I attended the IssueTrak open house in Va. Beach yesterday afternoon, along with 35 or 40 other nearby customers.  (In the interests of full disclosure, Issuetrak was founded by my brother Hank in the early 90’s and I serve on its board of directors.  Also, I am wearing an IssueTrak t-shirt as I write this).  We at SurvivalWare have been IssueTrak users for the last two years.  It has been a great tool for tracking customer support calls.  It helps me understand how much support is required for a customer base of a certain size, and to monitor support demand over time.

They showed IssueTrak 9.5 which is in testing and due to be released in a month or so.  It looks so nice!  I especially like the type ahead features for customer lookup, and the ability to show / hide lists and parts of the screen with ease.

We have only scratched the surface in our usage of IssueTrak, and intend to do much more in the coming year.  In a dispersed organization such as ours, the project tracking features should really be useful.  I’ve already entered three critical projects for the month of December, and will meet with our senior operations pit-bull, Rosalie Cushman, later today to check her out on how harness the power of IssueTrak to herd these cats known as SurvivalWare employees.

The other exciting development with IssueTrak  for us is the ability to embed video in Knowledge Base articles. (This ability has been there for some time because you can embed HTML in Knowledge Base articles).  In the wee hours of this morning, Hank and I took some test videos, put them up on Screencast.com, and were able to paste the HTML code into a knowledge base article so that it appeared the video was part of IssueTrak.  How cool was that!

We’re hoping to make a big push to build a library of “How to” videos connected to Knowledge Base articles in IssueTrak to make them easily accessed by SurvivalWare customers.  In a few weeks, every SurvivalWare customer will be given an IssueTrak user ID which will allow for direct submission of support issues, or browsing the knowledge base to find solutions.  Let us know of topics you’d most like hekp with.

Cheap is Good

 How is it that Financial Modeling is finally within the reach of Small Business?  It is because SurvivalWare makes it cheaper – an order of magnitude cheaper – for a company to install and use a financial model that fits.  SurvivalWare provides the infrastructure that makes the model inexpensive to feed with data and easy to use.   With the new SurvivalWare Pro (coming in December), we have enabled consultants and accountants and bright analysts with the on-the-ground knowledge of a specific company or groups of companies to provide the final “fit and finish” on top of the solid Fort Knox model structure. 

Our Model Generator technology – set to be released shortly thereafter - promises to reduce the cost of developing a completely customized financial model.  You might want to have a highly specialized financial model for say for a franchise system, or a specific industry like convenience stores – to a fraction of what it was four years ago when we first applied Survivalware to such a setting.

Moore’s Law

People in the computer industry are familiar with the concept of Moore’s law.  It states that computer power roughly doubles every two years, and has done so for almost four decades. 

Below is a graph of transistor counts found in the Wikipedia entry on Moore’s law. 

Moore's law - transistor counts

Since transistor count is an approximation for power per unit of cost, we have seen dramatic declines in the cost over the years of processing power and memory.

 You may have seen this quote making the rounds on the internet, attributed to Bill Gates at Comdex in 1999 (there is some doubt he really said it):

“If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 to the gallon.”

The rejoinder of course is that GM issues a press release that says if GM had developed technology like Microsoft,  cars would have the following characteristics: 

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you’d have to buy a new car
3. etc., etc.

But you get the point.  The cost of computing continues to get smaller and smaller while the power continues to grow.

Financial Modeling Power

 So what has happened to Financial Modeling power over the years and its cost per unit of power?

Financial Modeling Power per unit of cost - last 30 years

I’ve been in the financial modeling field for over over 30 years and can provide some insight.

Back in the late 1970’s, most financial modeling was done through commercial timesharing services who not only sold “raw cycles” but added value to their offerings by charging a premium to use 3^rd generation software such as financial modeling languages.

Back then, I serviced the Marriott account for Comshare, which sold access to a really good financial modeling package called FCS.  They spent about $10,000 per month to do cash flow projections for Hotel development projects in the course of structuring deals and attracting investors to put up the money to actually build the hotels.  Marriott was great at getting hotels built with OPM – Other People’s Money.

I’m intimately familiar with those models and their complexity because I was the one that developed the models for them.  My estimate is that they were moderately complex financial models with a limited number of time periods analyzed, equivalent to about 2 SMU’s of power.  An SMU is a SurvivalWare Modeling Unit, and is equal to a standard 200 variable model applied to 12 months or 10 years for a month’s worth of usage.  So we can say that Marriott was paying a monthly fee of $5,000 per SMU.  Expressed as power per dollar of cost, we get 0.2 SMUs per $1,000.  This was in 1978 and 1979.

