A Check On Your Cheques...

Diamant Software's Bank, available on disc or cassette, aims to provide a tool for those who can't keep their financial house in order.

Having this disability to an extreme degree, I'm exceptionally well qualified to judge it.

The program will keep a record ofyour bank transactions over a period of 12 months, together with a running balance, and will even print professionallooking bank statements.

Provided that you diligently enter all deposits and outgoings, the information you get will be more up-to-date than anything from your real bank, and you can make it as detailed as you wish.

Up to 50 standing orders - income or expenditure - can be handled automatically, whether they occur annually, monthly or at irregular intervals.

The statements you send to yourself list all such payments, and inform you of those due over the next seven days.

For non-recurring transactions, you simply enter dates, items details, and amounts.

Unfortunately, the screen instructions make the program unnecessarily difficult for new users.

The less mathematically minded may well be puzzled by prompts such as "+ve for input, -ve for withdrawal"; and the ambiguity of "Type numbers only when entering sums" could leave some people in the dark.

More serious is that there is insufficient error-trapping. It is possible to lose data, to exit from the program accident ally, and to make it hang.

There is no escape route, for instance, if you fill the printer buffer with no printer attached.

Or again, Bank thinks that a lower-case "y" for YES means NO, which can give some strange results. I would have thought that disposing of that particular old chestnut would not have been too much to ask.

Nevertheless, when you get accustomed to its quirks, the program can be useful.

Quite apart from the fact that - I'm told - it's worth checking for mistakes made by bank clerks, for most of us the only way to avoid bank charges is always to know precisely where we're up to.

And here, unless you're genuinely on your uppers, the program does help.

Bank is not especially ingenious or revolutionary, but if it were tidied up, and if the documentation looked less "home-made", it would not be out of place in a good software library.

Even as it stands, it's probably worth buying if you're anything like me.

Gabriel Jacobs