Two financial programs in one package - Publishing International's Byte Size General Ledger and Personal Finance financial software

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1991

Two Financial Programs In One Package

Byte Size General Ledger and Personal Finance

Rating: * * AT A GLANCE: General Ledger (GL)--Small, relatively simple double-entry accounting program--best for people who want an inexpensive program to learn on. Too small for more active businesses. Personal Finance (PF)--No-frills personal-finance. Tracks checking, cash, and credit-card accounts as well as assets and loans. DOCUMENTATION: On-disk manuals that you print out. Very clearly written and well explained. No on-line help. Good bibliography of beginning accounting books. ERROR HANDLING: Good. Dialog boxes in GL warn against exiting without saving and erasing files. Very difficult to keep PF records straight. No way to change reconciled transactions. EASE OF USE: GL has pop-up lists of accounts and account types that make bookkeeping easier. PF suffers in comparison with Quicken and MoneyMate; there are many little ways to make financial mistakes. Difficult to learn. VALUE: Good for the price and as bookkeeping-learning tool. PF competitors are better values. SUPPORT: Very good. The person I talked to didn't know all answers but called me back promptly with complete information. Not toll-free. VERSION REVIEWED: 1.1 (GL)/1.0 (PL) LIST PRICE: $50 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 512K IBM compatible; one drive; CGA, EGA, monochrome; mouse optional for PF; DOS 2.1 or higher; 5.25- or 3.25-inch PUBLISHER: Publishing International, P.O. Box 70790, Sunnyvale, CA 94086; (408) 738-4311 General Ledger and Personal Finance are two inexpensive finance programs--one intended for simple small-business use, the other for home. Both look nice and tidy onscreen. Both come in small packages with a two- or three-page instruction booklet telling you how to install the program. The telephone support (not a toll-free call) is the same for both--prompt, courteous and eager to please. And both have the same problem: the competition.

For people who need to track income and expenses, even assets and loans, for a home-based business, there are several inexpensive check-writing and easy personal-finance packages on the market that can do as much (indeed, a whole lot more) than these programs. And they do it in a way that is less confusing to the average person. Even so, with their rock-bottom prices, General Ledger and Personal Finance are worth considering.

General Ledger. I found General Ledger to be a good, straightforward, small accounting program with a clearly written manual. If you want to learn double-entry accounting and apply it to a business that doesn't average more than about 30 expense checks and five or six deposits per month, this program might be an excellent choice.

You can alter the chart of accounts as you wish, adding new ones and deleting those you don't need. Most important, you can add up to 150 new accounts on the fly.

Assigning the right account type is the trickiest part of using this program. The manual explains how to do this, but you have to read it carefully. There is no on-line help to get you through this.

From a computing standpoint General Ledger is very easy to use--and fast. However, you must take the time to read about accounting practices if you want to avoid trouble down the line. Included is a short, fairly clear explanation of double-entry accounting and a list of several introductory books on beginning accounting principles. This is honest-to-goodness double-entry accounting, with a somewhat simplified interface. Instead of using the terms "debit" and "credit" the manual lists the entries you make as "positive" and "negative." At first glance, this might appear to be clearer, but it's still confusing in practice.

Although everything you can do with this program (other than learning accounting) can be done much more intuitively with Quicken 3 and Managing Your Money, those programs won't teach you to think like an accountant, or appeal to your sense of financial tidiness in quite the way Byte Size General Ledger will.

If you have followed me this far, you might be a candidate for General Ledger. Because of its small size and limited structure, the program can't be used for a business that needs departments (separate income and expense statements for individual clients, for example) or that has a large amount of record-keeping activity.

Personal Finance. Although this program does not have the "positive-negative" problem associated with double-entry accounting, you still have to decide whether something is a long-term or a current liability, or a personal or a financial asset. You also have to be careful to set up your credit-card payments and record them twice--once when you write the check in your checking account and once as a payment in your credit-card account--otherwise the bill won't be shown as paid.

The learning curve is steep because you have to keep pawing through your computer printout of the manual to find out how to do things. And there's no index, so finding what you need is not easy.

If you are diligent and follow instructions carefully, though, this is a perfectly adequate personal-finance program. It will figure your net worth if you feed in information on things you own--your house, car, financial assets (stocks, bonds, brokerage accounts, CDs), and your liabilities--your mortgage and car loans. And it will track cash expenditures, checking, and credit cards, and give you a neat list of how much you spent, organized by category or payee.