Product ReviewsOffice software
With personal finance companies such as Intuit continuing to turn a blind eye to the Mac personal finance market, increasing competition in the small business sector is all the more welcome. A number of new, affordable products are vying for users' attention and the latest to join the throng is Torsoft, whose CashBook Manager is the first UK-based finance package available in both Classic and Mac OS X versions. CashBook Manager is a single-entry computerised cashbook that doesn't just offer a way of recording the financial traffic of your business - it also boasts cash reconciliation, VAT and financial reporting features so you can effectively track your current business state. If your business encompasses more than one area, separate cashbooks can be created for each. The most important feature of any product aimed at small businesses is ease of use. In this respect, CashBook Manager's setup Wizard adeptly guides you through the creation of a new set of accounts when first launching the program, prompting you to enter basic company and VAT information, as well as automatically generating basic accounts details from a choice of around 20 account templates. Like more feature-laden accounting tools such as MYOB, CashBook Manager makes use of a sensible and familiar flow chart layout to illustrate money movement. The program is divided into three main modules, Company, Accounts and Money, each with its own navigation window. The Company window allows you to enter non-financial information, such as company, VAT and reporting details. The Accounts window shows money accounts, such as bank or credit card balances, income and expense accounts, as well as the cashbook journal. The crux of the program is found in the Money window, where you enter income and payments. There's also a Reconcile Money feature allowing you to make sure your own accounts match up with printed statements. Two other modules - Sales and Purchase and a Contacts Management - are available as an optional extra. Reports, including cash-based VAT reports and Creditors and Debtors lists, are available from the bottom of each window. These can be printed, exported as tab-delimited text or directly to Microsoft Excel for further analysis. Money talks For a budget-priced product, this amounts to an
While you might reasonably expect to enter payments directly into the fields in the Spend Money window, CashBook Manager instead displays a historical listing of every transaction not yet posted to the selected money account. This is effectively a pending tray that allows you to delay the impact of a payment or receipt on a money account until it becomes due. While this is a useful feature, it also means that to add a fresh payment you need to open another window, the Entry window. Even here, you don't add information directly - instead you must launch yet another window to post transaction details. Through trial and error you learn to complete the fields here in a specific order. If you enter the payment amount first, without specifying the applicable VAT code or account, CashBook Manager helpfully pops up a warning window, but unhelpfully clears the other fields in the process. If you return to edit the details later, the Account field is returned to its original, blank state - amending this means that the details in other fields are once again removed. Torsoft says this problem will be fixed in an imminent upgrade, but it's worrying that such an obvious bug should be present at all. Such flaws detract from the application's genuinely useful features, including the ability to easily create duplicate entries for recurring transitions. There are other drawbacks that should have been ironed out. The lack of obvious keyboard shortcuts for most of the program's functions won't have every user chewing their nails in frustration, but more than a few will be continually irritated by the inability to quit CashBook Manager without manually closing all open data windows. Among several aesthetic glitches, the lack of a Cancel button in the Entry Window is the most perplexing and noticeable omission. Helper skelter The incomplete feel is exacerbated by dismal documentation. The paper-based manual is limited to a straightforward cross-platform installation guide, while the mechanics of the program are relegated to an inexhaustive mix of PDF and HTML help files. It would be churlish to deny CashBook Manager's promise or to fail to acknowledge the developer's foresight in producing a fully functional OS X version of the software, but that doesn't make up for its weaknesses. For now, if you're looking for a simple cashbook functionality, Do$h Cashbook 2 (see Reviews 17 March 2000, p29) is a far better bet. NEEDS: G3 PowerPC or higher, Mac OS 8 or higher, Mac OS X, 30Mb RAM, 20Mb hard disk space MAC OS X Carbon By Tom Gorham |
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