I started my first company in 1979 just to get out on my own.  I quickly realized that the microcomputers being introduced then were more powerful than most people gave them credit for.  I set out to drive down the cost of financial modeling by figuring out which features were absolutely critical, and which were not – and providing 90% of the functionality at less than 10% of the cost.  The first product was developed for the Apple II computer in 1980 and called RCS (which stood for Rusty’s Computer System – the ego thing started long ago).  I believe it was the first financial modeling software to appear on a personal computer.

RCS Brochure from Sept, 1980

RCS lowered the cost to Marriott from $5,000 per SMU to $500.  Power rose to 2 SMUs per $1,000.

ENCORE! Plus - 1988

ENCORE! Plus was introduced for MSDOS in 1988 with a power rating of 20 SMUs per $1,000.

ENCORE! for Windows - 1996

ENCORE! for Windows appeared in 1996 continuing the increase in power while holding steady on the cost.  We estimate the cost per SMU at about $20, equivalent to a power rating of 50 SMUs per $1,000.

SurvivalWare 3.0 - 2009

The combination of SurvivalWare 3.0 and the Fort Knox model as currently sold delivers about 10 SMU’s of modeling power.  If we look at the life cycle cost over 5 years, we can convert it to a monthly by dividing by 60 months.  Then divide the monthly cost by 10 to get the cost per SMU which turns out to be about $3 – equivalent to 333 SMUs per $1,000 of cost. 

That turns out to be a 1,700 fold improvement over 30 years. 

And when you look at applying SurvivalWare to a GROUP of small companies, the improvement is even more dramatic – another threefold increase is power per unit of cost.

Originally posted 11/3/2009

I just finished my third full month of keeping a consumption and exercise log, and I feel like it has really been worth the time and trouble.  For the first time in my life, I feel like I am in control of my weight.  I weighed 191 on November 1st, down from 224.5 when I first started what I then called the FaceBook diet in April of this year.

I’m getting ready to analyze what I ate (and drank) during those 3 months, during which I lost 14 pounds.  I will say this: I’m not very good at controlling what I eat.  I find it much easier to get more exercise than to cut down on caloric intake.  Also, I made sure I had room for alcohol.  I drank bourbon every single day during the last three months.  I did pretty much abandon beer – because I discovered bourbon gives you more bang for the buck.

Here is what I averaged per day in caloric intake the last 3 months:

August:  2,452

September: 2,617

October: 2,574

August was the month I set out to prove this would work.  I set an ambitious goal of burning 35,000 calories more than my intake – which should result in a loss of 10 pounds.  It turns out to be 1,130 calories per day, and I decided I had a shot at doing it if I could ride my bicycle 3 hours per day.  My bike ride became my priority, and it worked.  I came 2,000 calories shy of my goal, but still lost the 10 pounds.  I found my actual weight varies from my “theoretical weight”  by as much as 3 pounds, but usually they are close. 

I felt I needed a rest from the diet in September, and set my goal at zero the first two days of the month, and then an excess of 500 calories per day for the rest of the month.  I missed that goal by 4,000 calories, but still managed to lose 1.5 pounds.

I left the goal unchanged in October due to inertia, and performed even worse:  I burned 5,575 excess calories vs. a goal of 15,500.  I still lost 2.5 pounds, half due to luck.

So for November, I’ve decided to dial down the goal to 233 excess calories burned per day, which should result in 2 pounds per month of weight loss.  It should be comfortable and easy to do – and will allow me to redirect some of the biking hours to work.  The first day of the month I missed that meager goal by 300 calories, but made up for it today with an extended bike ride.

Background

A little background:  in April of this year I decided to test a theory I had long held about the importance of motivation in trying to lose weight.  During my last physical my doctor told me that based on my BMI, I was borderline obese (what do they expect – they make you weigh with all your clothes on!).  She also said my cholesterol levels were a little on the high side, and she could put me on statins, or I could lose 30 pounds and come back for a re-check in 6 months.  She suggested that if I just stopped drinking alcohol, I could lose the weight pronto.  Easy for her to say!

 The appointment took place in February, and of course it took me a couple of months to decide to act on her advice.  Around that time my brother Hank (www.issuetrak.com) introduced me to Facebook, and the old wheels started spinning. 

