Personal Accountz

Having a program to review your personal finances is a good idea, especially

in a recession.Despite the rather silly spelling of its name, Personal Accountz can be used

to track bank accounts, loans, credit cards and more. It allows users to review

their financial situations, based on existing transactions and balances, and

plan ahead by creating forecasts.One of the best features of Personal Accountz is its ability to import data

from downloaded bank account and credit card statements. It does this by using

the open-standard OFX and QIF file formats.

A list of the financial institutions whose statements can be handled by

Personal Accountz is available on the company's website, so it is a good idea to

check that your accounts are compatible with the program before you buy it.Personal Accountz makes it simple to set up your home accounting system. Its

basic on-screen interface is split into two areas, Accounts (to enter details of

banks accounts, utility bills, direct debits and so on) and Entries (to enter

individual transactions). Initially, it’s time-consuming work to enter your

accounts, but the program has some help in the form of predictive text – it will

attempt to automatically fill fields based on what you start typing.Users can enter transactions in the entries screen in any order, allowing the

program to do the tedious date-order filing automatically. Personal Accountz can

also automate recurring payments, a handy time-saver.A few clicks later and results data can be produced either as a tailored

spreadsheet or as more user-friendly graphs. There is a decent online forum to

deal with frequently asked questions and more in-depth technical issues, while

the company website also contains a lot of useful information. Furthermore,

there are some tutorial videos on

Youtube,

though the quality of these is not great.The lack of tax and interest calculations mean that Personal Accountz is best

suited for day-to-day financial planning and monthly record keeping, something

that must be remembered when using it to create forecasts.Personal Accountz is cheap, well thought out and could potentially save the

user money. The program's demands on the computer are also tiny, meaning that it

can be used on older computers without trouble.

Taken from here