Checks and balances: balance your checkbook and manage your finances with these personal finance managers - evaluations of five programs - includes related articles on Internet banking, summaries of products and key terms - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, March, 1997 by Mike Hogan

Balance Your Checkbook and Manage Your Finances With These Personal Finance Managers

The days of banking in your bathrobe are here at last! Although personal finance management software has been on the market for several years, electronic bill paying through the Web has finally matured into a mustperform task each month. With a little discipline, the programs in this review will help you better track your finances and maybe, just maybe, keep more of your money as well. Personal finance managers such as Quicken and Managing Your Money for both Windows and Mac and MS Money for Windows can reduce the time you spend writing checks, reconciling account statements, totaling your account balances, and fixing the inevitable calculation errors that result from banking by hand. The programs offer robust report writing that provides quick answers to such thorny questions as "Where's the receivables to cover this month's payables?" Thanks to reminders and features for recurring payments (your mortgage, for example), these programs can greatly simplify bill paying. If you sign up for electronic banking and bill paying, you'll reduce those costs in addition to lowering your bank charges and avoiding those late-afternoon dashes to your bank.

Quicken established the personal finance manager market and competitors followed suit by adopting Quicken's checkbook and account balance sheet metaphor. Many of the programs have adopted other features as well, such as AutoFill (just type in the letters "gen" and the program enters "General Motors," complete with the amount of last month's car loan payment). With a click of a button, these programs display a breakdown of your monthly and yearly finances, with charts highlighting food, rent or mortgage, entertainment, credit cards, savings, and so on.

Most of the software publishers in this review--specially Microsoft, the maker of Money, and Intuit, the creator of Quicken--have signed a series of partnerships with leading banks to offer online banking.

If you're a well-established small business with employees and inventory, you're better off with a good double-entry accounting program (see "Playing the Numbers," January, page 83). But if you're still running your business out of your checkbook and via credit cards, a user-friendly personal finance manager may be more to your liking. All offer light double-entry features as well as file-export capability so that you can upgrade to a heavy-duty accounting program later on.

How We Chose Since your time is money, we decided to conserve both by testing and reviewing the most popular personal finance managers with the best financial management options and those that have established agreements with banks for online banking and bill paying. We settled on the Windows and Macintosh versions of market leaders Quicken Deluxe and Managing Your Money as well as Microsoft Money 97. We declined to review Simply Money, once published by Computer Associates but now offered by CD Titles, because the program hasn't been updated in two years.

How We Tested Because it's a fine line that separates a small-business person's personal and business dealings, we examined both types of financial activities. We created standard personal/business transactions such as paying auto loans and home-office mortgage bills electronically. We also built budgets, balance sheets, P&Ls, and retirement and other planning reports. We isolated our business transactions in separate checking and credit card accounts. Finally, we evaluated the usability of each program's interface, automated help, charting features, and file imports.

Managing Your Money 7.2 for Macintosh

RATING: ** 1/2

MAC

MYM for Mac is a solid personal finance manager, but it lacks online banking features. Its SmartDesk interface-which resembles a desk complete with blotter, drawers, and calendar--is perfect for checkbook-balancing newbies. Likewise, MYM for Mac will certainly deliver when it comes to typical financial management tasks. We were able to create budgets and personal reports, and we could use its tools for planning retirement and college expenses. But its feature list is definitely c locked on the trailing edge of personal finance management software and MYM 7.2 is particularly thin for business-oriented activities, such as payroll.

While other software publishers in this review have agreements with banks to add direct online banking features to their products, Meca Software has no similar agreements with Bank of America (BofA) or NationsBank for MYM for Mac.

MYM for Mac users, however, can still bank online using the transaction-only banking services offered by these banks (see "Banking With a Net" sidebar). If you want to pay bills electronically, MYM for Mac has long provided that capability through services such as CheckFree, and you can download stock quotes from MYM's CompuServe connection. Still, these are paltry options for the era of the Internet.

Despite a strong interface and straight-forward personal finance management powers, MYM for Mac isn't a strong choice unless you have absolutely no intention of banking online.