This page lists all of the history of changes and fixes in all of the releases of the program since the start of 2019. The changes prior to that are listed on the Revision History - Version 1.00 to 2018 and Revision History - Beta Versions pages.

For anyone that is interested, we can send you a list of future work that we are considering doing. Please contact us by email if you want that.

Release 4.06 (Nov 7, 2024):

•Fixed an incorrect message that could happen if you have set limits on how many days transactions can be in the past or future, in the Maintenance ⇒ Main Options window. When you were entering dates too far in the future based on those settings, the message gave the number of days it wasn't allowed to be in the past, rather than the number in the future! (You could only notice that if those numbers were different from each other.) The correct limits were being enforced, only the messaging might be wrong.

•Fixed a bug: If you created a Journal Entry in a new database that did not have an Opening Balances transaction saved yet, it would be recorded as being the Opening Balances transaction, and it would not appear in the Journal Entries window.

•The program now comes with a newer version of the 3rd-party controls (Chilkat) that it uses for multiple purposes including sending emails and communication with websites.

•As long as you are connected to the Internet, the program can now transmit usage information for many actions and features you use to Google Analytics, to help us better understand and improve your product experience.

Release 4.05b (Apr 29, 2024):

•Fixed some named date ranges for reports that include "Last Quarter", which could erroneously give a quarter end date of March 30, instead of March 31, when you are in the 2nd quarter of the year (that ends on June 30).

•Fixed a bug in the selection of accounts for various reports that are for one account or one fund, where if instead of typing or selecting an account name, you typed an account number, it would cause technical error messages and the program would exit. You can only select accounts by name, not by number.

Release 4.05 (March 16, 2024):

•Fixed a bug in the data entry of account names in many windows like the Register, Write Cheques, Journal Entries etc. where if instead of typing or selecting an account name, you typed an account number, it would cause technical error messages and in some cases could cause bad data to be stored. You can only select accounts by name, not by number.

•Fixed a bug when importing a chart of accounts from QuickBooks Desktop or Online on startup, where if an account or sub-account "General Fund" was found, but not with that exact capitalization, the import would fail without a clear error message. (For instance, it would fail if the account was found with the name "GENERAL FUND".)

•Fixed a bug in Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ One Fund Income Statement: If you ran it, then clicked the Rerun button, then re-ran it without changing which Fund Account it was being run for, it would crash the program with a message about "Error at line 33 in clicked event of cb_ok".

Release 4.04c (December 27, 2023):

•Fixed a couple of problems with cut-off information in the headers of the two sub-reports (Balance Sheet and Income Statement) in Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Government Form Amounts.

•Corrected an error building this help file that led to there being an extra topic in the Index, "Importing Accounts from QuickBooks", which had actually been replaced by an updated version of it, "Importing Accounts from QuickBooks Desktop". There has also for a while been another separate topic "Importing Accounts from QuickBooks Online".

•Fixed the link to the Canada Revenue Agency's payroll calculator in the Payroll section of the Help page "What Doesn't ACCOUNTS Do?".

•For OnDemand and Local Network versions, display a banner saying "Connecting to SQL Sever" when it is attempting to do that as the program starts, or after certain other activities. Usually it will only be displayed for a fraction of a second, but if there is ever a problem with the SQL Server, the appearance of this banner will help you and our support team understand what is blocking the program from starting.

Release 4.04b (September 27, 2023):

•Fixed an obscure bug in Custom Reports, if you include Budget columns, and your fiscal year, as set in the Organization Info window, is not the same as the calendar year. As an example, suppose your fiscal year starts on July 1, so the "Fiscal 2024" year is July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024. If you included a budget column in your Custom Report with a date range that included any months in 2023, the program was trying to pull their budget amounts from a "Fiscal 2023" budget, instead of the "Fiscal 2024" budget that it should have used. That could lead to wrong figures, or even all 0's for the budget figures, if you didn't have a "Fiscal 2023" budget at all! That is now fixed.

Release 4.04 (September 14, 2023):

•Corrected the Net Income lines in Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement Yr/Yr Comparison and Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement General Comparison. They were incorrectly showing the same Net Income totals for all of the funds, which were actually the Net Income totals that would be shown on the non-fund Summary reports with the same names!

•On those same two Fund comparison reports, added a section below the Net Income for each fund showing, for each of the date ranges the changes in fund balances for that fund. That is similar to what is done in Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement.

•On a number of reports, a very long Organization Name would get cut off at the end. That has been fixed (though it's possible that a very long Organization Name that was in all capital letters would still have this problem).

•In the Maintenance ⇒ Funds for Accounts window, removed income and expense accounts that have sub-accounts under them. (Since you cannot post transactions to accounts with sub-accounts under them, it doesn't matter what fund is associated with them!) Also removed the indentation that showed which income and expense accounts were top-level, sub-account or sub-sub-account, since that really didn't matter in this context.

•Improved a message you can get when you use Enter Bills, if there does not appear to be an Accounts Payable account it can use, to explain in more detail what the problem might be. It has to be an account of type Accounts Payable (whether or not that is its name!) with no sub-accounts, not even hidden ones.

•Improved an error message that you can get during the importing of a chart of accounts from Simply Accounting / Sage 50 Canada, during your initial setup of your database. The error message was about "S" accounts that were stopping the importing because they could not be renumbered to have a lower number that the preceding "A" accounts (the ordering is reversed in ACCOUNTS). The error message gave the name of the problem account; now it also gives the number of that account.

Release 4.03 (June 7, 2023):

•Added Fund reports Income Statement Yr/Yr Comparison and Income Statement General Comparison. They are like the same-named Summary reports, except they are split out by fund, with each fund starting on a new page.

•When running reports that prompt for a date, range of dates, and/or other information, if you click the Rerun button after the report is displayed, the prompting window will now appear with your previous choices in it. Previously each Rerun would start again with whatever the default choices for that report were.

•On the Pay Bills window, added a Don't warn about empty Chq / Ref # checkbox. If you check it, you can leave the Chq / Ref # field empty without receiving a warning message asking you to confirm that you want to do that.

•When clicking Memorize from the SQL Select window, if your SQL is valid but doesn't return any rows of data, you are now given a choice of whether to still memorize it for later re-use. Previously you would get a message that it didn't return any data and you were not able to complete memorizing it.

•When using the Memorize button to re-save a previously-memorized report from either the SQL Select or Reports-viewing window, if you change the Name, you are now given an option of saving an additional memorized report with the new name, or renaming the previous-saved memorized report to the new name. Previously it always saved an additional memorized report with the new name (unless it was just a change in capitalization, which still doesn't cause you to be asked about this).
In addition, if you got to those windows from the Memorized Reports window, any changes made to the name of the memorized report you are working on are now reflected properly in the drop-down list of names on that window, which was not always the case before.

Release 4.02d (May 16, 2023):

•Some internal code changes that do not affect the program's behaviour, related to our use of a new server URL for some of the services such as Internet Backups and license key requests.

Release 4.02c (April 23, 2023):

•When entering a transaction in the Register window, or the Write Cheques window, if you accidentally put a cheque number in the Type field, and a value that might indicate a cheque (such as anything that includes "CH") in the Number field, you will now get a warning, asking whether you want to reverse which value is in which field, to fix the problem. (Only transactions with a number in the Number field can be printed as cheques!)

•Fixed a small bug in the autocomplete for fields like the names of Accounts, or Payees: sometimes if you had entered something, then entirely backspaced it to try entering something else, the autocomplete wouldn't start until you had typed 2 characters, when it should have started on your first character.

•Fixed a limitation of the Simple Filter window: you could not type (or paste) text into the Value field that was longed than would fit in the display area, because it would not scroll to the right as you typed.

Release 4.02b (March 23, 2023):

•Software4Nonprofits has a new website. Where possible, references in the program and this Help file to pages on the old website have been converted to the most closely corresponding pages on the new website. (Some less-used pages on the old website do not yet have equivalents on the new website, so links to them will be unchanged, and will still work.)

•The program already reminds you monthly to check for updates, if you haven't done so for at least a month. Now, if other users of the same database already have a newer release of the program than you do, it also informs you of that fact as part of the message encouraging you to upgrade. (However, that will only happen once all users have at least this new release.) It can be important to have all users on the same release of the program!

•Fixed an obscure problem: If we ever gave you a SQL Updating password along with some SQL to fix or change some data in your database, and it was based on a version of your organization name but with the wrong capitalization, it wouldn't be accepted. You couldn't fix that by just changing the capitalization to match what we gave you, via Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info, unless you exited and restarted the program afterwards. Now in such cases that will immediately fix it.

•Removed the little-used menu option Help ⇒ Read Manual. The main purpose of that was to take you to a web page from which you could download a PDF version of the entire help file. That really wasn't useful because it wasn't as searchable as the Help file, was way too long to print, and would go out of date as soon as there was a new release of the program.

Release 4.02 (March 1, 2023):

•Once a month, as you exit the program, it does the equivalent of the Database ⇒ Validate Database menu option. Now, after that, it also does the equivalent of the Database ⇒ Validate Transactions menu option. Both are for finding very rare errors, but ones that it is important to resolve if they do occur!

•As well as silently sending us your Release Number after installing any update, the program also now sends us your Windows version number along with that. That will help us to understand which older versions of Windows are still in use by our customers.

•When you request or automatically retrieve license keys, or request evaluation extensions, the program also now sends us your Windows version number.

•New installations of the program now start with a 30-day evaluation period. If that expires before you pay and get the required license key, you get a 30-day grace period in which you can pay, before the program will stop working until you do pay. This replaces the prior wording of it being a 60-day evaluation period, though it gives you the same number of days.

Release 4.01 (February 5, 2023):

•Added a new menu option Tools ⇒ Pay your Annual Fee which takes you to our payment processor Stripe to pay for the program and set up an annual subscription.

•Added a new option Use words "Dollars" and "Cents" in amount in words on cheques in the Maintenance ⇒ Main Options window. It is checked (on) if you have never changed it, in which case cheque amount in words are written as things like "Ten Dollars and 5 Cents", as they always have been. If you uncheck it, that will be written as "Ten and 5/100".

•When you are setting up Gmail-Specific Authorization in the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window, when it takes you to a browser window to log in (if necessary) to your Google account and authorize emailing from ACCOUNTS, you now have 90 seconds to do so. It used to be 60 seconds, but that could be too short if you had any trouble logging in, or had 2-step verification required on your account.

•Made some changes to prevent an occasion problem, particularly for OnDemand users, when doing Gmail-Specific Authorization. The problem we fixed was one that would show you a technical log including a line saying "SocketError: WSAEADDRINUSE: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted."

