Money matters: personal finance software gets down to business - includes related article on new financial software versions, a brief summary of findings and a glossary - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1994 by Wayne Kawamoto

Another MYM hallmark is tax extimation, and the programs create abbreviated Federal 1040 tax forms along with Schedule B, C, D, E, and F forms. You can perform what-if tax analysis and export tax information in the standard TXF format to commercial tax packages such as Meca's own TaxCut.

MYM is a workable solution for your small business. And if you want to track your money, particularly your investments, any version will do the job quite nicely. $80; Meca Software, (203) 255-1441, (800) 537-9993.

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Financially Speaking

With few exceptions, all of the products in this review provide the same basic features. Some of the terms, however, may not be familiar to those with no or limited experience in working with personal finance software. So instead of running a comparative list of features, we decided to define a few terms that appear throughout this roundup.

Actual vs. budget reporting--Comparing what you really spent in a category against what you estimated you would spend.

Memorizing transactions--Having the software record, or memorize, a transaction so that it may be recalled later and re-entered. For example, you can have a package memorize your monthly mortgage payment. At bill time, just press a button and the computer enters your mortgage transaction, amount, payee, and so forth.

Reconciliation of accounts--The process of verifying that the amount of money on the bank's statement agrees with that in your records. Also known as balancing the checkbook or account.

Register sorting--The ability to rearrange the order that transactions appear in the register--usually by date, payee, or amount.

Splitting transactions--Distributing one transaction over several categories to track expenses. For example, you may have written only one check for a computer system purchase, but you can track, or split, the transaction across categories for hardware, software, and peripherals.

MoneyCounts

WIN

Rating: ** 1/2

Version Reviewed: 8.0

DOS

Rating: **

Version Reviewed: 8.0

Parson's MoneyCounts lacks both built-in capabilities and any explanation in the documentation for managing business finances. It does, however, offer acceptable features that manage your checkbook and give you a bird's-eye view of your finances.

MoneyCounts's basic checkbook management will memorize transactions, set up and track loans, and create budgets. On setup, MoneyCounts provides predefined sets of accounts for home, general business, farm, church, and rental profit.

Planning modules include a loan and future value calculator. There's also an address book, calendar, and notepad. Both versions estimate your taxes and can export data to any tax program that accepts the TXF format.

Not surprisingly, MoneyCounts for Windows's graphical interface is far more attractive and easier to use than the DOS version. Both versions will track investment basics and can manually update security prices.

Except for predefined accounts for some limited business use, MoneyCounts documentation makes no mention of how to use the program for business beyond managing the checkbook. For personal finance needs, neither version of MoneyCounts is exceptional, but both do a competent job. $49; Parsons Technologies, (319) 395-9626, (800) 223-6925.