 Trained as an Industrial Engineer at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!),  I remembered about the Hawthorne Effect.  Look it up on Wikipedia if you want the details – but in a nutshell some industrial engineers were trying to improve productivity at this huge GE Plant, and kept meticulous production records to help them study the impact of certain things.  They turned up the lights – and sure enough productivity increased.  They turned the lights back down – and guess what – productivity increased again!  They concluded it was the attention from management, knowing what was being watched, that led to the improved performance.  We see the same effect when SurvivalWare is used in a small business – when you make explicit what the performance measures are, and make them visible to all who can impact performance, you see improvements over time.

 So I thought that if I did nothing more than post my weight on Facebook (www.facebook.com) every day, I would be forced to make good decisions throughout the day in order to avoid embarrassment the next.  I started out at 224.5 on April 8, 2009.  I know what you’re thinking:  I must be shameless to start with in order to post a weight like that, and how could I possibly be less embarrassed if I get it down to still-chunky  220?  Well, it worked for me – for a while, anyway.

 I got myself to start by NOT setting an outlandish weight loss goal (e.g. 30 pounds in 6 months). I’m in the software business after all (http://survivalware.com).  I try not to get too worked up about deadlines.  Rather, I made to commitment to post my weight on Facebook every day for 30 days – and then decide if it was worth continuing.  How hard could that be?

 That worked for a bit – I actually lost 15 pounds in 90 days.  The encouragement from friends and family was really helpful. My brother Hank (www.issuetrak.com) asked me to see what the impact of not drinking alcohol would be.  Don’t you love it when family members make suggestions about how you should live your life?!  But  I had opened myself up for that type of thing by posting on Facebook (www.facebook.com) to begin with.  Plus he had a point – I would gain information about the impact, and then I could decide if it was worth it.  Plus I had the added benefit of an opportunity to prove that I wasn’t a total souse.  I stopped for 10 days.  I finally gave in with encouragement from my wife (it’s not every night we go out to dinner – you’re telling me you can’t have a glass or two of wine?).  It was at a Macaroni Grill or something like that where they put a huge open bottle of wine on the table and have you keep track of what you drink on the honor system.  I’m only human, after all.  Those 10 days did help with the weight loss.

 But I found I would rather cut back elsewhere – say on the peanuts that normally accompany the alcohol consumption.  Or maybe up the exercise to compensate.  Hank (www.issuetrak.com) suggested that I post the number of miles I rode my bike, so I started doing that as well.

One problem was that I was uncomfortable with the unpredictability of my daily weight.  It didn’t always correlate with the previous day’s performance.  I felt like I needed a better measure to monitor and control.

The other problem was trying not to sound like a self-absorbed dork when reporting my weight and bike miles each day on Facebook (www.facebook.com).

 Toward the end of July I experimented with calorie counting.  I was in the habit already of logging my daily bike riding, so I just needed to track the occasional walk with the wife or mowing of the lawn.  I use a push mower and awarded myself the same 600 calories per hour that you get for jogging (400 for biking, 200 for walking).  I decided I could handle the calorie counting, and made the commitment to do it for 30 days, and track my actual vs. theoretical weight.

 See my last post for the month by month account of what I did:

http://survivalware.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/survivalware-diet-progress-through-october-2009

http://www.survivalware.com/rustysblog/2009/11/03/rustys-diet-a-soft-landing-after-losing-30-pounds-in-6-months

The SurvivalWare Diet

In a nutshell the SurvivalWare diet is this:

• invest the time and effort to determine your food intake and how much time you exercise. 
• Log calories and exercise minutes every day.  Write down somewhere (paper or in a computer file) the Total Calories Consumed and Minutes of Exercise by each of three main categories (walking, biking, running).
• Do the analysis: keep a running tally of how many calories you have burned vs. consumed.  
• Set a goal based on your desired weight loss over 30 days. (I did 10 pounds one month, but I had to average 3 hours a day of bike riding to achieve it. 3 to 5 pounds a month is a more reasonable pace).
• Calculate the calories you need to burn in excess of calories consumed by taking the total for the month divided by 30 to get an average per day.  That is your daily goal.

I found two things really helpful when tracking food calories: 

1. the CalorieKing food database (www.calorieking.com) and
2. buying a food scale.  I loved mine until it broke recently.  I bought it on Amazon.com for less than $40.  I might try to upgrade next time.

 Also, it helps that I like to cook, and that enables me to jot down ingredients and read from the food labels as I prepare dinner.   Also, I find that if you prepare dinner for your spouse every night, it is hard for the spouse to be mad at you for any length of time.  Unless, of course, you overcook the salmon or overspice the chili.

