Home Computing Weekly


Money Manager
By Connect Systems
Amstrad CPC464

 
Published in Home Computing Weekly #115

This is a home accounts analysis program. By using it you can record and examine your income and expenditure over the period of a year. You can set up a number of accounts, classify income and expenditure passing through them, then sort them by each attribute above, and in addition by date. You can even establish who spent how much! Output can be to the screen or printer in the form of monthly or yearly accounts, or for a graphic interpretation, a pie or bar chart is shown on the screen.

The program allows you to save updated statistics to tape, though the advice given in the manual contradicts that given by Amstrad, namely, always use new tapes for important data. The manual tries hard to be very clear, but often fails. It isn't good enough to write "here is a fact, it's important, think about it." Ordinary mortals need to be told exactly why, and how the facility can be used to best effect. Similarly, to set the program up to your own spec requires you to wade through to page 11. Sample accounts are provided, but no tutorial as to how to get the best out of them.

Whilst input is reasonably easy, presentation on screen often falls down with bits of labels missing, and what seemed to be inaccuracy in the bar graphs. Sorting is painfully slow, and internal "garbage collection" makes for frequent machine hang-ups.

Sound idea; more work needed on both program and documentation.

D.M.

Other Amstrad CPC464 Game Reviews By D.M.


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