•Fixed a few links to web pages in this Help file that were to the relevant page for the DONATION program instead of the correct page for this ACCOUNTS program.

Release 4.00c (December 3, 2022):

•A few users, when they updated to Release 4.00b, were getting a message about "Error in unlock key for Chilkat ..." when the program started after the install. While that could always be fixed with either a reboot or a 2nd install of that Release, we are not sure why it happened. This Release gives a more detailed error message if that problem occurs, which could be sent to us as a screenshot, to help us understand it and hopefully prevent it in the future.

Release 4.00b (November 25, 2022):

•Fixed a problem where email sending using the Microsoft SMTP server smtp.office365.com, configured with the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window, had stopped working recently.

Release 4.00 (November 23, 2022):

•The program now checks for whether there's a newer license key available for you to retrieve, every time you start it, even if your current license key isn't expiring yet - as long as your computer has Internet access.

•Made various changes to make the program work with our upcoming change of payment processors from PayPal to Stripe.

•Fixed a bug that allowed an automatic retrieval of an expired license key that expired before your program's release date. That didn't make sense, since the newer program is an upgrade, and an expired license key doesn't entitle you to an upgraded version.

Release 3.05c (October 31, 2022):

•Changed the column heading for the final total column in Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement by Months, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement by Quarters, Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement by Months, and Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement by Quarters. It used to always say "Total Year". Now it only says "Total Year" if the report is for an entire year (any 12 months for reports by months, or any 4 quarters for reports by quarters), and otherwise says "Grand Total".

•Improved the change that was the last point in the notes for Release 3.05b, about silently informing us when you install a new release of the program. In most cases, that will now update our records automatically, rather than sending us an email.

Release 3.05b (October 17, 2022):

•A number of fixes to Recurring Transactions, including:

oWhen setting up the recurrence details, you could not successfully set a Start Date before today, that would lead to the Next Recurrence being before today. You also might be asked multiple times about that same thing.

oWhen you were asked about using a Start Date before today, if you chose the messagebox option "Use today as the start date and re-calculate", it did not actually change the Start Date to today's date in the display.

oWhen inserting recurrences with an End Date, after which there could be further recurrences before today's date if it was ignored, it was in fact ignored, and so extra recurrences were inserted.

oWhen inserting recurrences that weren't set to be automatically inserted, so that you were asked whether to Insert, Skip, or Ignore, and if you Skipped all of them, that action might be ignored, and so the next time you entered the program you could again be prompted to insert the same recurrences. ("Skip" should mean that you won't be asked about those recurrences again.)

•When you first install this release, or any new release after this, as long as you have Internet access working on your computer, the program will silently send us an email to inform us of your new release number. That will allow us to better support you if you have any problems with the program, since we will know what features and bug fixes you have in your release of the program.

Release 3.05 (August 18, 2022):

•Added the Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Percentage of Annual Budget and Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Percentage of Annual Budget reports. They list your income/revenue and expenses for a prompted-for period within one budget year, along with the budget for the entire year, the difference between the actuals and the annual budget, and the percentage that the actuals are of the annual budget. The version on the Reports ⇒ Fund menu breaks it out, with one report per fund.

•Fixed a bug in the Summary ⇒ Budget Comparison report: some totals in the Budget column could be missing.

Release 3.04b (August 4, 2022):

•Fixed a bug introduced by Release 3.04: various actions, including trying to request or retrieve a license key, could give "Error at line 16 in gf_email_valid".

Release 3.04 (August 1, 2022):

•Fixed a bug: in fields with the autocomplete feature, like Account names, Payees etc., typed digits that were part of an entry on the list of values for that field would be ignored if they were typed using the numeric keypad. Digits typed using the top row of your keyboard were already working correctly.

•Fixed a bug: Memorized Custom Reports that include a Custom Date Range need to display the Custom Reports definition window when you re-run them, for you to enter your desired date range. That was happening if you ran it from the Memorized Reports window, but not if you ran it from the Report Browser.

•Corrected an oversight: users entering the program with the read-only password were allowed to edit Memorized Report names and descriptions on that window.

•This release was created with a new version of the programming environment we use - PowerBuilder 2021. Because of that, it can no longer be installed on Windows 7, Vista, or 8.0. It can be installed in Windows 8.1, 10, 11, or Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later.

•Added a Help button to the Tools ⇒ View Saved Settings window.

Release 3.03c (June 22, 2022):

•(This point is primarily for our own staff.) Change some code used for reading text files that can fail to read the entire file if the file has an ANSI rather than Unicode encoding, but has accented characters in it.

Release 3.03b (June 21, 2022):

•Added a right-click menu option "Print Register" on the Register window, that just tells you which reports from the main menu would allow you to print the contents of the Register.

•For users using Gmail-Specific Authorization for their Email Sending Configuration, fixed problems that could occur in some situations:

oYou could get a message saying "There was an errors in the Specific Authorization for Google: Error: response information is not complete." After that you would have to redo the setup.

oYou could be required to redo the Authorization every time you used email sending with Gmail, if it was more than an hour after the last time you had used that.

Release 3.03 (June 7, 2022):

•Changed how fields for selecting an Account work with the keyboard, in order to make it easier to select them:

oPreviously you could not type in those fields, but pressing the first letter of an account name would bring up the first account starting with that letter, and pressing it repeatedly would bring up successive accounts starting with that letter.

oNow it has "autocomplete", where you can type in the field and it shows you matches to what you have typed so far, with the part you haven't typed highlighted so it will be replaced if you keep typing. So for instance if you had accounts Garden Donations and General Donations as the first ones alphabetically starting with G, typing "G" would bring up Garden Donations, and adding "e" would change it to General Donations.

oYou can still use the drop-down list, or use the arrow keys to move through the accounts (perhaps after typing the first part of an account name) even without dropping down the list.

•Similarly, changed several places where you can pick a Vendor, to allow typing and use autocomplete, rather than just picking from a drop-down list.

•Fixed two cases where the list of accounts on the main window can be cut off on the right, with no scroll bar:

oFor read only users, if you are showing account numbers, and

oFor regular users, if you use the Maintenance ⇒ Main Options window and uncheck "Hide Account Numbers except in Chart of Accounts", when it was checked before.

•In the Enter Bills window, changed the Vendor field to allow typing and autocomplete, as with the Account fields, and the Payee / Vendor field on the Register window.

•Usually a Chart of Accounts should have only one account where the Type is Accounts Receivable, and only one where the Type is Accounts Payable. If you try to create an additional one of either, you are now informed of that, and the program suggests that you not do so. Of course, you can have other asset and liability accounts that represent other things that are receivable by you or payable to you, but they would have other Types.

•Fixed a problem with the Register Splits window: if there is only one split line, and you use <Add New> and add a new account there, then when you close that window and return to the Register window, a number appears instead of the account name. (The transaction was still OK though.)

•When you click a Save PDF button for a report, or use the Save As button and save to PDF, and you choose to save it to a file that already exists, you now get an option to Append the new PDF to the existing file, as well as the previous options to replace the previous file, or cancel the save.

•Fixed a problem when doing Gmail-Specific Authorization for your Email Sending Configuration. When it took you to the browser window to do the authorization on Google, if you didn't succeed in doing that, or closed that window etc., the program was supposed to stop waiting for you to do that after 60 seconds. It would actually never stop waiting, and you might have to force the program to exit, to get out of that wait.

•Fixed a subtle and somewhat unlikely to occur bug in the Simple Filter window. It occurs if you have two or more filter conditions using the Operators IN or NOT IN, and the comma-separated list of Values for one of the earlier conditions has more items in it than the comma-separated list of Values for one of the later conditions. In that case, one or more of the Values for the earlier conditions will actually be incorrectly added to the list for the later conditions, in the calculated technical filter string. (Note: no users have reported encountering this bug - we just happened to notice it ourselves!)

•This point is just a technical one for Software4Nonprofits staff to understand it: A fix was made for a file downloaded from CanadaHelps that users might want to import into our DONATION program, that could also change behaviour in ACCOUNTS. The downloaded file was using the UTF16-LE Unicode file encoding with no Byte Order Mark (BOM), which really should not be done. (We have written to CanadaHelps to suggest they change this.) To adjust for this, we added some detection using a function supplied by Windows for detecting such files, which however can still give incorrect results for some files, and thus could possibly lead to other text files with unexpected encodings that were being read by ACCOUNTS being misinterpreted.

Release 3.02d (May 7, 2022):

•Since all @telus.net and @telusplanet.net email addresses are now served by Gmail servers, the verification etc. in the Email Sending Configuration windows has been changed to use Gmail settings for them. This also means that you can use the Gmail-Specific Authorization option for them. (This was supposedly fixed in release 5.01d, but actually wasn't.)

•Two changes for users of the Cloud Storage Service:

oFor the cases when you do not have an Internet connection when you start the program, it gives better messages and options about reconnecting before you continue, to avoid having only read-only access to your data.

oFor the cases when you lose your Internet connection before you exit the program, it gives clear options to reconnect. If you cannot reconnect to the Internet, the messagebox about that now gives better instructions as to what to do to ensure that your last changes (if any) are uploaded to the Cloud Storage and your control of it is released.

•Added a /F "basename" optional command-line argument, which allows you to specify which database to open if you have multiple databases that you switch between with the File ⇒ Open Database menu option. (Without that argument, the program will always open to the database you used most recently.)

•For users of the Cloud Storage Service or OnDemand version, the prompt that comes up if you have left the program running for two hours without doing anything in it, saying it will exit, is now forced to be "attached" to the program's main window, so the main window is always visible then it comes up. That should be clearer.

•Made some changes for automatic license key retrievals, so that if you have only paid for the Standard version, but have installed the more expensive Local Network or OnDemand version, you will get an appropriate message, explaining that an upgrade payment is required if you want to switch to that.

Release 3.02c (April 23, 2022):

•Made two fixes to bugs introduced by the improvements to Recurring Transactions in release 3.02:

oTransactions which you had set to be inserted some number of days in advance of the transaction date would not be inserted until the transaction date was reached.

oFor transactions that should have a cheque number, if there were multiple occurrences of the same transaction to be inserted, as well as other transactions with cheque numbers, overlapping cheque numbers could be generated and saved, if you did not notice and correct them.

Release 3.02b (April 8, 2022):

•When you choose to print the Reconciliation Report after you click Finish on the main Reconciliation window, that report has been changed to only show uncleared transactions after the statement ending date if the "Show unreconciled transactions after the Statement Ending Date" checkbox in the window is checked. Previously when you printed that report from the Reconciliation window it always showed all future unreconciled transactions. (You were always given a choice about that if you chose to reprint that report with Reports ⇒ Banking ⇒ Prior Reconciliation.)

