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Balance Your Checkbook and Manage Your Finances With These Personal Finance Managers

The days of banking in your bathrobe are here at last! Although personal finance management software has been on the market for several years, electronic bill paying through the Web has finally matured into a mustperform task each month. With a little discipline, the programs in this review will help you better track your finances and maybe, just maybe, keep more of your money as well. Personal finance managers such as Quicken and Managing Your Money for both Windows and Mac and MS Money for Windows can reduce the time you spend writing checks, reconciling account statements, totaling your account balances, and fixing the inevitable calculation errors that result from banking by hand. The programs offer robust report writing that provides quick answers to such thorny questions as "Where's the receivables to cover this month's payables?" Thanks to reminders and features for recurring payments (your mortgage, for example), these programs can greatly simplify bill paying. If you sign up for electronic banking and bill paying, you'll reduce those costs in addition to lowering your bank charges and avoiding those late-afternoon dashes to your bank.

Quicken established the personal finance manager market and competitors followed suit by adopting Quicken's checkbook and account balance sheet metaphor. Many of the programs have adopted other features as well, such as AutoFill (just type in the letters "gen" and the program enters "General Motors," complete with the amount of last month's car loan payment). With a click of a button, these programs display a breakdown of your monthly and yearly finances, with charts highlighting food, rent or mortgage, entertainment, credit cards, savings, and so on.

Most of the software publishers in this review--specially Microsoft, the maker of Money, and Intuit, the creator of Quicken--have signed a series of partnerships with leading banks to offer online banking.

If you're a well-established small business with employees and inventory, you're better off with a good double-entry accounting program (see "Playing the Numbers," January, page 83). But if you're still running your business out of your checkbook and via credit cards, a user-friendly personal finance manager may be more to your liking. All offer light double-entry features as well as file-export capability so that you can upgrade to a heavy-duty accounting program later on.

How We Chose Since your time is money, we decided to conserve both by testing and reviewing the most popular personal finance managers with the best financial management options and those that have established agreements with banks for online banking and bill paying. We settled on the Windows and Macintosh versions of market leaders Quicken Deluxe and Managing Your Money as well as Microsoft Money 97. We declined to review Simply Money, once published by Computer Associates but now offered by CD Titles, because the program hasn't been updated in two years.

How We Tested Because it's a fine line that separates a small-business person's personal and business dealings, we examined both types of financial activities. We created standard personal/business transactions such as paying auto loans and home-office mortgage bills electronically. We also built budgets, balance sheets, P&Ls, and retirement and other planning reports. We isolated our business transactions in separate checking and credit card accounts. Finally, we evaluated the usability of each program's interface, automated help, charting features, and file imports.

Managing Your Money 7.2 for Macintosh

RATING: ** 1/2

MAC

MYM for Mac is a solid personal finance manager, but it lacks online banking features. Its SmartDesk interface-which resembles a desk complete with blotter, drawers, and calendar--is perfect for checkbook-balancing newbies. Likewise, MYM for Mac will certainly deliver when it comes to typical financial management tasks. We were able to create budgets and personal reports, and we could use its tools for planning retirement and college expenses. But its feature list is definitely c locked on the trailing edge of personal finance management software and MYM 7.2 is particularly thin for business-oriented activities, such as payroll.

While other software publishers in this review have agreements with banks to add direct online banking features to their products, Meca Software has no similar agreements with Bank of America (BofA) or NationsBank for MYM for Mac.

MYM for Mac users, however, can still bank online using the transaction-only banking services offered by these banks (see "Banking With a Net" sidebar). If you want to pay bills electronically, MYM for Mac has long provided that capability through services such as CheckFree, and you can download stock quotes from MYM's CompuServe connection. Still, these are paltry options for the era of the Internet.

Despite a strong interface and straight-forward personal finance management powers, MYM for Mac isn't a strong choice unless you have absolutely no intention of banking online.

Managing Your Money 3.0 for Windows

RATING: *** 1/2

WIN 95/WIN

It's easy to tell that Meca Software has bet the farm on Managing Your Money 3.0 for Windows. The Windows 95/Windows version of MYM closely resembles Quicken for Windows, offering an assortment of checkbook management, budgeting, portfolio management, and tax and financial planning elements. All are very accessible, whether you're a seasoned financial manager or a novice.

Although you can find MYM for about $30 in software stores, BofA, NationsBank, Fleet Bank, and Royal Bank of Canada send you the program for free (shipping and handling charges are extra) after you open a checking account. These MYM versions include online banking and bill-paying modules unique to each bank. The retail version lacks this dimension, which, after all, should be the foundation of your financial management activities.

Practically speaking, if you bank with one of the financial institutions that supports MYM, the program is a very strong choice. Although its features aren't as robust as those found in Quicken for Windows, we found them more than adequate. MYM produced a bevy of reports and graphs for summarizing and visualizing our financial data, showing us where our money goes each month.

We were quite impressed with MYM's SmartDesk interface that includes icons representing familiar elements in your home office--a checkbook register, calculator, calendar, Rolodex, bookshelf. and bulletin board. This brings the functionality found on MYM's menu bar to the fore. In version 3.0, SmartDesk gets animation, sound effects, and other multimedia elements.

MYM puts a check or deposit form on the same screen as your checkbook register with various action buttons arrayed around it. Like Quicken, MYM's check, deposit, and transfer forms are scarcely distinguishable from the real thing. Select your payee from a dropdown list or just begin to type and MYM's AutoFill feature completes the rest of the check based on last month's transaction. A third method is to scroll the register above your form and single-click on a similar transaction.

MYM 3,0's usability improvements make it easier to cast a budget, plan for taxes, and manage your investments than most other programs in this review. Thanks to MYM's intuitive import feature, you can import your data from other personal finance managers. Now with a new 32-bit version, Windows 95 diehards have another choice besides Microsoft Money 97. And it's a strong choice indeed.

Microsoft Money 97

RATING: ***

WIN 95

Microsoft Money offers a personal finance manager for people who don't want to get overinvolved with managing their money. The new Money 97 concentrates on a fast-growing segment of the financial software market--people who want to focus on automating such core financial tasks as account management and banking/bill paying.

Money 97, however, lacks the depth and flexibility of reporting and planning that you find in both MYM for Windows and Quicken for Windows. You won't get built-in online connections for investment tracking and other Internet activities, either.

But we found that its interface was thoughtfully designed to speed users through bill paying, account reconciliation, and more common reporting topics, including "Where the Money Goes" or "Income vs. Spending." Instead of navigating through menus or between multiple windows, Money 97 anticipates your needs and assembles the necessary program tools on split screens packed with information and action buttons. For example, Money 97 puts your checkbook register and a check on a single screen available from the Account Register button on its main screen. Fill in the check fields just as you would on one of your paper checks.