Planning with Handy Finance Lite for Palm OS.
How to use "Cleared" and other expense properties to adjust real and planned balance.

You are doing almost right. You should use filters to exclude certain transactions from the balance.

For example, you can activate filter by end date so that future transactions will be out of filter and excluded from total. Also they will disappear from table. When you will adjust end-date filter according to the current date, some future transactions will again fall into filter conditions so that they will be displayed and added to total.

Also you can use "Cleared" checkbox to mark transactions which should be excluded from total. Set filter "Cleared" to "Yes" and only cleared transactions will be added to total.

Additionally, non-cleared transactions will be excluded from viewing in table, you can view them separately by selecting filter "Cleared" into "No".

There is a way to see both cleared and non-cleared transactions in table but add to total only cleared. To do this uncheck checkbox at the left of "Cleared" filter.

(Take look at the screenshots)

Setting up filter for Cleared property so, that both cleared and non-cleared expenses will be displayed, but only cleared transactions will be added to total	Both transactions are checked as cleared and added to total	Lower expense is unchecked and became non-cleared and excluded from total, but still visible in table

The same is correct for another three checkboxes (receipt, billable, remind) in full and trial versions. You can configure table fields to change all these checkboxes directly from table.

You can do almost the same with the "Balance" field, but unfortunately it is available only in full and trial versions, not in lite.