Restaurant meals were tougher.  Not all restaurants publish the nutritional contents of their meals, or there may be a lag when a new menu item is added – and of course, that’s what everyone orders, the new stuff.  But it was amazing what I could find out with my iPhone using the Food Scanner app.  ($2.99 from Apple’s App store).  It helps kill the time between placing your order and having it served to you.  Plus what social interaction – such as lunch or dinner with a spouse or friends – can you have today that doesn’t lead to at least one Google search?   Food Scanner gave me an excuse to play with the iPhone, and then I naturally would keep it out just in case.

You can search for Caesar Salad and you get to choose from about 12 different restaurants.  If you don’t find the exact establishment you are eating at, you can compare yours (when it comes) to the pictures of the others and pick one that looks closest.

Food Scanner also claims to read the UPC codes on labels that come on packaged foods.  I found that feature to be unreliable in my tests.  Also, if you have the label in front of you, there in plain text  is the serving size and number of calories, and it is really easy to jot that down on a scrap of paper.  That’s what I do – just jot down what I eat soon after every meal,  or during the meal preparation.   Then once a day I tabulate all the scraps, and look up any calories that need looking up (e.g. fresh fruit).  I try to remember everything I ate and drank.  Depending on your memory, and how many drinks you have – you may be able to jot things down just once a day without having to do it throughout the day.  When you get all that in one place,  record the total calories consumed in a spreadsheet.

It gets easier over time.  It is amazing how you tend to eat the same thing for breakfast or lunch every day (with a few variations).  I’ve learned to estimate fruit weights and serving sizes just through repetition. 

I never did find a food logging program I liked – either on the iPhone or on the PC.  I found my hand method of recording to be a good hybrid approach that fit my style.  I’d say don’t bother with entering into a computer every single food item that you eat – it is the total calories each day that counts.

 When I was at my PC,  I used the Calorie King database (www.calorieking.com) instead of the iPhone to look up calories because it was more efficient and easy to use (no iPhone keyboard!).  It would correct my misspelling of broccoli, and make it easy to express my consumption in standard servings, dry measure, or weight in ounces or grams.  For fruit it would show me the weight for small, medium, or large pieces of fruit (e.g. fresh apples) and you could use that to estimate if you didn’t have a food scale.

 In my next posting about the SurvivalWare Diet, I plan to make available and explain the actual spreadsheet I used to track my weight loss performance since August, 2009.

We’re targeting October 15th to make the formal announcement.  This version has been in “soft release” since August 31, 2009.  It has been available as a 30 day trial, or for purchase.  We just didn’t tell anyone about it (unless they stumbled onto our website).

Now we’re about to start telling the world.    Here’s the top 10 list of what’s new in SurvivalWare version 3.0:

1. Drilldown enabled from Projections module
2. Export to Excel;  streamlined import from Excel
3. Comparanator now available in projections module for doing scenario comparisons
4. Consolidation / comparison list builder
5. KPI Customizer allows the user to define non-financial data to track, and calculations based on these and the financial data already loaded
6. Dashboard customizer allows for user to select variables and color breaks for gauges and barcharts
7. Report customizer runs off easily changed specifications in a master Excel file
8. By Column reports – can now select any time period
9. FortKnox foundation model (this will be sold separately at $295 when the introductory price expires).  In SurvivalWare version 2.0, the all purpose model was called FM2008 and was free.  Fort Knox is a big improvement over FM2008.  I
10. Improvements to the Forecast Tool 

A few more words about the Fort Knox model:

 Here are the improvements to the Forecast Tool:

• Term Loan calculator
• ARC Loan calculator
• Can adjust seasonal forecast up or down
• Can control which months each technique applies to
• “Inflate as of” option
• Simplified user interface

SurvivalWare including the Fort Knox model is priced at $495 through the end of this month.  Starting November 1, the Fort Knox model will be sold separately at $295, or $790 bundled together with the SurvivalWare platform.

I decided to test the theory that analyzing and publishing Key Performance Indicators will improve performance by designing what I call the “FaceBook Diet.”  You can eat anything you want, but must publish your weight on FaceBook for friends and family to see every day.

I used myself as a guinea pig and lost 15 pounds in 90 days.  See details at Rusty’s Blog: http://www.survivalware.com/rustysblog/?cat=5

We recently had a prospect (now customer) express the need for a tool to do the cash flow projections in support of his ARC Loan application.  I was putting the finishing touches on the new Fort Knox model (solid, substantial, money-focused, good as gold) for SurvivalWare Version 3.0, which according to an April blog post, is just around the corner.  

