| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ COMPTA, BOURSE, BUDGET ★ MONEY MANAGER ★ |
MONEY MANAGER (Popular Computing Weekly) | MONEY MANAGER (Amstrad Action) | MONEY MANAGER: So hält man die Finanzen in Ordnung (Aktueller Software Markt) |
Money Manager takes a different approach from the Gemini system. It also divides its work between two programs, but these devote themselves to entry of transactions, arid their analysis. Money Managei is particularly strong on analysis and can produce summaries by account, class and mark. You what? Well, an account is one of seven pre-defined categories, covering such things as current, savings, credit card and building society. You may also like to consider your wages or salary as being a payment into an account with your employer You can rename any of the accounts at will The account class is a handy sub-division of your expenses. 32 classes are provided, but again you may redefine them. They include salaries, mortgage, gas. food, life insurance, computer games - in fact, most of the essentials of life. You may attach any transaction to one of these classes.
A mark is a user-defined flag attached to a transaction and used to pull them all out for analysis. The manual suggests that you might use a mark to distinguish between a husband's and a wife's expenditure a great way of promoting marital strife. Nonetheless this three ne: system of analysing your expenditure allows you to examine things in great detail. Entering individual transactions is a straightforward business. You select the appropriate routine from the menu and type in the relevant details The program gives each transaction a number and you supply a date. account number, reference number, class, description am:unt and mark. Only reference, description and mark are optional. Once you've beer, using the system for a while, you can call the analysis module to provide statistics on your income and expenditure. The program can display a wide variety of different statements comparing expenditure in different categories, classes and time periods, and also calculates maximums, minimums and averages. This it does quite slowly, but then it's not the kind of thing you'll want to do every day of the week. In fact, I wonder how many people will actually want to do it at all! Money Manager works exclusively in mode 2 - 80 columns so you need a green screen monitor to do it justice, since its statements make use of the full width of the screen and can look a bit fuzzy on a colour set. On the other hand, the graphic displays the package can produce look rather better in colour, and you can select the two colours. The program can display multiple bar charts, up to four on the same axes, but oddly it displays them all up the screen marking negative ones with a minus sign. This takes away some of the benefit of graphing the figures in the first place. The pie charts are rather better. You can sub-divide your pie into several different segments, and the program marks each with a percentage of the total. Things can get a bit crowded with small sub-divisions drawn next to each other. There's no facility for printing out either form of graph, but any of the statements may be sen: to the printer. Money Manager is a very professional package, so much so that it may put you off if you're one of the chocolate-wrapper brigade. The manual tries to explain things clearly, but the program is perhaps a bit over the top for home accounting. It is certainly very well put together and can provide detailed analysis of your income and outgoings. AMSTRAD ACTION #5 |
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