Citibank credit card processing - CB

If you have a Citibank or similiar credit card with Internet reporting,
you may copy the credit card charge detail from your web browser and paste
it to a file (CB.DAT is the default). CB will then process that file,
generating an output file CB.DAT which can then be pasted to a STAR
input file. That file should be a separate file from your regular STAR
bank account file, as it will contain all charge detail, which then can
be reported into the bank account file, as charges against a single
star account.

CB prompts for the previous balance which can be either a negative number
(positive means the bank owes you) or a symbol similar to "star.act\#"
where "star.act" is the STAR file where the credit card account is kept.
This enables CB to display the new and total balances for verification.

All files created, other than CB.DAT, will have the default name.
If you enter a non-blank default account, that will be used instead of
prompting each time an unrecognized charge appears.

If you wish to filter out duplicate charges, enter at the "STAR file"
prompt the name of the STAR file that contains your current charges.
If you do choose this option, CB.EXE is tightly coupled with STAR.EXE,
so both programs need to be the same revision level. Also, if you
change the values associated with the credit card charges in your
STAR file, entries in CB.DAT may fail to be removed as duplicates.

You may maintain a special definition file CB.DEF which will help CB
to process the credit card charges. The formatting is three sets
of quoted strings, the first an index of the charge description, the
second the star account to be used and the third the budget account
to be used. You may enter a switch "/nostate" appended to the file
prompt (for instance: "CB.DAT/nostate"). This will remove the state
designation from the end of charges saved to CB.DEF, correcting for
the inconsistency in the Citibank vendor name reporting.

For example, suppose you regularly charged gas purchases
at a mobil gas station that appears as "exxonmobil75 91942730 fairfield ct"
on the statement. Suppose you wish to add the charge into the star
account "mobil" and total this under all gas purchases under the budget "gas".
Then enter into CB.DEF

"exxonmobil75 91942730 fairfield ct" "mobil" "gas"

In this example, a match anywhere of the index ("exxon...") in the Citibank
statement description will cause CB to attempt to use this definition. Thus

"exxonmobil75 91942730 fairfield ct" "mobil" "gas"
"exxonmobil75 91942730 fairfield" "mobil" "gas"

will both match the Citibank description "exxonmobil75 91942730 fairfield ct"
and cause a duplicate query from CB. The resolution of this is to enter
only the second definition (the shorter one).

The use of $ before or after the first string allows matching at the
beginning or end, respectively, of the charge description.
For example suppose you wished to classify all charges made
in the state of Florida to a star account "florida" and budget "vacation".
Then enter into CB.DEF

"fl"$ "florida" "vacation"

If a charge description is not in the .DEF file, it will be written there
with a prompted star and budget account name. If you don't know what
is appropriate at the time of the prompt, enter nothing and the entry in .DEF
will have those fields blank. You then can enter those fields and
re-adjust the location of the entry later. If you don't want to answer any
further prompts, enter ^Z (control-Z) at the star account prompt.

The file CB.SAV is used to maintain a list of which transactions have already
been processed. This should be edited when re-running CB.EXE.