•In Custom Reports, change the Type column names for Difference columns from things like "Difference (Col 1 - Col 2)" to "Difference (Col 1 vs Col 2)". That's because the dash, or minus sign, in the previous wording suggests subtraction, but our difference reports subtract in different directions for Income accounts and Expense accounts, so that it always (in that case) shows by how much Col 1 is "better" than Col 2 - higher for income, or lower for expenses. More details about Difference columns are in the Help on Custom Reports.

•Added a Help page on OnDemand Troubleshooting.

•Added a new entry to the Troubleshooting section for the Cloud Storage Service (and a new Index entry under "Troubleshooting" to help you find that section!). The new entry is about what to do in the unusual cases when databases on different computers become out of synchronization with each other, so they have different data.

•When importing a chart of accounts from Simply Accounting or Sage 50, the program will now stop the import attempt if any of the account numbers it finds are not your specified account number length (4 or 5). If that happens, you need to correct that in your Simply Accounting or Sage program, re-export the accounts, and try again.

•Clarified the window title of the window reached by clicking Edit on the Bill Payment List window. Previously its title was "Edit Payment Bills", now it is "Edit Bill Payment".

Release 3.02 (March 21, 2022):

•Improvements to Recurring Transactions:

oTheir Start Date can now be in the past, so that they will cause recurrences to be entered prior to the current date.

oWhen there are multiple occurrences of a given transaction that need to be inserted when you start the program (whether because the Start Date was in the past, or just because you haven't run the program for a while), they are now inserted all at once, instead of requiring you to confirm them one by one, and then continue on to the next batch of recurrences.

oIn the window that comes up for inserting the transactions when you start the program, for the ones that aren't automatically inserted, instead of the Insert and Skip buttons, there are now three radio button options: Insert (the default, that comes up selected), Skip, and Ignore. See the help for full details on that.

•Changed the help for Gmail Configuration to point out that after May 30, 2022, only the Gmail-Specific Authorization option, or using 2-step verification and an application password, will work. The option of allowing "Less Secure Apps" is being removed.

•When importing a chart of accounts from QuickBooks during your initial setup of a new database, added "Long-Term Assets" as an allowable account type found in the import file. Previously we were unaware of the possibility of that type occurring in such import files, and import files including it would be rejected.

•Fixed a bug in the arguments available in the SQL Select window: the :TRANSACTION_DATE argument was broken and selected data with the wrong date (if there was any for that wrong date!).

Release 3.01b (February 13, 2022):

•Fixed a bug in the main Email Sending Configuration window that happens if you switch back from Gmail-Specific Authorization to Normal Server Authorization, and then click OK to save that change and close the window. The next time you opened that Email Sending Configuration window, the window would show an empty area in the middle, rather than showing your saved email settings.

Release 3.01 (February 9, 2022):

•Added a new section about Fixing Reconciliation Problems to the bottom of the Help topic on Reconciling your Accounts.

•Made some fixes to the Gmail-Specific Authorization option in Email Configuration:

oIt now catches some cases when there is missing information that would have generated very technical messages, gives better messages instead, and can sometimes automatically reset the authorization to correct the problem.

oIf you switch back from Gmail-Specific Authorization to Normal Authentication, after a prompt to confirm you want to do this, your Gmail authorization settings are now cleared, so that if you switch back to Gmail-Specific Authorization again later, you can start fresh.

oFixed a problem where if you have an extremely long email address, it could give messages about certain settings being too long.

•Since all @telus.net and @telusplanet.net email addresses are now served by Gmail servers, the verification etc. in the Email Sending Configuration windows has been changed to use Gmail settings for them. This also means that you can use the Gmail-Specific Authorization option for them. (Note: This actually was not correctly done in this release. It works in release 3.02d.)

•Added a paragraph in the Help topic on OnDemand User Management, under the heading "OnDemand Login Passwords", about how you can't change your own password, and what to do if you need it to be changed.

•If you try to make a backup to a location on your computer's hard drive, you always get a message explaining that that is dangerous, in case your hard drive dies, and it would be better to backup to a USB memory key or elsewhere. You are then asked whether to do it anyways. The default response on that question has been changed from Yes to No, to better prevent you from doing that!

•Prevented a technical error message if you click Show Transaction in the Found Transactions window and for some reason the highlighted transaction can neither be shown as a Journal Entry nor be shown in a Register window. Now there will be a clearer error message - which still indicates a problem that should be investigated, because normally there is no way to enter transactions which cannot be shown in one of those two windows!

•Prevented an error in the SQL Select window, and in running Memorized Reports that were based on SQL Selects, that could incorrectly give a message about "Error executing the SQL SELECT statement", with no further helpful details, if the SELECT statement you were executing returned more than 32,767 rows of data.

•Corrected some messages that could come up in unusual situations, if the program had downloaded an installation file (for instance, with Check for Updates), and then was unable to run that installation. Previously some of those messages told you to find the file with the Tools ⇒ Explore Data Directory menu option, when in fact the file was in your Temp directory - the messages have been corrected to tell you to use Tools ⇒ Explore Temp Directory.

•Made a change to stop the lines at the left and right edges of the Common Actions boxes on the main window from extending downwards if you resize the window to be taller, by dragging its top or bottom edge.

•Made a change that could prevent a technical error message and crash (which we could not replicate ourselves) in the Email Sending Configuration main window, possibly when switching between "Use Normal Server Authentication" and "Use Gmail-Specific Authorization". (The error was "Error at line 16 in wf_validate_and_save event of w_smtp_options.")

•This is primarily a note for our own staff, to remember when this change was made, because it will not affect users of the program in any noticeable way: Made a change to how the program accesses secure services on the Software4Nonprofits.com website, that should prevent future "Error 106" problems like the ones that started happening for many users on September 30, 2021, and were fixed by changes in Releases 2.47 and 2.47b. (The affected services included Internet Backups, connecting with the Cloud Storage Service, doing Check for Updates, and requesting license keys.)

Release 3.00b (December 22, 2021):

•Fixed a number of issues, introduced by Release 3.00, that could prevent users from requesting license keys or evaluation extensions for the OnDemand version, or the upcoming subscription versions of the Standard or Local Network versions. The problems could also cause various incorrect messaging for OnDemand and subscription users whose support had expired.

•When you are specifying the details for Recurring Transactions, the control for how many days to automatically insert the transaction before the recurrence date now allows values from 0 to 60 days. (Previously it only allowed up to 14 days.)

Release 3.00 (December 7, 2021):

•This is the first release of the Standard and Local Network versions where, if you have made a payment on or after January 1, 2022, and gotten an updated license key after that, they will become subscription versions (that stops working after that payment expires, plus a 30-day grace period) . The OnDemand version has always been a subscription version.

•We have confirmed that ACCOUNTS works on Windows 11.

Release 2.48b (November 19, 2021):

•Most messageboxes in the program now show a small camera button in the bottom right corner, similar to the camera picture that was added a while ago on most windows in the program. If you click that camera button on the messagebox, nothing happens immediately, but when you return from the messagebox by clicking OK or whatever other regular buttons are displayed on it, you will be prompted to email a screenshot of the messagebox to us. After you do that, the program will continue as normal.

•If you uninstall the program, it now gives you a message telling you the two directories that will still be left over after the uninstall, and that you can manually remove them and their subdirectories if you are positive you will never be using ACCOUNTS again.

•When you submit a registration from the program, or set up your Unique ID for Internet Backups and let it email that information to Software4Nonprofits, both of them now include your Release # of ACCOUNTS, so that we can know how up-to-date your software is.

Release 2.48 (November 5, 2021):

•When printing cheques for transactions created with the Pay Bills feature, the splits that show on the voucher sections of the cheque now show the accounts used in the bill(s) that were being paid by that bill payment, including proportional amounts if it was a partial payment of a bill. Previously only one split line was shown for cheques for bill payments, with the text "Bill Payment" and the total amount.

•For Custom Reports, only include the header field that says "For the period .. to ..." if the date ranges specified for all columns in the report are the same as each other. Also, correct the code so that when that header field is displayed, it doesn't incorrectly show both dates as 01/01/1900. (This is a further fix to what turned out to be a partial fix in release # 2.45c.)

•When you are doing your Email Sending Configuration for the first time, if you configure it in the first window from an email address from a known email provider or ISP, or from your email client program such as Outlook, then when you get to the 2nd window, there may be some new helpful messages. If it's a Gmail address, you will receive a recommendation to use the new option Use Gmail-Specific Authorization, and if it's any other email provider where we have some special information about extra configuration requirements, you will be given an option to go to the section of our web page www.software4nonprofits.com/smtplist.htm that shows the relevant details.

Release 2.47b (October 1, 2021):

•Better solution than the temporary one in release 2.47, to prevent "Error 106" errors that many users were getting when doing Internet Backups, connecting with the Cloud Storage Service, doing Check for Updates, and perhaps a few other parts of the program.

Release 2.47 (September 30, 2021):

•Changed the name of the Maintenance ⇒ Entity Names menu option to Entity and Report Names, since it actually deals with both the names of entities in the program (specifically, classes of accounts, like "Equity", "Income" etc.) and the names of reports (like "Income Statement" etc.).

•In the window for editing an account or creating a new account, if you click See Existing Accounts, it now shows headings for the types of accounts, like Bank etc.. Also, when that list of existing accounts opens, it scrolls to an appropriate place in the list based on the account number or type of account already showing in the main editing area.

•If you try to restore a backup from a database with a different base filename from your current database, although it worked correctly to restore (and if necessary create) that other database, there was usually at least one incorrect informational message during the process. That has been corrected.

•Put in a temporarily work-around to prevent "Error 106" errors that many users were getting when doing Internet Backups, connecting with the Cloud Storage Service, doing Check for Updates, and perhaps a few other parts of the program.

Release 2.46 (September 18, 2021):

•In Reports ⇒ Listing ⇒ Annual or Monthly Budget, if it's a monthly budget, and your fiscal months start on the 1st of the month, the column headings are now the name of the months, rather than the previous "Month 1", "Month 2" etc. The previous version is still used if your fiscal months don't start on the 1st of the month.

•Fixed a bug with the new screenshots feature, that meant that for some users with versions of Windows prior to Windows 10, and certain scaling factors (like 125%), the screenshots were of the wrong area of the screen and thus not helpful!

•Fixed an inability to import online banking download files from one financial institution that was using unusual line terminators between the initial header lines of its files.

•Put in several warning messages about having Bank accounts in your Chart of Accounts that are sub-accounts of other Bank accounts. Normally in ACCOUNTS that should not be done, for two reasons:

1. You will not be able to reconcile the parent Bank account, because only accounts with no sub-accounts can be reconciled.
2. Doing this is usually a work-around for the lack of fund accounting in other bookkeeping programs like QuickBooks or Quicken etc. It is not needed in ACCOUNTS, because of the automated fund accounting features explained in the Help section on Funds and Fund Accounting.

