Show Budget breaks the budget down into Departments, and
Categories within departments.
Eg. Costume, Publicity and Sound are Departments. Haberdashery,
Fabric, and Dyeing are Categories within the Costume department.
Show Budget classifies transactions as:
The name of your production, production company and total budget are entered through the New Production option. You then specify the Departments and Categories for the production and their budget allocations, either by defining a new breakdown, or by copying the breakdown from a previous production.
Perhaps all of your productions have the same departments or maybe all of the productions in a season have the same allocations, if so the Template option will save you a great deal of time and effort in setting up productions.
To keep track of the state of the production budget, all transactions are entered from the Update menu. The budget's running progress is available throughout the entry process. Department and category allocations are readily modified from the Modify Production menu as the situation demands. When that "simple little red dress from K-Mart" turns out to be a ballgown with 8,000 sequins on it, the process of swapping funds from Insurance to Wardrobe is easy to do with Show Budget, if not in other ways.
The good news is: you don't have to. Show Budget writes all data to disk as soon as you enter it. If the power goes off or the batteries run flat, the most you can lose is the transaction you were entering. For added safety you can make a back-up copy of the current production to another disk drive from within Show Budget.
The state of the budget is available as full or summary progress reports. All reports are available both on screen and in printed format.
Being away from a printer part of the time is not a major inconvenience.
The summary report is also available in spreadsheet compatible electronic form.
The minimum system requirements to use Show Budget are:
Show Budget is fully Microsoft Windows compatible
and is supplied with a program information file (PIF)
and an icon for Windows installation.
To run ShowBudget under windows XP or Vista a DOS emulator, such as the excellent freeware DOSBOX may be required
Like Windows, Show Budget's mouse and menu system are based on IBM's Common User Interface. Show Budget is not a Windows program, it also runs on machines which don't have the processor, memory or disk space required for Windows.
Show Budget has a built-in, context-sensitive hypertext manual (no books to leave behind in the office). If the manual doesn't answer all of your queries, The Kilowatt Company offers telephone support, free to all purchasers of Show Budget from 09:00 to 24:00 E.A.S.T. every day of the year.
If you would like to test drive Show Budget, a Demonstration version is available from this web site (download it now).
The demonstration version has all the functionality of the full
system except that it doesn't print reports. It is also limited
in the numbers of Departments, Categories, and transactions which
may be entered.
Last updated Saturday, 5 October 2002 by The Kilowatt Webwrangler