Personal Accountz (PC/Mac)

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Editorial reviews

Manufacturer's Description
Personal Accountz tracks your bank, credit cards, savings, loans and shares in the simplest possible way. You can enter all your transactions in the same window in any order so you can see exactly what you have done. Your balances update in real time: you will always know what you have in the bank, what you have left till the end of the month, whether you will go overdrawn in the future, on what date, and by how much. With automated direct debits and rapid data entry including our unique single key press preset entries there is no faster way to keep on top.

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Box Contents

1 X CD-ROM

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-07-19 rating:
Functional but lacking the functionality of other packages
Having read the other review's and how apparently usefull they were to other users. I thought that i could buy and use this product effectively.

I bank with nationwide whose download service does not provide OFX files which the manual claims is "industry standard" in the UK. Also the conversion software included contains the caveat that qif files are temperamental. The package cannot convert CSV files although this is one of the Personnal Account's primary outputs.

This is not for a lay person the other reports seem to have been written by professionals or keen amateurs.

I had hoped to replace my MS Money 2000 with a home grown equal and I'm sorry to say that you will still have to do a lot of the work yourself. It lacks the instant visual management - such as instant forcast graphs for you to plan your future finances.

This would probably suit someone who works in accounts, whose bank account supports OFX files and has the time and disposition to invest in learning the software and then producing reports which then able them to do forcasts away from the system. It has more basic flexibility than Money but a "UK version" it is not. I will continue with Money 2000 as the pros out weigh the cons between these two.

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review by: date: 2008-05-11 rating:
Not as good some other products, but does the job
After I recently ditched the PC in favour of a Mac I found the one application I missed more than anything was MS Money. Mac users are not exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to good, reasonably priced personal finance applications so I settled for Personal Accountz (PAZ).

Whilst PAZ does the job it is meant to do more than adequately it is not on par with, say, MS Money. The user interface in MS Money is far more intuitive than that of PAZ, and PAZ looks and behaves much more like a double entry bookkeeping system. As an accountant this isn't really a problem, but I can see that for some this may be a bit baffling at first.

Some basic set-up work is required before you can start using PAZ. But you can start with just two accounts (e.g. a bank account and an expenses account) and add to the list of accounts as you go along. So you could be up and running in no time - especially as setting up new accounts isn't all that difficult.

One area where PAZ is way ahead of e.g. MS Money is the way your accounts can be set up exactly the way you want them, and should you wish to do so you can effectively create your own P&L and Balance Sheet type lay-out. Similarly, you can set any number of groups of accounts with several levels of sub-groups which can be rolled up and summarised at the click of a button.

As I said, Mac users don't have much of a choice in this area - especially after Intuit stopped supporting Quicken for Mac in the UK - so Personal Accountz is probably the best of an average lot, and let's face it, it isn't a bad piece of software. PC users should either go for the more user friendly MS Money, or - if you're after a proper ledger system - something like MYOB or SAGE.

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review by: date: 2008-05-03 rating:
Very easy to use
If you use Quicken to look after your finances, this software is a great replacement. However, there are no whistles or bells or graphs! You can download the reports you create to Excel and produce your own graphs.
Considering the product has been around for a number of years, there is still a lot of work to be undertaken if it is to compete with Microsoft Money.
If you buy this product, stick with it and it will pay dividends in the long term.

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review by: salvor date: 2008-04-19 rating:
Personal Accountz
I spent half a day trying to get this to work but it is the most unuser friendly software I have come across. It needs dozens of accounts to be set up before a reasonable number of entries can be made and although it reconciles everything to zero only those who want to know how much they spend on widgets every year will persevere with the tedious process.

The report function is very limited and downloading bank accounts is a joke. I have reverted to Quicken 2004 which although no longer supported is much better. A complete waste of money.


review by: date: 2008-03-25 rating:
Wanted something like MS Money on your Mac, This is not it!
I recently migrated to Macintosh and as a long term user of MS Money on my PC I wanted a substitute. After much scouring the net and treating rumours of MS Money for Mac with a suitable amount of cynicism I happened across Personal Accountz. Great I thought, a personal finance package intended for the UK Market. There seemed to be a reasonable number of positive reviews at the time, the screenshots looked OK, I wasn't expecting an exact replica of MS Money. But then the disappointments began:

Importing QIF files exported from MS Money. I am not naive enough to have expected no problems - but frankly it was hopeless. (I have since achieve it pretty well in another package.)

Setup of the accounts is a very slow and tedious process (Templates are rarely perfect but they help) and the interface is clunky.

Reporting for most people I suspect will be a disappointment - Yes you can create detailed reports if you have little else to do in your life BUT if you want any 'at a glance' type pie charts (or any charts at all for that matter) forget it.

Split transactions (between categories) i.e. cashback at the checkout when you buy your groceries - Nope, not that I can find a way of doing it in the 'help' file.

Want to have the ability to enter your automated entries manually to look ahead to a certain date and see what you have left - No doesn't do that, which if like me you don't necessarily get paid on a set date or once a month is a right pain.

If you stick with it, you are stuck with it - there is no way of exporting the accounts as QIF or other common "personal finance" package formats but only as CSV files.

To sum up, I am sure Personal Accountz will be fine for some people but if you (rightly or wrongly) wanted something that worked in a similar way to MS Money, this really is not it, trust me there are better packages out there.

Bear this in mind if you are thinking of buying it - You can't get a trial version or demo copy of Personal Accountz and they don't seem to offer any money back guarantee.

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