People who wish to do the simple tasks well need look no further than The Care Utility Series from Squirrel Software. I have tested three of Squirrel's programs:

Cash Care copes with up to sixty categories of income/expenditure in either one or two accounts.

VAT Care produces the three-monthly VAT liability reports on up to 150 sales or purchase postings per month.

Building Society Care handles a maximum of 208 deposits, withdrawals or rate changes in any year to a building society account thereby allowing one to know the interest earned at any given time.

It is a great compliment when I say that Cash Care is the sort of program which you'd wish you could produce at home over a weekend. At the cost of a take-away meal, Squirrel have taken all the chore out of getting a useful program.

VAT Care adopts the same no frills approach. For the small tradesman who loathes keeping the books and is not interested in copious management information, this is the ideal system.

Whereas Bank Care and VAT Care work on the time honoured principle, Building Society Care is more like a spreadsheet. This is so that you may experiment in order to test the effect of money being moved around. Each row represents a transaction, while each cell of the matrix represents the detailed effect the transaction has upon the account. At a cost of ten to fifteen pounds each, they represent excellent value for money.

Jo Stock