The only case in which this would be appropriate is if the parent Bank account isn't really a bank account itself, but rather just an account that you are using to group together some related individual bank accounts, each of which will have its own bank statements and should be reconciled separately.

The warnings appear in 3 places:

1. When the first user starts the program after upgrading from an earlier release of ACCOUNTS to this release or a later release, if there are Bank accounts that are sub-accounts of other Bank accounts.
2. When exiting the Chart of Accounts window, if there are Bank accounts that are sub-accounts of other Bank accounts, and you have not answered a previously-seen question about no longer warning you about that.
3. When creating a new Bank account or editing an existing one, and setting it to be sub-account of another Bank account.

•Fixed a small bug in messageboxes from the program, for users whose computers are set to use certain languages other than English (for instance, Simplified Chinese) where a question mark would appear on what should have just been blank line.

•Changed the Database ⇒ Import Transactions menu option so that if there are two negative signs before a number, like "--5.00", or two indications that the number is negative, like "-(5.00)", it is correctly changed to a positive and thus can import properly. (This could, rarely, be a problem with exports of Bank Deposits from DONATION, although that will also be fixed in the next release of DONATION.)

Release 2.45d (August 31, 2021):

•Correctly fixed this bug, which it says below was fixed in Release 2.45b, but actually wasn't: For OnDemand users, prevented a possible but very unlikely error, where actions that are not allowed while more than one user is logged in, such as restoring a database backup, would still be allowed. The bug in Release 2.45b could also cause inappropriate messages that there was more than one user connected so you couldn't do certain actions, like validate your database, when you were the only connected user.

Release 2.45c (August 30, 2021):

•Fixed a bug in Custom Reports: if you used the date range "Custom Date Range", whatever dates you entered manually would get changed to 01/01/1900 and thus the report would be incorrect.

•Added the menu option Tools ⇒ Turn Debug Mode On, which gives you an option to temporarily turn what is called "Debug mode" on in the program, if we have asked you to do so. Doing that causes certain debug messages and logging to occur, to help us solve problems you are having.

Release 2.45b (August 23, 2021):

•For OnDemand users, prevented a possible but very unlikely error, where actions that are not allowed while more than one user is logged in, such as restoring a database backup, would still be allowed.

Release 2.45 (August 20, 2021):

•Added new alternatives in the main configuration window of Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration: radio buttons to choose between Use Normal Server Authentication (which is what the program has always done up to now), and Use Gmail-Specific Authorization, which is a special option for Gmail accounts, and accounts using email addresses on your organization's domain using Google Workspace (formerly called G Suite). Details on the new Gmail option are in the Gmail Configuration help page.

Release 2.44c (approximately July 1, 2021):

•In the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window, allow the selection of Letter versus Legal paper size (or A4 for users in countries other than Canada or the USA).

•For OnDemand users, fixed a weakness that you weren't being notified, and shown this Revision History page, when the program had been upgraded since you last used it. (Unlike all other versions, we do the upgrades to your OnDemand version programs when they are available, so you don't have to.)

•If you have set up automatically recurring memorized transactions, and you have not used the program for a fair while, there is a potential issue - you could have to accept a bunch of recurrences before you can get into the program. Now, if you are in that situation, after each set of recurrences is inserted, you are given an option to continue with further recurrences, or stop for now, and have them inserted the next time you start the program.

•Since the Remote Database Version was discontinued on August 1, 2021, removed most of the references to it and Help about it in this Help file.

Release 2.44b (June 9, 2021):

•Made a correction to the new Reports ⇒ Accountant ⇒ General Ledger report. It was failing to display transactions on the fiscal year's start date, and thus also failing to include them in the ending balances.

•Fixed several issues in the Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ One Fund Income Statement report. Problems included that there could be a page break within the main income statement section, for no apparent reason, and in the summary sections, some headings could be omitted or partial. In addition, particularly if a top-level fund with a lot of sub-funds was being reported on, the summary sections sometimes didn't all get onto the report - they would just stop at the bottom of a page, when there should have been more on a further page. For technical reasons, the hyperlinks on amounts in the income statement part had to be removed. And in the individual fund summaries section, if a given fund didn't have any Net Income for the period, that line is now omitted, and similarly for the line for direct transfers into or out of the fund.

Release 2.44 (June 7, 2021):

•In the Reconciliation Summary window, it now asks you to confirm that you want to re-open your last reconciliation if your entered a Statement Ending Date that is the date of that last saved reconciliation. It also now asks you to confirm if your Statement Ending Date is less than 28 days after the last reconciliation (which would mean it's probably not a month after it).

•Users of the OnDemand version can now be given an access level of "No Access" to a database, in the Administer All Users window. This would be helpful for OnDemand clients with multiple databases, where some users should only have access to some of the databases.

•Users of the Remote Database version will now receive a message, each time they start the program, telling them how many days are remaining until that version is discontinued (on August 1, 2021), before which they have to switch to the Standard or OnDemand version.

•Fixed a bug in the Maintenance ⇒ Funds for Accounts window, where it would give an error message and crash the program if you tried to make a change to the selected fund when the sort was by Account. (In recent versions, before that crash it would offer to send a screenshot of the error message to Software4Nonprofits first.) Also fixed a small weirdness in the grouping after clicking the Re-Sort by Fund button.

Release 2.43c (May 22, 2021):

•Added the Reports ⇒ Accountant ⇒ General Ledger report, which can be used by your Accountant to see all transactions in all accounts in a year (or up to a given date in the year), with starting and ending balances. This allows them to see which transactions went into making up your Trial Balance.

•Changed things so that license key requests for Organization Names with non-Roman characters, such as Chinese or Hebrew, should work properly.

•When importing a chart of accounts from Simply Accounting or Sage 50, the program can now handle account names that are longer than the maximum length in ACCOUNTS, which is 40 characters. (Older versions of those programs that we were aware of did not have names longer than 40 characters, so this had not been a problem.)

•This note is primarily for Software4Nonprofits staff to know when we made this change - it should not affect users! When the Remote Database version is downloading its database to become a local database, permissions are no longer granted by the program to the database usernames that the Standard and other versions use, but the Remote Database version does not use. That is because the process of doing the backup on the server, that gets downloaded to the local PC, grants those permissions instead.

•Undid a change in release 2.42b that could create error messages such as "Internal error: trying to add the key ... a second time to an nvo_keyvalue object." While the change that caused those messages is not known to have affected the behaviour of any functionality in the program, it could possibly have done so.

Release 2.43b (May 6, 2021):

•This release only has an improvement for users of OnDemand: made the new screenshots feature released in # 2.43 (which was not deployed to OnDemand) work properly.

Release 2.43 (April 30, 2021):

•Most windows in the program now have a small camera icon in some corner of the window. Clicking on it automatically saves a screenshot of that window to a file, then brings up a window that allows you to email the screenshot to us, with your comments. Some technical messageboxes also have a similar mechanism for emailing them to us. See Screenshots for Tech Support for full details.

•The Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window now allows you to use Port 587 or 465 with the Security option None (after warning you that it is unusual), if it is allowed by your email provider.

•Some users have been having problems with updated versions of the helper file HtmlMessageBox.dll not being installed when they do upgrades, likely due to interference from their anti-virus software. (We can assure you there is nothing wrong with that file!) The program now checks on startup that that file is present, and is as up-to-date as it should be.

Release 2.42b (April 22, 2021):

•The Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window now allows you to use Security None with Port 587 or 465 (after warning you that it is unusual), if it is allowed by your email provider.

Release 2.42 (March 24, 2021):

•Added an option to the Startup Accounts window for importing your chart of accounts from QuickBooks Online, with the existing option on that window that used to be called just "QuickBooks" renamed to "QuickBooks Desktop", for clarity.

•Prevented a rare bug where if you have a recurring transaction set up for the 27th or 28th of the month, with the option to move the day forward if it's a weekend selected, and February 27th or 28th happen to be on a weekend, it could keep inserting the transaction on the same weekday of February prior to that day (the 26th or 27th) repeatedly, with no way to stop it.

•Using the Save PDF button in Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement by Months, and by Quarters, doesn't work quite right. Added a note in the descriptions of those two reports in the Help topic on Summary Reports, and in the Report Browser, explaining that, and what to do about it.

•Changed a lot of places in the program that accessed web pages or utilities (such as for requesting license keys) on our website, that were using insecure web pages (http://...), to instead access the same pages securely, with https://... addresses.

Release 2.41e (February 25, 2021):

•Further improvements for users of the OnDemand version who have been trying to open files from, or save files to, the C: drive, which is the OnDemand server's drive. Your local computer's C: drive shows up as J: under OnDemand, with subsequent drives like USBs showing up as K: or L:. All File Open or File Save type dialog boxes now give you warning messages if you navigate to a folder on the C: drive, telling you to use J: etc. instead, and prevent you from clicking Open or Save if you are in a folder on the C: drive.

•Message boxes that have a Help button on them now work in a more convenient way: the Help file is opened immediately, and you can switch between it and the program. Previously, you had to close the Help file that was opened, before you could resume working in the program.

Release 2.41d (February 17, 2021):

•Users of the OnDemand version who try to save files such as backups, PDFs, data exports etc. to the C: drive, which is the OnDemand server's local drive, not their own computer's local drive, are now given a message about that not being allowed, and asked to try again. (Under OnDemand, your local computer's C: drive shows up as J:, and additional local drives, like USB memory keys, show up as subsequent letters like K: etc.) There's also a message warning you about that before you try to do any database restores.

•If you start the program and your licensing file accountsl.txt is not present in the program's Data Directory, it is now automatically created, with data in it that starts a 60-day evaluation period starting on the current date. This is particularly for the OnDemand version, to make sure that new users start with an appropriate evaluation period, because their setups never have that licensing file pre-installed.

Release 2.41c (February 10, 2021):

•The Tools ⇒ Check for Updates window now has a Print button when an update is available and thus revision history is being displayed, to print that revision history.

•Made some changes in the OnDemand User Management Help page to reflect some changes to the User Management application.

•Fixed a bug when you use the Database ⇒ Find Transactions menu option, where part of a date was appearing to the right of the Amount in the window of results.

Release 2.41b (January 27, 2021):

•Some improvements to the OnDemand help topics.

•In the OnDemand Administer All Users window, user names are now forced to upper case, to match the User Management application. (Logins can still be done wit the user name in any case, though passwords have to be in the right case.)

