Personal Accountz

Having a program to review your personal finances is a good idea, especially in a recession.

Despite the rather silly spelling of its name, Personal Accountz can be used to track bank accounts, loans, credit cards and more. It allows users to review their financial situations, based on existing transactions and balances, and plan ahead by creating forecasts.

One of the best features of Personal Accountz is its ability to import data from downloaded bank account and credit card statements. It does this by using the open-standard OFX and QIF file formats.

A list of the financial institutions whose statements can be handled by Personal Accountz is available on the company's website, so it is a good idea to check that your accounts are compatible with the program before you buy it.

Personal Accountz makes it simple to set up your home accounting system. Its basic on-screen interface is split into two areas, Accounts (to enter details of banks accounts, utility bills, direct debits and so on) and Entries (to enter individual transactions). Initially, it’s time-consuming work to enter your accounts, but the program has some help in the form of predictive text – it will attempt to automatically fill fields based on what you start typing.

Users can enter transactions in the entries screen in any order, allowing the program to do the tedious date-order filing automatically. Personal Accountz can also automate recurring payments, a handy time-saver.

A few clicks later and results data can be produced either as a tailored spreadsheet or as more user-friendly graphs. There is a decent online forum to deal with frequently asked questions and more in-depth technical issues, while the company website also contains a lot of useful information. Furthermore, there are some tutorial videos on Youtube, though the quality of these is not great.

The lack of tax and interest calculations mean that Personal Accountz is best suited for day-to-day financial planning and monthly record keeping, something that must be remembered when using it to create forecasts.

Personal Accountz is cheap, well thought out and could potentially save the user money. The program's demands on the computer are also tiny, meaning that it can be used on older computers without trouble.