Abelssoft Moneyfox 2012

Many personal finance programs are baffling to use, but MoneyFox is incredibly simple. Each user has a profile that is linked with accounts that correspond to real financial assets. For instance, a bank account or a credit card (as opposed to the notional accounts you'd use in a program based on double-entry bookkeeping).

Each account gets an opening balance. Then you start recording your debits, credits and money transfers. It's easy to create recurring transactions, for instance rent or mortgage payments. You can also set up recurring transfers between accounts: convenient if you make regular investments, for instance. Different accounts can even use different currencies – you simply specify the current exchange rate when you transfer money between them.

To help you understand exactly what you spend your wages on, you can assign each transaction to a category, for example "food" or "pub". The program comes with a list of categories all ready to use, but you can create your own too if you want.

There are two ways to quickly see where your money is going. You can just look at the program's main screen – its 'dashboard'. This displays, as pie charts, the source of all your income (salary, investments, freelance) and a breakdown of your expenditure. For a bit more detail, use one of the filters on the Reports tab to see exactly how much you've spent on a particular category between whatever dates you specify.

Not everything is great though. The manual is an awful mess. Written, it seems, by the German software developers themselves in a sort of horrendous Deunglish. The Reports tab promises "stunning reports and statistics", but it's just a pivot table that outputs to a line graph. It's useful but hardly visually impressive. What's more, people who aren't used to pivot tables will find it difficult to get to grips with. You can't import bank statements, not even plain old CSV files. One final oddity is that Brits pay about £5 more for the program than American customers.

On the whole, though, if you want a program that will help you budget without making your head hurt, MoneyFox is good enough.