Keith Oswald (TheEther@home.com) gave a detailed presentation of Electronic Teller, the personal OS/2 accounting software package, at the May 29, 2001 meeting of the San Diego OS/2 User Group (SDOUG). Keith is a member of SDOUG.

"Installation is a snap," said Keith as he unzipped the downloaded package and started the Install program. "This is version 3.23. Version 4.0 is currently in development." In fact, Version 4.0 should be out within a month "with more screenshots and hyperlinks in the screenshot bitmaps," according to the program's author.

Electronic Teller allows one copy of the program, installed on one machine, to be used by many people. Each person can create one or more password-protected "Portfolios" of accounting information.

"Each Portfolio holds all the 'Accounts' that the user wants to keep track of," added Keith, "and you can add more Accounts and Portfolios at any time."

Accounts may be set up for bank accounts, cash, credit cards, assets, and liabilities. "Assets are what you might need for an insurance claim," said Keith, "such as jewelry or antiques. Liabilities are items like a house mortgage or car loan. The Accounts for banking, cash and credit cards are obvious, of course."

The author of Electronic Teller is Paul H. Caron (phcaron@home.com), a Canadian. The program is shareware and can be downloaded from BMT Micro (http://www.bmtmicro.com/BMTCatalog/os2/eteller.html), Hobbes (http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/money/et323.zip) and LEO (ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/apps/et323.zip); an FTP Search found several mirror sites. Update notices are posted on the developer's web page (http://members.home.net/phcaron/). The trial version is limited to 200 transactions per account, and if you like Electronic Teller and want unlimited transactions, the registration fee is $40.

"I and my wife tested several personal accounting packages including MoneyTree and the Java-based MoneyDance. We feel Electronic Teller is best for what we need," said Keith. "There are configurable check printers, reports, budgeting, transactions, graphs, tracking, reminders, foreign currency support, even data import/export."

What doesn't Electronic Teller do? "There's no income tax calculation, and you'll have to wait for Version 4.0 to get Investment Accounts for your stocks and mutual funds," adds Keith. "Other than that, it does what we need quite nicely."

The San Diego OS/2 User Group (SDOUG) meets every month in San Diego, California. Meetings are free and everyone is welcome. For information, visit the SDOUG web site at http://home.san.rr.com/cq/sdos2ug/.

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.