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

The competition is not quite as tough on the Mac side. Aatrix's CheckWriter Pro is the only Mac product that provides built-in business features, such as inventory, depreciation, and invoicing.

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MacMoney 4.02

MAC

Rating: *1/2

Survivor Software's MacMoney comes with decent financial capabilities, but learning to use it requires you to wade through a sea of documentation. And except for basic checkbook features, you're on your own to manage your business or track investments.

MacMoney's checkbook functions are straightforward. To enter an existing transaction, for example, type in the first few characters of a payee and tell the program to find it.

Although it tracks loans, MacMoney won't perform and manage the necessary calculations, as the other products do: You have to create accounts and perform the math yourself.

MacMoney features payment reminders and can group transactions with ID codes. MacMoney also accepts data from CheckFree and Bill-Pay USA to pay bills and update your files electronically.

For business use, you'll have to do a lot of extra work by manually setting up accounts and entering the changes. To record depreciation or payroll, for example, you must calculate the values outside the program and then enter them into MacMoney.

The documentation discusses using MacMoney to track investments. But unlike the other programs, which have dedicated investment functions, MacMoney asks you to calculate changes to security prices outside of the program and then enter them--a major work-around. Any software that asks you to do this much work really isn't worth using.

Avoid MacMoney at all costs if you have investments to track or a business to run. Even if you're new to computers, there are Mac programs that are far easier. $90; Survivor Software, (310) 338-0155.

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An Advance on Your Finances

In the highly competitive personal finance software market, nothing stands still for very long. As this story went to press, both Meca and Intuit announced new versions of their personal finance packages, all of which should be available by the time you read this.

Meca's Managing Your Money for Windows 2.0 offers features that most people feel really should have been there in the first place. Remedying a planned oversight, MYM will offer electronic bill paying through CheckFree and electronic security price updates through CompuServe.

Enhancements to MYM include the financial snapshot--a combination of graphs and monetary data that illustrates your financial position in a single screen--and the Home Inventory Manager, which tracks all household valuables, calculates depreciations, and prints insurance reports. Other improvements include register searches across all accounts and a display that shows all categories associated with a payee when entering a check.

MYM for DOS 11.0 includes some 170 enhancements, though none are as major as the changes made in the Windows version. Among the most notable enhancements are a movable calculator; more powerful register sorting; stronger and more flexible searches according to check amounts, dates, memos, and payees; and a simpler report generator. Also, the program will pay all recurring monthly bills with a single keystroke.