Release 2.41 (January 20, 2021):

•When you add a first sub-account under an existing top-level account, or first sub-sub-account under an existing sub-account, the program now checks to make sure there are no memorized or recurring transactions, tax code accounts, vendor expense accounts, or bank rules using that account. If so, you are prompted to allow the program to switch those things to use the new sub-account instead. (This type of checking and adjusting had previously already been done for existing transactions, budget lines, fund accounts with associated income and expense accounts, and government form lines.)

•Added a check, as part of the Database ⇒ Validate Transactions menu option, that makes sure that none of the problems prevented by the checks mentioned in the previous bullet point are present in your database, and reports on any such problems. And the Help topic for that menu option now tells you how to fix any such problems that are found. Also, this check is automatically done the first time you upgrade to this release, to make sure you do catch any existing problems. (We believe that these problems are all very unlikely!)

•Fixed a weakness in Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ One Fund Income Statement: if you selected to run it on a fund account that had hidden sub-accounts under it, they would not be included in the output if they actually had transactions that affected them during the selected time period, leading to incomplete results. This also fixes a bug that could give a techie error message if all of the sub-accounts under your selected fund account were hidden.

•Fixed several bugs that would cause the Database ⇒ Delete Old Data menu option to fail, initially with an error message that starts "Cannot set a filter to eliminate $0 rows in the starting Trial Balances". That is now fixed. However, for some reason that we have not yet determined, after successfully completing the processing, and telling you that it has done so, the program may immediately exit with no further message. That's OK, the action has been completed successfully and the program opens again fine after that.

Release 2.40d (January 5, 2021):

•For users of the cloud-based OnDemand Version, added a warning when they are backing up, if they choose to back up to the J: drive, which is their local C: drive. This is similar to the warnings given to other users if they back up to their C: drive, that if it dies, they could lose all of their data.

•Fixed a bug that could show just a number instead of an account name in the drop-down for the Parent account and linked Fund account in the Edit Account window, if the selected Parent or Fund account was a hidden account. Now hidden accounts are included in those drop-down lists (which was not the case before). The hidden accounts have their names in italics.

•Similarly, added the hidden accounts, with their names in italics, to the Fund drop-down lists in the Funds for Accounts window. (The same bug could happen there, with hidden accounts showing just a number instead of their name.)

•When you are saving a hidden Fund account, if it has linked Income or Expense accounts that are not hidden, you are now warned of that, and given an option to make all of them be hidden.

•Technical point mostly for our internal memory: If you chose "Run ACCOUNTS" from the last screen of the installation program, it used to run it with elevated Administrator privileges, the same way the installer itself ran. That was different from how ACCOUNTS was normally run, and could cause some unusual errors during that first run done directly from the installer. Now if you do that, ACCOUNTS is run with your normal user privileges.

•Put in a fix in the Tools ⇒ Check for Updates window, that may prevent an error message about "Error ... in destructor event of ole_web" when the program is being closed in order to run the downloaded installation program.

Release 2.40c (December 17, 2020):

•Added a couple of further places explaining about our licensing and payment rules for multiple user with multiple databases, like the existing information about that here.

•Added a check when the program starts up that it has all of the expected database permissions. There was a potential problem about that with our initial version of the instructions on the website for switching from the Remote Database version to the OnDemand version. (Those instructions have been changed to avoid the problem.)

Release 2.40b (December 15, 2020):

•Added instructions for automatic logins with the OnDemand client program to the Command Line Arguments page.

•Various additions and improvements to the OnDemand help pages.

Release 2.40 (December 14, 2020):

•This release introduces the entirely cloud-based OnDemand Version, which runs on a server, through a small remote-control client program, and does not require installation of the ACCOUNTS program itself. Like the Remote Database Version, multiple users can access the same database at the same time, each with their own login, but it is much faster than the Remote Database Version.

•Backups can now always back up to mapped network drives, and also to UNC paths (\\computername etc.), except for the Local Network Client version. Restores can now always restore from mapped network drives, and also from UNC paths.

•When you are Importing Transactions, which are usually bank deposit exports from the DONATION program, it does not work if the import file has account numbers preceding the account names. The program now explains that error more specifically.

•Fixed a failure to import Online Banking Download files from Desjardins Credit Unions in Quebec. The failure was caused because the files were missing a blank line at a place it was expected to be included. Now they will work.

•When you get errors configuring emails in Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration, the technical log file that is generated is now shown to you in a special window with a button on it that allows you to email it to us for our suggestions.

•Fixed a bug where if you are in the last field of the last row of a Register window (including the Register-like windows for Online Banking Download importing) and press Tab, you get an error message and the program crashes.

Release 2.36g (November 9, 2020):

•Added new Sort radio buttons to the Reconciliation Details window, to allow you to change the sort to be by Cheque # or Reference # and then by Date, to help you find cheques.

Release 2.36f (November 6, 2020):

•Fixed a bug in the first Reconciliation screen: the Delete Latest button almost drops off the screen, with just a top sliver of it showing, when you are reconciling liability accounts such as credit cards.

•Fixed an inappropriate error message when installing the Local Network Client version, where it would say "Could not copy file ... ACCOUNTS.DB ... Source file(s) does not exist...". (There was more text where each "..." was in that quoted message.) Clicking Cancel on that messagebox would allow the install to complete successfully.

•Fixed an error in installs of the Local Network Server version, on computers on which it had never been installed before, that could prevent the Local Network Client installs from succeeding. That error could be fixed by copying the file ACCOUNTS.DB on the Local Network Server computer, from the directory in which the program files had been installed, to the Data subdirectory of the program's Data Directory.

•All users of the Remote Database Version can now use the Maintenance ⇒ User Administration ⇒ Administer All Users menu option. However, only users who are Administrators can make changes in the window that comes up - everyone else can just see the information about the users.

•Fixed a bug that can cause an error message "Common Dialog Error: Error Number 65535" to come up when you use certain parts of the program that bring up a window for selecting a file to open, or specifying a file to save, if certain other parts of the program that also do that have been used first.

Release 2.36e (August 26, 2020):

•Fixed a bug, that in the Write Cheques window, only "CHEQUE" or "CHECK" was appearing in the Transaction Type drop-down list, rather than what it should have been - all types you have used for payments on that bank account in the last 13 months.

•Fixed two small bugs: When you drill down into a summary field in a report (such as an Income Statement) to see the details making up that summary amount, then you use the details report's Back button to come back, the paging controls (the icon buttons for First Page, Previous Page, Next Page, and Last Page) were not necessarily re-enabled or disabled properly based on whether or not the main report you returned to had multiple pages. Now they are. Similarly, if you create or change a Filter in a way that changes the report from one page to many, or vice-versa, those paging controls are now appropriately enabled or disabled. (The controls are disabled when there's only one page.)

•Made it clearer when those report paging controls are enabled by adding a solid black border around them in that case. When they are disabled (when the report is only one page) their border is grey.

•Added a Help topic on making Screenshots for tech support emails.

Release 2.36d (July 29, 2020):

•Prevent a crash when clicking OK on a Register Splits window, if you have made a change to an Amount but not tabbed out or clicked out of that field to another field before clicking OK. The error message was "Error at line 8 in of_fill_last_amount of nvo_entry_window_service." A version of this bug might also have been possible in the Write Cheques, Enter Deposits, Credit Card Charges and Enter Bill windows.

•Also prevented a problem in any of the windows in the previous point, where after adjusting some splits values, the program could put $0.00 into a blank row at the bottom, as part of its feature of automatically balancing the splits to the transaction's total. (In those cases where it put $0.00 in, it was already balanced, and should not have put anything into a blank row.) One time this could definitely happen when it should have happened is if you clicked the Adjust Total button.

Release 2.36c (July 24, 2020):

•To help prevent any future bug like the ones introduced in Release 2.36 and fixed in 2.36b, where transactions could be unbalanced, the program now checks each transaction before saving it, to make sure it is balanced, and refuses to save it if so. That way if we somehow put in such a bug in the future, it will be immediately found in our testing.

•Fixed a subtle bug that can crash the single-transaction entries windows like Write Cheques if you enter exactly the number of splits rows as are displayed in your window, and then click one of the Save buttons. (This could come up as "Error at line 18 in of_pre_save of nvo_entry_window_service ...".)

•Fixed an issue that was causing the Register Splits window to unnecessarily show a bunch of extra blank rows at the bottom, that you would have to scroll to see. (That wasn't a real problem for users, just odd.)

•Fixed a weird behaviour in the Register window, where if you resize the window to be taller, the transactions scrolled to show the first one in that account, rather than continuing to display the one you were on.

Release 2.36b (July 23, 2020):

•Fixed very serious bugs introduced in Release 2.36 to the Write Cheques, Enter Deposits, Credit Card Charges and Enter Bill windows. All of them might reverse their debits and credits (and thus whether they were viewed as being a Payment or a Deposit on a chequing account etc.) and they might also create unbalanced transactions!
If you installed Release 2.36 you MUST run Database ⇒ Validate Transactions to check for such problems. You must also review all transactions that you recently entered using one of those special-purpose data entry windows in a Register window to make sure they aren't reversed.

•Fixed both Database ⇒ Validate Transactions and Reports ⇒ Administrative ⇒ Unbalanced Transactions to catch some unbalanced ones that they were not catching before. The ones they were missing appear to be ones where all of the included splits (including the main part of the transaction) were debits, or all of them were credits.

•In the confirmations introduced in Release 2.35 for the words Fund or Funds in fund account names, also allow the user's specified entity names for "Equity / Fund (singular)" and "Equities / Funds (plural)" from the Maintenance ⇒ Entity and Report Names window. Also, even in Release 2.35 the French word "Fonds" was also allowed.

Release 2.36 (July 19, 2020):

•Removed several named date ranges, that are unlikely to be used, from windows prompting for Date Ranges, except for reports where two date ranges can be compared (namely, other than Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement General Comparison, and Reports ⇒ Custom Reports). The ones that were removed from windows prompting only for one range of dates were Last Month Last Year, Last Quarter Last Year, Last Year to Date, Last Year to Last Month End and Last Year to Last Quarter End. This makes the drop-down list shorter and easier to use.

•Added a "Show Hidden Accounts" checkbox on the Maintenance ⇒ Budgets window, to determine whether or not hidden accounts are shown.

•In Reports ⇒ Listing ⇒ Annual or Monthly Budget, if a hidden account is shown (because it has a budget!), its name and number will now be in italics.

•Changed some reports that have three columns of figures from landscape mode to portrait mode, as long as there is room - which is if you have checked "Hide Account Numbers except in Chart of Accounts" in the Maintenance ⇒ Main Options window, and if you have not checked "Use A4 Paper" in the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window. The affected reports are Summary ⇒ Income Statement Yr/Yr Comparison, Summary ⇒ Income Statement General Comparison, Summary ⇒ Balance Sheet Comparison, Summary ⇒ Budget Comparison, and Fund ⇒ Budget Comparison.

