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We liked Personal Accountz. It was easy to use and logical. Everything was editable, all your finances were visible in single screen and you could instantly see the effect of any change. It was exactly what you need from a home finance program. And now it’s gone, replaced by the new Home Accountz.
One of things we liked best about Personal Accountz was its simplicity. With the screen split between your transactions and your chart of accounts (CoA), you instantly saw the effect of any changes you made to your financial records. The split screen has been lost in the redesign: transactions and the CoA each get their own “views” (tabs, more or less) along with a few other functions.
The new design isn’t as easy to instantly grasp as the old, but it’s not that complicated either. You enter your transactions in the Transactions tab, then flick to the Accounts, Balances & Budgeting view (the CoA) to work with the information you’ve entered. The CoA is subdivided vertically into four further tabs: Balances, Transactions, Budgeting and Period Overview. Flicking between these tabs, you can instantly see how much you’ve got in your real bank accounts, how much you’ve spent on whatever items you choose to track (food, entertainment, car, house, whatever) and whether you’re sticking to your budget.
The budgeting tool is new to Home Accountz. It lets you easily specify how much you want to spend over the year. By default, the software automatically breaks your annual budget for an item, for instance food, into twelve equal amounts. However, using the budgeting tool you can quickly change the amount assigned to each month as a percentage of the annual total. Once your budget is set, you can use the Period overview to compare your actuals against your budget and to see forecasts for the month ahead.
You can also use the program’s charting tools to create a range of different graphs that show you exactly where your money is going. There are two ways to view charts. In the Transactions view, you can filter your transactions, for instance by date, and then use the dedicated charting tool to create a visual representation of your expenditure. This can be a very good way of understanding your finances.
If you don’t want to create customised charts, just open the CoA in the Transactions view and click on any account group. Accountz will show you a bar chart in which the activity on the account is broken down by amount and type. Our only reservation about the charting features was the visual quality of the charts themselves, which are fairly basic and sometimes look a bit as if they’re over-enlarged bitmap images.
The filtering tool that we’ve already mentioned is another of the new features that weren’t part of Personal Accountz. Using it, you can choose to filter transactions by a wide range of criteria, by date, by account, by currency, reconciled and reconciled statements and so on. Beyond being useful when creating charts, filtering is a very good way of homing in on particular transactions.
Home Accountz is easy to get your head around and has everything you need to help you get your home finances in order. If we had one criticism, it would be the slightly old-fashioned interface.
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Price | £40 |
| Details | www.accountz.com |
| Rating | ***** |
