In many fields in the program in which you can enter a currency amount, you can pull up a calculator by typing an arithmetic operator in the field. Those operators are + for addition, - for subtraction, / for division, and * for multiplication. Entering a left parenthesis, (, also pulls up the calculator, because parentheses can be used for grouping. The only exception to this happening is if the first character in the field is a minus sign, which of course is used to indicate a negative number.
When you do that, the following window will come up, filled in with that you have typed so far in the amount field:
This example would come up if you had typed exactly "100+" in a field.
At this point, just type the rest of any desired calculation in the field at the top, and click Calculate or press Enter to see the results of the calculation in the Result field. If that was successful, the Paste button becomes enabled, and you can click it or press Enter to paste that Result value back into the field in the window you came from.
Click Cancel or press ESC to abandon this window without pasting anything back.
Some Example Calculations
100 * .08
100 / 4
100 + 35
100 * (3 + 4)
Note that in that last example, the parentheses (brackets) are used to indicate that the addition should be done first, before the multiplication. Normally multiplications and divisions are done first, before additions or subtractions, if parentheses are not used. So, 100 * 3 + 4 would evaluate to 304, whereas 100 * (3 + 4) evaluates to 700.
Spaces are never required - they are just used in the examples above to make them easier to read.
Using the Windows Calculator
The ACCOUNTS main menu also has the option Tools ⇒ Run Windows Calculator, which starts the standard Windows calculator application. That can be helpful if you want to do certain types of more complicated calculations. However, for it to be helpful, you would have to first start it from the main window, then switch to it from whatever ACCOUNTS window you needed a calculation on. Then after getting the result, you would have to use the calculator's Edit ⇒ Copy menu option to copy the result to the clipboard, switch back to your ACCOUNTS window, and paste the result into the desired field. (Or of course you could manually type the result into that field instead of using copy and paste.)
So in almost all cases it will probably be much easier to use the built-in calculator described in this Help topic.
This topic was last edited on Mar 23, 2023