•Added some confirmation messages about unusual account names that might indicate an error, when you are creating or editing Fund accounts in the Edit Account window:

oIf the name doesn't include "Fund", give a warning. (All of these tests are not case-sensitive, so for instance it would be fine if it includes "fund" or "FUND".)

oIf the name includes "Income", "Revenue", "Expense" or "Expenditure", give a warning. (This would likely indicate that the account really ought to be an Income or Expense account, not a Fund account!)

oIf you change the name of the original General Fund account to anything different, give a warning, pointing out the special properties of this account, which will still be the same with any different name. (Those properties are that the account cannot be deleted, it cannot have other funds under it as sub-accounts or sub-sub-accounts, and new Income and Expense accounts will default to having it as their associated Fund account.)

oIf it is a sub-account or sub-sub-account, and its Parent account's name doesn't include "Funds", and it's Parent account didn't previously have any accounts under it, give a warning. Normally a parent account with accounts under it would have a plural name.

oIf it has sub-accounts or sub-sub-accounts under it, and its name doesn't include "Funds", give a warning.

•Merged some common code in the following windows: Register Splits, Write Cheques, Enter Deposits, Credit Card Charges and Enter Bill. (This is primarily a note for us at Software4Nonprofits, but if you see any new or weird behaviour in any of these windows, please let us know!)

Release 2.35 (June 16, 2020):

•Changed most windows that prompt for a range of dates for reports to have a Date Range drop-down that you can use to select most commonly-used ranges of dates. You can select Custom Date Range on the drop-down to allow you to instead directly enter the dates, as you did in previous releases. (All Date Range options other than Custom Date Range make the actual date fields not be editable, because the Date Range option determines what the dates should be.) An explanation of the Date Range values, which were first introduced with the Custom Reports, is here.

•Made the Write Cheques, Enter Deposits, Credit Card Charges and Enter Bill windows resizable. When you resize them horizontally, the Memo field will expand to fill the space. When you resize them vertically, extra splits rows will be added to fill the space, if necessary.

•The Journal Entry and Opening Balances windows were already resizable vertically. Adjusted the way they resize to behave just as described for the other windows like Write Cheques, in the previous point.

•Added some tests to the Tools ⇒ Network Client Information menu option (which is only in the Local Network Server Version). The tests check for some of the things that would prevent the Local Network Client Version installation from working. If any of them are detected, you will be given a message and told to contact us.

•Restored the title bar at the top of the Write Cheques window, which had been accidentally removed in the last release. (Not having that title bar also prevented users from being able to move that window to a different location.)

Release 2.34 (May 28, 2020):

•Made changes to how the program determines the date of the latest transaction in the database. This date is used when deciding whether to warn you before restoring a backup (including automatically restoring via the Cloud Storage Service). The warning shows up when your current database appears to contain newer transactions than the backup database that will replace it. The changes include:

oDeleting a transaction will now be registered as an update to your database, which wasn't the case previously.

oSome changes to existing transactions in the Register, such as changing only the dollar amount, will now register as updates to your database when they previously didn't.

•Significantly redesigned the Check for Updates window, including now displaying the changes since your last update on the window itself. The program also now always prompts you to check for updates once a month, to encourage you to get the latest features and bug fixes. (Previously you could opt out of those once a month checks, with an option on that window.)

•Made the displayed part of the Memo field in the splits area wider, to allow more of it to be displayed without scrolling within the field horizontally, in the following windows: Register Splits, Enter Bills, Write Cheques, Enter Deposits, and Credit Card Charges.

•For users in countries other than Canada or the U.S.A. who checked Use A4 Paper in the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window, fixed a lot of reports. They were cutting off a tiny bit at the right edge, and/or printing extra blank (or almost blank) pages after each page.

Release 2.33c (April 28, 2020):

•Made a technical change that should prevent a problem that a few users were having where they were shown a log file saying that the Chilkat function UnlockBundle needed to be called.

Release 2.33b (April 24, 2020):

•Changed the default for the range of dates that Reports ⇒ Details ⇒ One Accounts Details, Reports ⇒ Details ⇒ One Account with Running Balances, and Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ One Fund Details and Balances all prompt for. Now that default is the current fiscal year, if it is different from the calendar year, rather than the current calendar year, which it was previously. This makes them match most other reports.

•Made some improvements to both the messaging in the program, and the relevant Help topic about Gmail problems, when you are configuring email sending for a Gmail account and it doesn't work at first. Also improved the Help and the program's messaging about email configuration problems for several other email services, which either need or might need you to set up a special "application password" for use only with this program.

•Updated the Help topics for the Register Window, and for Writing Cheques, with the following information: If the Type (or Transaction Type) field is any of "CHECK", "CHEQUE", "CHÈQUE", "CHK", or "CHQ", or even just includes "CH" anywhere within it, then when you go to save a transaction, if the Number (or Chq / Ref #) field value is not just a number, you will get a warning message, to let you confirm that you have not made an error. This also implies that if the Type is not as described here, Number values that are not entirely numeric are allowed, with no warning messages to bother you!

Release 2.33 (April 9, 2020):

•Renamed two of the versions of ACCOUNTS to better describe them: the Standalone version is now called Standard, and the Web Network version is now called Remote Database. This does not affect their features in any way, just their names!

•The Journal Entry editing window and Opening Balances window are now resizable vertically, by clicking and dragging on the top or bottom border of the window.

•Removed an apparently incorrect restriction (added in release 2.30) stopping the Local Network Server version from backing up to mapped network drives. The Local Network Client version still cannot write to mapped drives on the server (which is making the backups), for technical reasons. Trying to do that now gives a nice error message explaining that that doesn't work, rather than a techie error window.

•Fixed a bad bug in the Journal Entry window, where if you entered a bad date in the Date field and tabbed or clicked out of the field, or were in the Description field, left it blank, and tabbed or clicked out of the field, you would get an endless series of error messages and have to kill the program with Windows Task Manager.

•Fixed a problem that could cause incorrect error messages when installing the Local Network Client version, where the installation program could give an incorrect message about needing to upgrade the Local Network Server version first, when it had already been upgraded.

•Added a message to the installation programs, to give an error message and ask for confirmation if you were trying to install an older version on top of a newer version. However, that will only take effect if the older version being installed on top of the newer one is this version or later.

•Organization Names with leading or trailing spaces in the name can cause problems with license keys not matching properly, so we made a couple of small changes to prevent and/or fix that.

Release 2.32c (February 25, 2020):

•The Help ⇒ Email Software4Nonprofits.com menu option now gives a choice between using your default Windows email program to send the email (which is what it always did prior to this) or using a plain-text form within the program to do so.

•Changed the To Email field in the window for sending emails to arbitrary people to allow multiple semicolon-separated emails to be included in that field. That window is used for emailing backups, for emailing reports saved with the Save As button, and a few other places. For instance, "john@gmail.com;mary@hotmail.com", without the quotes, would now be a valid entry. When entries like that are used, any emails sent to the the people listed in that field will go as one email, with the To line for the email including both email addresses.

•Updated the Help topic Move the Program from One Computer to Another to include a much shorter simplified instructions section to cover the simplest cases.

•Added some messages to help catch weird situations that have happened to a few users, where their database was messed up in a way that making a backup then immediately restoring that backup would fix. (Please do not try that yourself unless we advise you to do so.)

Release 2.32b (February 9, 2020):

•Changed the behaviour of picking Vendors from the Vendor, Description, Payee or "Pay to the Order of" field in the Enter Bills, Write Cheques, Credit Card Charges, and Register windows. The change is relevant when your vendors have associated default Expense Accounts and Tax Codes. Previously, if you dropped down the list and were moving your cursor through the vendors, or typing letters to select them, the first one you encountered with a default Expense Account and Tax Code would update those fields on the window, and a subsequent actual final selection would not change that. Now, those defaults from the vendors are not applied until you have moved out of the field that included the vendors to another field or another part of the window, and the values used are from the actual vendor you selected. (In all of those windows except for Enter Bills, if you select one of the descriptions that are included in the list that is not a vendor, no defaults will be applied.)

•Fixed a problem that could happen in the Journal Entry window. If the Date field was left empty (including if you entered it with the Duplicate button from the Journal Entry List window) you could get a continuing series of messages about having to enter that date, with no way to stop them.

•Restored a missing column heading, Tax Code, in the Register window.

•Improved some messaging around the automatic retrieval versus manual requesting of license keys. Also changed the Evaluation and Licensing window to normally automatically close after a successful request of a license key or of an evaluation extension.

•Each page of this Help now has a footer that tells when it was last updated. However, for technical reasons, all pages will initially show as December 13, 2019 if they have not been updated after that.

Release 2.32 (February 3, 2020):

•Fixed a small bug in Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Budget Comparison: If you have the Main Options set to Hide Account Numbers on reports, and you run it for Only Top-Level Accounts, you get extra lines showing the top-level account numbers, which should not be there.

•Fixed problems in many summary reports: If you used the Save As button to export them to formatted Excel, some of the numbers in the first (or only) column could be missing in the resulting Excel file. The fixed reports are Reports ⇒ Listing ⇒ Annual or Monthly Budget, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Balance Sheet, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Balance Sheet Comparison, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement Yr/Yr Comparison, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement General Comparison, Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Budget Comparison, Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement and Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Budget Comparison.

•Added some additional warnings in a number of help topics about the fact that exporting reports to formatted Excel (with the Save As button) can be imperfect.

•Fixed a bug where Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ One Fund Income Statement could crash the program if you used the Rerun button and chose different options for the 2nd run.

•Improved the wording of the email sent with Email Backups about how to restore the backup.

•Altered the Help topic on Opening Balances, and some of the messaging in that window in the program, to make it even clearer that entering them is a one-time thing, not something you update every year. (This was something that a few users misunderstood recently, leading to something that was quite hard for them to fix.)

•When you are displaying a report and click Print, the printer dialog box will have an option to select only a range of pages to print. If you do that, and when that is done, click Save PDF, previously it would automatically only save the same range of pages to your PDF file. Now it will ask you whether you want to save the same range, or all pages.

•Made a change to the installation program that should fix the very infrequent errors where the program cannot properly access 3rd-party controls installed with it, leading to error messages such as "Cannot connect to global object in ChilkatAx-9.5.0-win32.dll ...".

