Personal Accountz (PC/Mac) - Software and Utilities (Accountz.com Ltd)

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Customer Reviews of Personal Accountz (PC/Mac)

nicjaytee
London
20th November 2008

Simple and quick...
There's not much to Personal Accountz other than a simple and quick way of entering your personal financial transactions under as many Expenditure & Income categories and sub-categories as you want. Once the categories are set up (which, as with any personal accounting package, needs prior thought and planning) and the transactions for a defined period are entered, you get a straightforward summary of the totals for the period for each category & sub-category plus a separate analysis of the details of the transactions behind them that can be sorted in multiple ways. You also get the option to produce and print-out reports of all transactions by category type or keyword, and you get a basic but effective system to ensure that the underlying transactions reconcile to the relevant bank or credit card statements.

And... that's it. No bells & whistles and limited output options. So why three stars? Well, realistically, if you want true flexibility and power in analysing and managing your personal finances the best way to get it is to set-up a spreadsheet to take the category totals by period from this type of personal accounting package and then to manually transfer the actual figures from the accounting package into the spreadsheet. This way you can use the huge and powerful array of comparison, graphing and trend analysis tools in the spreadsheet to prepare annual budgets and to compare what's actually happening with what you think is happening. Sounds time consuming but, unless your finances are unduly complicated (in which case you probably need a full blown accounting package anyway) it's not, and it's by far the easiest and quickest way to get the additional flexibility that several other personal accounting packages claim to deliver.

The really time consuming part of the exercise isn't in transferring the actual category totals into the spreadsheet (and, don't be fooled by claims of "automatic CSV transfers" - at this level, manual transfer is usually simpler and more flexible); the real effort is in entering the large numbers of individual (often small value) transactions from your bank and credit card statements that make up these totals. And, to do this quickly and accurately, you need a package that allows you to enter and categorise these transactions with the minimum amount of typing, that produces the necessary category totals for transfer into the spreadsheet, that confirms that everything reconciles to your source statements, and that allows you to to search & query transactions by payee or other keywords for control & checking purposes. Which is exactly what Personal Accountz does.

Marios Iacovides

8th November 2008

Leave this one on the shelf!
I just switched from Windows to Mac and trying to find personal accounting software has been surprisingly difficult. Personal Accountz is one of the few in the UK market. Having bought it and set it up, I've found it clumsy, rigid and generally flawed in its design. I'm an accountant by profession and I struggled with it. I ditched it within 2 days of buying it and wrote off the £25 to a bad experience. If you're a Mac user looking for accounting software, look across the water. Try Moneydance 2008.

S. KIRKWOOD
UK
17th October 2008

Disappointing product
A very disappointing product. Having bought it, I have now "binned" it. I would not recommend it to anyone. Like others I was used to MsMoney and was still using a version which came on floppy disk, so needed something that worked in Vista. With Personal Accontz, putting all entries into one screen no matter which account they refer to makes no sense at all - you cannot see what the impact is without looking at a separate screen which summarises each account. After trying it for a day, I removed it.

Jon
Warwickshire, UK
11th September 2008

Personal Accountz
I bought this because I've just migrated from PC to Mac, and MS Money is unavailable in Mac format. It really is an awful product though. I can't believe that they could have made the interface any more clunky. It's just not intuitive to use in the way that MS Money is. I'm abandoning it, and will try Quicken for Mac. What a waste of money!

---Iain---
Cambridgeshire, UK
19th July 2008

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.