He needed something right away so he could get his application in.  He had found SurvivalWare via Philip Campbell’s website.  I’ve kept the advertising turned off since February so the whole company can focus on getting this new release out the door.  Can’t be disturbed by pesky prospects asking questions about software not yet ready for sale.  But this guy was very nice, and educated me on the whole ARC loan program, and we worked out a deal where  I would load his historical data for him and walk him through the steps for doing a cash flow projection via a web session.  I figured it would be a good test of the new model, and especially the Term Loan Calculator I had just added.

Naturally SurvivalWare flunked with flying colors.  We had to use a kludge to model the ARC Loan because its characteristics were not normal.  Plus, I had made room for a maximum of 24 months of projections – but less than that as each month of the current year passes.  So about 18 months at this point.  Plus there were no reports to show the projected Quarters instead of months.

So I decided to add an additional 24 months for projections, so that the bank would not have an excuse to exclude an applicant because it showed 18 and not a full 24 months of projections.  Also I added a special ARC Loan option to the Term Loan Calculation in the Forecast Tool.  It models correctly one of these silly $35,000 SBA with a drawdown period, 12 month deferral, and interest picked up by the feds.  I couldn’t resist and added some analysis features to look at these loans from each of the three points of view:

• Small Business Borrower
• Bank making the Loan
• SBA / Federal Government

I’ll share the results of that analysis in another blog post.  I really hope that Tim Geithner and the other senior government officials look at things from “our” point of view when crafting the new Small Business program.  They have an opportunity to do it right this time.

In the meantime, if you are desperate for a tool to help with the projections, I am allowing pre-release versions of SurvivalWare to be sold on a limited basis.  Give me a call or shoot me an email.  Current estimate on release of version 3.0: early August, 2009.

It really is amazing how important computer modeling has become.  This is where the computer really plays to its strengths.

The latest Scientific American (July, 2009) has a cover story article entitled “Grassoline at the Pump” and goes on to paint a very optimistic picture of using non-food plant material to provide 50% of our liquid fueld needs.

From page 55,” “Scientists.  have recently enjoyed an explosion of progress.  Powerful tools such as quantum-chemical computational models allow chemical engineers to build structures that can control reactions at the atomic level.” (Emphasis on models was mine).

Then there is an article I clipped from the June 24, 2009 Wall Street Journal: “Dreamliner’s Delay points to difficulties with composites.”

“Independent structural expers said Tuesday that even the most advanced computer models sometimes have difficulty accurately predicting how stress will affect the composite parts, or where they attach to aluminum or titanium.”

This was a companion article to the surprise announcement from Boeing that they were delaying the flight test for the 787 Dreamliner in order to reinforce the attaching of the wings to the fuselage.

SurvivalWare is, of course, a form of computer modeling.  It actually does two kinds: 

1) basic Financial Modeling, which allows you to do full financial statement projections – i.e. the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement – based on your analysis of history (conveniently stored in the same model), and assumptions about Sales, Headcount, Expenses, Capital Expenditures, Loans, etc.  Building financial models takes a special skill, and that is part of what SurvivalWare customers get to tap into:  my 30+ years developing financial models for a broad range of industries and company sizes.  An immediate use of this kind of modeling is producing the two years of cash flow projections most lenders ask for when you apply for a loan.  The recently announced ARC Loan program run by the SBA has this requirement.

2) Monte Carlo simulation – used by SurvivalWare’s Cash Planner.  Each and every cash disbursement and receipt is simulated over a 13 – 26 week period (or longer if you want.  Typcially the focus is on the short term).  Measurements are taken at various points to see how much cash is in the till. You can also include credit cards in the simulation.  You have to go to a fair amount of trouble to set up one of these simulations, but it can be a life saver when your back is against the wall, and survival at risk.

What a terrible communicator I have been recently: the last post to this blog was 3 months ago, about the same amount of time since the last newsletter.

I am turning over a new leaf.  As a company, we finally figured out what we are good at, and what customers are willing to pay for.  Luckily there is some overlap.

Version 3.0 is all about SurvivalWare coming of age as the ultimate small business analysis tool.  Every business is unique, and with version 3.0 we hope to make a quantum leap forward in the ability of customers to customize a Survivalware model.  You can customize in layers – for example, leave the model logic intact but create a new set of dashboards with your own targets contained therein. Report formats will be under your control, so format to your heart’s content.  If it’s just the Stats and the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) calculations you want to customize – not a problem.  The specs are housed in a separate Excel spreadsheet, and you are free to edit and re-generate the SurvivalWare model at any time.  The SurvivalWare model stays intact – it just adds on the newly created logic in a space reserved for PlugIns.