Release 2.31 (January 15, 2020):

•Changed all budget and income statement comparison reports, and Difference columns in Custom Reports, to switch the sign of the Difference column for Expense accounts (positive becomes negative and vice versa). The effect of this is that the Difference now shows how much "better" one thing is than the other. So for instance for a Budget Comparison, for Income accounts a Difference is "better", and so positive, if the actual amount is more than the budget amount. For Expense accounts it is positive if the actual is less than the budget. Previously for Expense accounts, the Difference was positive if the actual was more than budget, which was not intuitive.
The Balance Sheet Comparison report has not been changed.

•Changed Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Balance Sheet Comparison to default to putting the newer year in the 1st column instead of the 2nd column, the first time you run it. (This is in accordance with common national accounting standards, and matches the change we made in release 2.22 to Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement Yr/Yr Comparison.) You can switch the dates if you want, and if you do, the program will remember the order that you want the dates to default to for subsequent runs of the same report.

Release 2.30g (January 6, 2020):

•Fixed a bug causing error messages if you tried to save reports to formatted Excel with the Save As button.

•In the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window, added an option to select the A4 paper size if your country is Other (not Canada or U.S.A.).

•When running reports, your paper size will now always be set to Letter, unless A4 paper size was set in Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info in which case it will be A4. This will override any default paper size set for your printer in Windows.

•Added the function "IF" to the function selection box for complex sort expressions, and added an explanation of to that Help topic.

•Did a complete spelling and grammar check of this Help file, and made lots of small corrections.

Release 2.30f (December 5, 2019):

•Fixed a bug when switching between databases with File ⇒ Open Database, which would particularly affect users of the Standalone version with the Cloud Storage Service who have multiple databases. (The program could get confused between the databases because of the bug.)

Release 2.30e (December 5, 2019):

•Added back in a file that had been accidentally omitted from the significantly rewritten installation program first used by one of the earlier 2.30 releases - ACCOUNTS.DB, the empty database file used to create new databases.

Release 2.30d (December 4, 2019):

•Added a missing scrollbar on the drop-down list of Funds in the Associating Accounts with Funds window. (Without that, if you had more funds than fit in the drop-down, you could only scroll between them with the up and down arrow keys.)

•In that same Associating Accounts with Funds window, added radio buttons at the top for sorting by Account or by Fund, and a Re-Sort by Fund button for sorting after making changes, when the sort is already by Fund.

•Improved the message you get on startup, if the program thinks your screen resolution may not be sufficient to show the program's main window and other windows.

•Fixed the fact that if you clicked Sort in Reports ⇒ Details ⇒ One Account Details or Reports ⇒ Details ⇒ One Account with Running Balances, you would get a warning about the report having group breaks, which might make changing the sort mess up the report. That was not actually true for that report.

•Fixed an possible small bug on the Account editing window, caused by a change we made in Release 2.30. If you created a new account there and then clicked Save and New and only then clicked See Existing Accounts, the account you just added would not show up on the list. A similar smaller problem could occur if you edited an existing account in a way that would change its sort order, then clicked those same two buttons - the existing account's sort order would not have changed appropriately.

•Fixed a bug in an internal function in the program that determined whether you were running the Local Network Client version, that could think that was the case if you were running the Web Network Version. The only place we are aware this affected is when you used the Tools ⇒ Check for Updates menu option in the Web Network Version - it would ask you an inappropriate question about whether you had first updated the Local Network Server version.

Release 2.30c (November 21, 2019):

•Corrected an error if you downloaded a Web Network Version database to become a local database, with the Upload/Download ⇒ Download Web Database to Local menu option, as part of converting back to a local version such as Standalone. This version fixes that, even if the download has already been done and you have switched to Standalone.
(Technical details for our internal memory: It had failed to grant appropriate permissions to a new database stored procedure named SP_UPDATE_SEQNO, which could lead to error messages about that, and perhaps crashes of the program, likely harmless, if you were making any changes to your Chart of Accounts.)

Release 2.30b (November 20, 2019):

•Updated a number of Help pages, including Multiple User Options, to reflect the fact that we are discontinuing the one simultaneous user Web Network Version option. (The five simultaneous user Web Network Version will still be available.) We are doing this because we believe that when you only need one user at a time accessing a shared database, the Standalone version with the Cloud Storage Service is a much better option than the Web Network Version, because it is much faster, and potentially cheaper.

•Made a minor revision to the Database ⇒ Validate Database menu option so that for the Web Network Version, there is not a significant delay caused by reloading the main window when the validation is finished.

Release 2.30 (November 14, 2019):

•The Chart of Accounts window has a new Copy button that allows you to make a similar copy to the currently selected account, with a suggested account number that is the next reasonable choice after the number of the account being copied.

•The Enter Deposits window now allows for the entry of a Reference # for the deposit.

•When making Bill Payments, the Chq / Ref # can now be filled in with non-numeric values (reference numbers other than a cheque number).

•Various things in the maintenance of the chart of accounts have been speeded up for users of the Web Network Version. (They were never slow for any other version!)

•When recurring transactions are being inserted, there may be cases where more than one of the same transaction needs to be inserted. As an example, if it is a weekly recurrence, and you have not run ACCOUNTS for over two weeks, two or more of them will be due. Previously, only the first such transaction would be inserted when you started ACCOUNTS, and the next one would be inserted the next time you started ACCOUNTS. Now after you attempt to close the window to accept the first occurrence of that transaction that is due, the next one will be displayed, and so on until all of the transactions that are due have been processed.

•The program has never been able to successfully restore a backup from a mapped network drive. Now it has a clear error message about that, with instructions of what to do about it (copy the file to your local computer then restore it), rather than a more technical one that just says it cannot open the backup file to be restored. Also changed the previous messaging and Help file information for if you were trying to use a UNC path (like \\othercomputer\c\...) to also state that you have to copy the file to your local computer in order to restore it. The Standalone and Lite versions can actually make backups to and restore backups from network paths, so the messages preventing that have been removed for those versions.

•Fixed a bug: users entering the program with a read-only password could still have recurring transactions inserted.

•Fixed the fact that the Help button in the Calculator window didn't go the right help page.

•Did a significant re-write of some common program code shared between our two programs DONATION and ACCOUNTS, leading to related changes in the code that is unique to each program. This is not intended to change any program behaviour. (This note is primarily for our own memory of when this was done, since this should not affect users of the software. The technical change was to stop injecting global variables into program objects.)

Release 2.29 (October 16, 2019):

•The Cloud Storage Service now requires an email address for notifications to be set on each computer running ACCOUNTS, which should be the email address of the main user ACCOUNTS on that computer. You will be prompted for it when you first use this (or a later) version, if it has not yet been set up, and it can also be set or changed in the Backup/Restore ⇒ Backup Frequency and Options window.

Release 2.28b (October 3, 2019):

•Fixed an unlikely but possible crash when clicking Save and New in the Enter Deposits, Write Cheques, Enter Bills and Credit Card Charges windows, if the total amount of the transaction in the top half of the window had not been entered before the splits in the bottom half were entered.

•Fixed a problem that a few users were having in the Register where when they opened it, the first row rather than the new last empty row was highlighted.

Release 2.28 (September 27, 2019):

•Added the options of assigning a default expense account and default tax code to Vendor details. If they are set up, any time you enter a payment type transaction and choose that vendor for the Payee, if the Account or Tax Code are not yet filled in, they will be copied in from the vendor defaults. That includes transactions entered on a Register window, Write Cheques, Credit Card Charges, or Enter Bills.

•Simplified the installation of the Local Network Client version of the program: you no longer have to enter the full path to the folder containing the database files. Also improved error handling on connection errors when running that version. Those improvements include now having the option to prompt for a changed Local Network Server computer name from the program itself, which could previously only be done by re-installing the Local Network Client.

•Improved the messaging if you have a memorized report that you memorized after loading a variation of the SQL for it with the Load SQL button, and then when you run the memorized report the saved SQL no longer works. (That would most likely because we have changed the definition of that built-in report in a newer release of the program.) Also improved the error messages if you are just viewing a non-memorized report and use Load SQL, and the loaded SQL doesn't work.

•Fixed a problem where the Load SQL button failed if there were any double quotes (") in the SQL.

•Made some internal changes to the Report Browser, that could lead to it being more efficient, particularly for users of the Web Network Version.

Release 2.27 (September 8, 2019):

•Added the option of creating and using monthly budgets (that can have different amounts for the same account in different months) rather than just annual budgets, which was all that was possible before. As a result of this change, Reports ⇒ Listing ⇒ Annual Budget was renamed to Annual or Monthly Budget, and it shows whichever type of budget you have defined for the selected year. All reports that include budget columns will now use the monthly figures if they have been defined, to determine the total budget amount for the selected range of dates.

•For reports that prompt for something (like a date, or range of dates) added a Rerun button to the report-viewing window, that lets you respecify those prompted-for values, and redisplay the report with your new values.

•Changed the Find Transactions window for Register windows to have radio buttons for searching backwards (the default, which is how it always used to work) or forwards.

•Fixed a bug for Memorized Reports with saved Simple Filters: If the Simple Filter had two or more criteria, when you re-run the memorized report, although that filter would be applied correctly, but if you clicked the Filter button to further edit the filter, only the first line of criteria would be displayed in the Simple Filter window. Ones saved in this release or later will not have that problem.

•Adjusted the behaviour of changing the Memo field of an existing transaction on a Register window, when the change is saved. If all of the split lines (as seen in the Register Splits window) had the exact same memo as what was on the Register window before you made that change, then after the save all of them are also changed to what you changed it to on the Register window. If any of them were different, however, only the one on the Register window will be changed.

•Made the Register window a bit wider, so that the Payee/Description, Account and Memo fields could all be wider.

•Made some fixes for computers with a 2nd monitor attached:

oFor the windows that remember their last-used size and position when you next use them (including the program's main window and reports-viewing window), if you had moved the window to that 2nd monitor, it will again come up there when you next open it.

oIt takes care of the case where you last had such a window on the 2nd monitor, then unplugged that 2nd monitor from your computer and used the window again: it puts the window back onto your main screen.

oIt could still be a problem if you last had such a window on the 2nd monitor, then turned off that monitor and forgot to turn it back on. In that case, the program will still think it can put the window on that 2nd monitor, since Windows cannot detect that the monitor is attached but turned off. So the window will just appear to not come up, and the program may appear to be hanging!

•This release uses a new version of PowerBuilder, the program we use to build DONATION.

•Changed the installation program so it will no longer install on Windows XP (which Microsoft stopped regular support for in 2009) or Windows Server 2003 (which Microsoft stopped regular support for in 2010). Because of this lack of support for security fixes, we do not feel it is at all safe to continue using these versions of Windows, and in addition, some time back we started using some functions in the program that do not exist in those versions. The program can be installed on all later versions of Windows: Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 or later, or Windows Server 2008 or later.

