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Confirm Changes Option
Are you aware of WinForecast's Autosave Facility
What is the Funds Flow Statement?
Invalid Call Procedure or Argument
Loan Reinitialising Message
Files have renamed themselves
Amending Later Years Data

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Confirm Changes Option

You can control Sage WinForecast Professional’s actions

  • When you Store, Close or Save a record or forecast OR
  • When you Cancel a record your forecast numbers.

How to Do It

  1. From the main menu select Options>Preferences and click the Interface Options tab.
  2. Select or clear the appropriate options' check box.

    For example: Confirm Store/Close/Save when Changed:
    • When the check box is selected, you will be asked to confirm a requested action before it occurs.
    • When the box is cleared, the requested action goes straight ahead ie when you are working in a record and you click on OK you will not be asked to confirm changes to go ahead which will save you time when you are making lots of changes to your forecasts.

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Are you aware of WinForecast's Autosave Facility

The autosave feature protects your work against power failure or a system crash. After such an event, what you were working on will be recovered when you next start up Sage WinForecast Professional.

To enable or disable the feature, or to change the frequency at which autosave occurs, from the main window’s menu select:

  • Options>Preferences and click the Other Options tab.
  • Select or clear the Autosave check box as required, and/or enter the number of minutes between autosaves. (work done between the last autosave and power failure is lost).

  • If for some reason your recovered file is not automatically opened next time you go into WinForecast, forecast files can be manually recovered from your systems TEMP directory, by renaming the .tmp on any files (W4CXXXX.tmp - where XXXX is a series of numbers and digits) to be .fs0
  • You can then open up these files in WinForecast through FILE>OPEN FORECAST

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What is the Funds Flow Statement?

The Funds Flow Statement shows how the source of funds equals the use of funds during the period covered by the statement. It is also known as the Statement of Sources & Application for Funds.

Funds are obtained from the sales of goods, properties, stock & borrowings etc. While uses of funds are the purchase of fixed assets, payment of debts, distribution of funds and other purchases. Basically, it is a statement which shows the changes in financial position.

How is it different to the Cash Flow Statement?

Cash Flow is the summary statement that shows cash receipts by the organisation and cash payments by the organisation. If total receipts exceeds total payments , then cashflow is positive. If total receipts is less than total payments, then cashflow is negative.

Cash Flow takes into account only the cash items where as Funds Flow deals with non cash items also.

Cash Flow is based on the concept that Cash = Funds, while Funds Flow is based on the concept that Funds = Working capital.

Cash Flow is based on cash accounting while Funds Flow is based on an accrual system of accounting.

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Invalid Call Procedure or Argument

When you have crashed out of WinForecast or it wasnt closed down properly, WinForecast will attempt to recover the last autosaved file. If for some reason the file wasnt autosaved before it closed down, you will get an "Invalid Procedure Call or Argument" error message which means that WinForecast is having a problem trying to recover the autosaved file.

You will need to reset the autosave facility in order to get back into the program.

How to Do It

  1. Right click on the Start Windows Button > Search > For Files or Folders.
  2. In the "all or part of file name" type ~w4cauto
  3. As this is a hidden file, make sure you are searching all hidden files and folders by clicking on the "More advanced options" and ticking search hidden files and folders.
  4. Search in your local hard drive which should be C:\ in most cases
  5. Click Search.
  6. The search should come up with two files ~w4cauto.tmp and ~w4cauto.fs@.
  7. DELETE the ~w4cauto.fs@ file
  8. RENAME the ~w4cauto.tmp to ~w4cauto.fs@

You should now be able to get back into WinForecast

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Loan Reinitialising Message

You have set the last month on your forecast file to actuals and get a message saying "There is an error in the loan "Record Name". It is being re-initialised." But when you click OK, its stuck in a loop and you cant close out of it. Click on Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring up the task manager, go to Applications and End Task on WinForecast.

The reason you are getting this error message is because you have a loan record that has no data in it. When you set actuals to a month, the start date of the loan record will be pushed out to the next month. So if you are setting actuals to the last month on the file, it cant push the start date of the loan out to the next month because there is no next month to push it out to. The record cannot be deleted because it was created before actuals was set and once you have set actuals, the record is fixed.

Solution

You need to make available that extra month so that there is a start date for the loan. To do this, you'd need to extend the forecast out by another year. To extend out the forecast, go to File>Forecast Extent and increase the To date by one year.

Click OK and you should now be able to set actuals for the next month

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Files have renamed themselves

This most commonly occurs when a forecast or consoldation file have been opened through Windows Explorer by double clicking on them.

This will launch WinForecast and open the files, however it is opening a copy of the file and the file name will be truncated.

Please note that by opening it this way, the file can be corrupted. To avoid corrupting the file, ensure that you open it directly from within WinForecast.

How To Do It?

When you open WinForecast, you will be presented with a window that has the tabs 'Recent', 'Existing Forecasts' and 'Existing Consoldations' (if you have the consoldation option). Please open files from within here.

If you already have WinForecast open, you can use File > Open Forecast OR File > Open Consolidation

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Amending Later Years Data

When the active forecast covers more than one year,
you can amend some or all later years’ data based on earlier data.
You can do this for the whole forecast, or for the section,
sub-section or record highlighted in the main list of records.

How to do it

Firstly, click on the section, sub-section or record that you wish to amend.
Then from the main window’s menu select Wizards>Amend Later Years Data.
Select whether to Amend forecast or to Amend
[the named section, sub-section or record that you have highlighted].
Specify From when and To when the amending is to apply, then
select to Amend With Data From:
the previous year, last half-year or last quarter.


NOTE: You can only amend forecast data if you have more than 1 year in the file

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