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PLAN IT (Amstrad Computer User) | PLAN IT (Amstrad Action) |
The complete personal organiser Yuppies do it with a filofax, techies use a computer. If your finances are a mess then a computer system can help you to learn to be organised. But if you don't change you'll still be in trouble, as David Foster found out, while this is fine when there are only one or two options, it soon gets tedious when you may have to press the cursor 10 or 11 times and then Return to select an option near the bottom of the menu, when it could have been done with a single keypress of a letter or number key. Ideal as a method for selecting with a mouse, but not from the keyboard, and Planlt does not have provision to work with a mouse. Personal Accounts This is perhaps the main part of the Planlt suite for most people, and is intended to provide the facility to analyse your expenditure, bank and credit card accounts, month by month. Before using the program for the first time you must specify details of the bank account and any credit cards, together with opening balances. This is where we come across one of the many inbuilt compromises. There appears to be no provision to handle more than one bank account or a building society account, though provision is made for handling up to nine credit cards. Transactions can be analysed into 24 different categories of expenditure, but there is no way to break down the value of a single payment into more than one category, so don't pay your electricity bill and buy a computer with the same cheque! Individual statements for bank and credit card accounts can be viewed, printed or sent to a file on disc. There appears to be some slight problem with this part of the program, in that it is possible for credit card statements to not show all the entries, though they are shown elsewhere in the reports and" are included in the summary totals. Transaction reports and cumulative expenditure reports are available at any time, so that you can see your individual transactions for the month to date and also expenditure by category since the start of the accounting period, together with the overall state of your finances. At the month end you carry out a Month End update, to transfer all standing orders and balances forward to the next month. Card Index The Card Index is a very simple database and is ideal for simple names and addresses, but the maximum length of any one field is 22 characters and a maximum of seven fields. The default field headings are names, addresses and telephone numbers, but these can be changed as long as the wording is no more than eight characters long. If your requirements fit within these dimensions the Card Index works well Data can be entered, amended and deleted at any time and records may be scanned, viewed one after another or you can jump to a specific record. Search facilities are provided, and searches may be made on the key (first) field, or all fields. This is fairly rudimentary and it is not possible to search on multiple criteria. Records may be sorted into ascending . order and you can select on which field the sort is to be carried out. Financial Diary The concept of the Financial Diary is that you may enter dates and times of appointments, together with details, for any date in the future and these are retained in the activity file for as long as required. You are limited to 200 entries (maximum , depending on the size of each entry in the activity file at any one time , but it is possible to store past dates and times in separate files month by month and these can be referred to and, for some strange reason, altered at a later date by loading them in to the diary.
You must select the date first and then state the time, followed by the appointment or notes. There is also a column to allow you to enter monetary figures and I assume that the intention here is that you can insert expenses at a later date once the appointment has passed. The maximum size of any one entry is 50 characters, plus the time, and any "money" figure, but you can' also add "notes" to include further comments. Entries may be altered or moved to different dates without the need to retype the complete entry. Incorporated within the diary is a calendar, and this can display any month from 1900 to 9999. I now know that in 9999, my birthday falls on a Loan Calculator For some reason this seems to have funny ideas about what ranges of figures are acceptable, and it will not take interest rates less than 1 per cent. The loan period must be stated in years, which can be awkward if you want to work it out for intermediate periods, though it will accept decimal fractions of a year, assuming you know they are. ' Overall impressions Visually Planlt is good, though more I used it, the more irritated I became with the need to make multiple: selections from a number of menus in order to carry out the simplest task. There are a number of inconsistencies in the use of keys. Sometimes Esc may be used to back out to a higher level menu, but on other occasioris, with a similar menu, it doesn't work. Sometimes you select by moving the cursor, but other times you have to type in your selection. Will Planlt suite your needs? If they are simple and straightforward and you are prepared to be meticulous about entering everything, Planlt may be what you are looking for, but I can't help but feel that at the end of the day I could have done it a lot more quickly with pen, paper and a diary. ACU #8705 |
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