Release 2.26 (July 29, 2019):

•Made the Online Banking Transaction Importing able to handle files using a newer version of the OFX specification for such files. (Previously all such files we had seen were using version 1.02 of the specification, then two different users sent us files from one bank using version 2.02 of the specification, which ACCOUNTS was rejecting because of the unexpected format.) Also handled weird data in those files which did not separate fields to go into the Payee / Description field and the Memo fields into two different fields in the import file.

•Added some extra messages in the program if you are using the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration menu option, for handling new issues we have become aware of for configuring Apple-supplied email addresses (@me.com or @icloud.com).

•Changed the installation programs so that they don't try to put the uninstallation program in a C:\Windows\Accounts folder, which some users may not have permission to write files to.

Release 2.25 (July 10, 2019):

•Replaced the somewhat technical Sort window for Reports with a new easier Sort window, that only shows fields that you are likely to sort on.

•There is now a video on the new Simple Filter window on the Demos and Samples web page for the DONATION program. (While the examples are for DONATION, not ACCOUNTS, the techniques are the same.)

•Changed the font size of most of the text in this Help file from 10pt to 11pt, to make it easier to read on screen or if you print out topics. (On screen, you can also zoom the help text to read it more easily, by holding down Ctrl and scrolling your mouse wheel up, or pressing Ctrl with +.)

•Various small updates and improvements to the automatic configuration available for various email addresses, by using the 2nd option on the first window that comes up for the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration menu option.

Release 2.24d (June 26, 2019):

•Fixed a bad bug in full installers downloaded from the website (but not updates done with Tools ⇒ Check for Updates) that would cause errors such as "Internal error: The internal transaction ID for this transaction is not filled in."

Release 2.24c (June 24, 2019):

•Fixed a bug in budget comparison reports where certain date ranges (like exactly 4 months) could cause the report to crash with a message about "Integer overflow".

Release 2.24b (June 24, 2019):

•Fix the fact that the "As of date" in the report header had somehow disappeared from the Balance Sheet report.

•Fixed some issues in release 2.24 that could make it more likely for anti-virus programs to object to the installation. (In fact, there was absolutely nothing bad in it. We had just accidentally omitted what is called "code signing" that makes anti-virus programs trust installations more.)

Release 2.24 (June 17, 2019):

•Replaced the rather technical Filter window for Reports with a new much easier Simple Filter window.

•Reviewed all of the field names in reports available for filtering. Changed some to be clearer, and removed some that it wouldn't make sense to filter on.

•Improved sorting in most reports to prevent a problem where you add a filter, then remove that filter, and then the report ends up out of sort order.

•Fixed filtering of all reports that can show Income Statement or Balance Sheet amounts. Filtering on the amounts in the Income part of Income Statements, or the Liability and Fund Balances part of Balance Sheets, didn't work, because the displayed amounts were not actually what the filter would be acting on (it was acting on the same number with a reversed sign - negative vs positive). Now you can filter on all displayed amounts in those reports.

•Fixed filtering of all reports that can show budget comparisons. If they were run for a part of a year rather than a whole year, you could not successfully filter on the displayed Budget column amounts, because the displayed amounts were not actually what the filter would be acting on (it was acting on the full year budget amounts). Now you can filter on the actual displayed Budget amounts.

•The Local Network Client version of the program can now make Internet Backups.

•In the Register Splits, Enter Deposits, Write Cheques, Enter Bills, and Credit Card Charges, windows, made some minor but we think intuitive changes to how it recalculates the Amount on the last line when previous lines' Amounts are entered or changed. Also, a last line Amount is recalculated if you right-click and choose Delete Row on those windows, or if you change the total amount field's value in the windows that allow that (the ones other than Register Splits).

•Fixed Reports ⇒ Administrative ⇒ User Login History which except for the Web Network Version, was never displaying anything in the User column. Now it correctly shows the Windows username of the user who was running it.

•The following was actually changed in Release 2.22, but we failed to mention it at that time: When running Reports ⇒ Banking ⇒ Prior Reconciliation, added a checkbox for "Only include uncleared transactions up to the ending date". When running the reconciliation report as part of the actual reconciliation process, it is treated as if that checkbox was not checked, so it still includes later-dated transactions, as it did in all previous versions.

Release 2.23b (April 17, 2019):

•Fixed a problem that prevented successful Web Network Version registrations from its Log In window, or if you are prompted to register as a first time user, for users that were not previously using another version.

•Fixed some potential problems printing Help topics with screen shots that could be too wide for the page.

Release 2.23 (April 4, 2019):

•Improved the messaging and options for Web Network Version registrations from the program to help prevent multiple independent registrations for the same organization which could cause duplicate databases. The change also allows for additional registrations for different organizations.

•The program now detects when the current version of the licensing.dll file has not been properly updated by an update, and sends users to the DOWNLOAD page on the website to download and re-install their current version, which fixes the problem. (We are unfortunately not sure exactly why this problem is happening to a few users, but this at least gives an easy way to fix it.)

•Added a display of your Unique ID for Internet Backups on the Backup Frequency and Options window. You can click into that field and press Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard, for sending to a new user who might need it.

•Prevented a possible repeating error message, that you cannot get out of, in a very unusual circumstance when trying to make or restore a backup, or import a transaction file or online banking download file, if the last-used directory for that type of action was on the C: drive and cannot be found or recreated for some reason.

•Fixed a problem where non-English characters could not always be successfully saved to and retrieved from the program's settings file DONATION.INI, including if they were part of things like the last-used backup directory, or import directory.

Release 2.22d (March 15, 2019):

•When exiting the program to install an update downloaded by the Tools ⇒ Check for Updates menu option, avoid some of the normal extra prompts that can come up when you exit the program, such as to backup, validate your database, even check for updates itself!

Release 2.22c (March 13, 2019):

•Enhanced a number of error messages about bad date entry, to now show what the acceptable Short Date style from the Region settings in Windows Control Panel is (such as MM/DD/YYYY).

•The new Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ One Fund Income Statement report was actually added in release 2.22, but not mentioned until now. In this release, fixed a bug in it that could cause it to break weirdly between pages, with a lot of empty space left at the bottom of one page. However, it unfortunately still sometimes does that - it depends on your exact data. It appears that this is something we cannot control in the tool we use to create reports.

•When using the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration menu option, fixed the fact that the "Determine the setting from your default email program" option in the initial configuration window wasn't working if that default email program was a recent version (such as 16) of Outlook.

•Improved the handling and messaging in the situation where you run ACCOUNTS and it says that another instance of ACCOUNTS is already running.

Release 2.22b (February 22, 2019):

•Fixed two bugs when importing online banking downloads:

oIf you edited the splits on a transaction from the importing window, when you went to save it back on that window there would be an error message about a SQL problem, ending in "Sqlda variable has zero length", which fortunately was relatively harmless.

oIf you tried to import into an account where some Payee/Description field value in an existing transaction included a double quote, the program would crash with a message that started "Error at line 79 of ue_postopen event of w_import_online_banking".

Release 2.22 (February 14, 2019):

•The Cloud Storage Service is now available in ACCOUNTS. It is an improved way for users with the Standalone version of ACCOUNTS on multiple computers (not on a local network) to transfer their data between computers, using Internet backups, but without having to worry about whose turn it is to have control of the database, because it takes care of that for you. This service has been available in our other program, DONATION, since late 2015. The Web Network Version is another way of sharing access to one database. All ways of doing that are discussed, with pros and cons of each one, in the Multiple User Options help page.

•The program now prompts you to validate your database once a month, if you haven't done so in the last month. This is the same action that is done by the Database ⇒ Validate Database menu option.

•Fixed a case in the Bill List window where the Edit and Delete buttons could initially come up disabled when they should be enabled. (Normally they are enabled only if there are bills showing in the list.)

•Removed the option "Authorize ACCOUNTS" for authorizing sending emails from the program from a Gmail address. We did that because Google recently added a lot of complex criteria to allow software companies to do that, which unfortunately seemed prohibitively complicated for Software4Nonprofits to satisfy. Instead you can use the other option, "Allow less secure applications".

•Changed Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement Yr/Yr Comparison to put the newer year in the 1st column instead of the 2nd column. (This is in accordance with common national accounting standards.) If you want it the other way around, you can do that instead with Income Statement General Comparison.

•Changed Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement General Comparison to add in a Difference column, which is the difference between the amount for the newer date range and the amount for the older date range. That extra column required changing the report from being in portrait mode to landscape mode. If you want a report like this without the Difference column, and thus still in portrait mode, you can do that with a Custom Report instead.

•Changed Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Balance Sheet Comparison to just prompt for "Date 1" and "Date 2", rather than "Start" and "End" dates, and allows those dates to be in either order (newer first, or older first).

•Fixed two bugs in Reports ⇒ Banking ⇒ Prior Reconciliation: First, you could only see the last 5 or 6 reconciliation dates on the drop-down list. Second, if you were importing online banking downloads, imported or matched transactions that had not yet been reconciled (so they had cleared status "c" in the Register) were completely messing up the report. That has been fixed.

•Fixed a bug related to settings saved in the database: In the Tools ⇒ View Saved Settings menu option, when showing Current Database settings stored in the Database, each setting could show twice. (And the underlying problem that caused that could potentially have caused some other subtle problems with settings as well.)

Release 2.21c (January 16, 2019):

•Fixed a case where a certain bank's online banking download files could not be imported, because they were not following the specification for that type of file properly. Now that particular error (a missing blank line between the headers of the file and the main body section) can be accommodated.

Release 2.21b (January 14, 2019):

•A few users have been having problems requesting license keys over the Internet. This seems to be due to an internal programming change made (but not noted below) in a recent Release that should not have affected anything, but obviously did. Undid that change so it should work for everyone.

Release 2.21 (January 11, 2019):

•On the Bill List, trying to delete a credit memo (a "bill" with a negative Amount) that had already been fully or partly used (to offset bills) was giving a tech error message, rather than a sensible non-techie one. That is fixed. Also, when the window is opened the first row now shows as being selected.

•If you have displayed the Report Browser once, then make some changes to memorized reports (in the Memorized Reports window, or with the Memorize button in the report-viewing window, or the SQL Select window, or the Custom Reports window), previously if you then went back to the Report Browser, and looked at the memorized reports there, they would not be changed appropriately based on what you had done. Now that is fixed.

•Fixed a problem that would allow the database filename for the database for a new organization, the name of which includes French (or other) accented characters, to include the same accented characters. That would then prevent Internet Backups from being able to be successfully restored, although they seem to be made correctly! (If you have French accents in your Organization Name, you should check the File Name field in the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window - if the File Name has accents in it, please contact us for assistance to make sure your Internet Backups will be able to be restored!)

Revision History - Latest Version