Accountz Home Accountz review

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Verdict:

Although at times the look and feel is old-fashioned, Home Accountz has some good new features and is still as clean, logical and easy to use and its predecessors.

Review Date: 18 Jul 2010

Price when reviewed: £40

Supplier: http://www.accountz.com

Reviewed By: Karl Wright

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

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.

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