Labs

Like Personal Accountz, Money is designed specifically for home users wanting to manage their household accounts, but it's built on entirely different principles. There are no flowcharts and no double-entry bookkeeping. Instead, you simply track the state of your real assets and liabilities (bank accounts, loans, credit cards, pensions and so on).

If you're short of time, you don't even have to do this manually. Money can read statements saved in the industry standard QIF and OFX file formats, as well as ordinary tab and comma-delimited text files. Most financial institutions allow you to download statements in at least one of these formats. However, Money works best of all if you enter each transaction manually as it's made, then use your downloaded accounts as a form of control, cross-referencing your own records with the bank's to make sure that neither of you has made a mistake anywhere.

Money's features aren't, on the face of it, much different from those of the other programs in this group. It gathers information which it uses to monitor the health of your finances and predict

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any possible shortfalls or cash flow problems. In practice, the program has three great strengths. First, its simplicity: home users don't have to learn the dark arts of double-entry bookkeeping. Second, if you take the time and effort to enter precise details of your expenditure (for instance, the kind of goods or services you're buying), Money can produce detailed reports showing you exactly where your income is going. That's when financial management goes beyond spotting errors and avoiding problems, and gets into the territory of helping you see how you could spend less money while preserving your lifestyle.

Third, information such as reports is presented visually, as charts and tables, in a way that normal human beings, as opposed to accountants, will instantly be able to understand. Microsoft Money can even generate even pop-up advice windows telling you, for instance, that in order to cut your interest charges you should be making larger repayments on your credit card.

Not to say that Money is flawless. Its main interface is divided into tabs, some of which contain actual functions of the program, while others just link to a particular page of the MSN Money website. This seems unnecessary in itself, and what's even worse is that some of the web addresses no longer exist, so you're just presented with a 'page not found' message. Backdating entries, such as the opening balance of an account, can also be tricky and seems to introduce anomalies into the account in question.

Minor niggles aside, Money is easy for home users to get to grips with, works well with online banking, and handles your financial data in an intelligent and useful fashion.