give you an empty file to start off with.

		Operation
	While this program is menu driven, some points need explaining.

1. All dates *must* be in MM/DD/YY format. Giving the wrong date will cause
   problems when printing bills.

2. <E>nter Bills wills "Who is paying shares", answer y or n. It will then
   prompt for "Equal shares". If you answer y, it will split the bill evenly
   among the people you have indicated as paying shares. If you answer n, it
   will prompt for the amount owed by each of the share payers. The total must
   match the amount entered as the amount of the bill!
3. All amounts are stored as double precision numbers. Thus you have 14
   significant digits. Since all amounts are rounded to the nearest cent on
   bills you may occasionally get a bill that says that John Doe had a balance
   of $5.00, added a bill of $4.33 and now has a balance of $9.34! This is due
   to the 'breakage' being carried over.
4. The program has to read the entire file at startup, so as time goes on it
   will take longer and longer for the menu to come up. Use the <C> function to
   create a new file (carrying over current balances) when necessary. It
   creates a new file named BILLS.NEW. Rename BILLS.DAT to something else &
   then rename BILLS.NEW to BILLS.DAT
   I use BILLS.84, BILLS.85, etc.
5. To guard against data loss, all transactions are echoed to the printer. Thus
   it must always be on. <L>ist file will print out a complete audit trail. Even
   so I recomend using BACKUP (or BACKUP.SNG) to maintain a backup of your data
   file.
6. This program stores all of the data in a packed form. Thus the file contains
   NULL ^@ CHR$(0), CAN ^Z CHR$(26), and DEL CHR$(127). This means that it
   cannot be loaded into RAM! Nor can it be copied to CAS! Doing so will result
   in an unusable copy!!!!!


		Leonard Erickson 70465,203