Then there are the new and improved forecasting tools.  Recently I worked with a customer via a web session to help him learn how to use SurvivalWare to put together some financial projections.  This was in connection with his efforts to secure an SBA loan.  It sure would have been nice if SurvivalWare could have handled the modeling of the loan itself a little easier.  It’s embarrassing when you tell a customer to go do the loan amortization calculations in Excel and copy/ paste the principal repayments in one line (and reversing signs to create negative numbers representing cash outflows), and then figure out the interest rate and type it in a separate row.  There were some other glaring deficiencies as well in the ease of use of the underlying financial model. 

So in version 3.0, a big effort has been made to make it easier to create and understand financial projections.  The more uncertainty there is in the economy, the more critical it is to update financial projections frequently, and watch key performance indicators like a hawk.  But if it is hard to do, it won’t get done.

We are systematically collecting support call data using IssueTrak, and will continue to cull “opportunities for improvement” based on what customers are having the most trouble with.   IssueTrak promises to be a great management tool as our customer base grows, and the support team along with it.  (Full disclosure, I am a director of IssueTrak, Inc.  My brother, Hank, is founder and CEO.  www.issuetrak.com)

So when will this new version of SurvivalWare be available?  As soon as I quit bragging about it, and get back to work on it.  I’m shooting now for a May, 2009 release.  I have several customers in the middle of major customization projects I am applying the new technology to.  I want to have all of them up and running before final product release.

We’ll also be publishing a ton of technical reference content covering the Automator (for creating applets), the Model Generator, Report specifications, and automated Graphics (including the Comparanator).  The hope is to make it attractive for third parties to build customer solutions on top of the SurvivalWare platform.  Lots of demo and training videos are planned as well.  Well – at least they’re past the “gleam in the eye” stage.  Look for the documentation and videos to appear a couple of months after the software.

Your SurvivalWare data file (.MTX) holds a limited amount of historical data.  At the end of each year, there is a process you go through called a “Rollover” to archive the oldest 12 months of data, and make room for the new year.

The time to do the rollover is when you are ready to load January data – which is probably some time in February.  You can do it right AFTER loading December data.  There is no harm in doing it then.

NOTE: If you are on a fiscal year that ends in a month other than December, you would do the rollover after loading the first month of the new fiscal year, not January.

To do the rollover, go to Rusty’s Toolbox from SurvivalWare’s main screen.

As a way of preventing accidental rollovers, SurvivalWare requires the “Last Actual Month” be set to December (the last month of the Fiscal Year) before you are allowed to do a rollover.  From Rusty’s Toolbox you can set the Last Actual Month yourself – select Data / Set Last Actual Month.

When you are ready to do the Rollover, select Data / “Rollover this file”.

The first box controls what the settings are to be AFTER the rollover.  Set the month to January (or the first month of the Fiscal Year if you are on a fiscal year).  Set the year to the new fiscal year.  (2009 for those rolling over from 2008).

You have four options for dealing with the Budget:

1. Clear budget columns – just sets all the budget values to zeroes, for both the 2009 Budget, and the 2010 budget.
2. Preserve budget data – leaves the 2008 budget in the 2009 budget columns.
3. Move projected values into Budget Columns – the monthly projections you made for 2009 are moved into the 2009 Budget columns.
4. Move Next Year budget into Current Year Budget.  During 2008, you are allowed to work on the 2008 budget (Current Year) or the 2009 budget (Next Year).  All actual to budget reporting uses the Current Year.  If you’ve already prepared the 2009 Budget,  you can move it into the Current Year budget columns during Rollover. (This is the default).

When you click OK, SurvivalWare saves a copy of the file pre-rollover in the Archive directory, and tells you its name.  Your current file will now show a current fiscal year of 2009.  You can select File / Properties, and click on “This Data File” tab to check.

Time periods stored in a SurvivalWare MTX file

2008 file prior to rollover:

Months:  Dec 2005 to Dec 2009

Years: 2010 to 2019

Current Budget: 2008

Next Year Budget: 2009

2009 file after rolling over the 2008 file:

Months:  Dec 2006 to Dec 2010

Years: 2011 to 2020

Current Budget: 2009

Next Year Budget: 2010 

Note:  The time periods stored may vary from model to model.  The example above is for the generic FM2008 model that comes with SurvivalWare.