Remember when you were justifying buying a computer to your spouse, your parents, yourself and the Almighty? Well, one of the persuasive arguments you could have used would be that it can solve your accounts problems, keep records, an address book, do calculations and all kinds of other things.

Abrasco has introduced a suite of five programs, collectively called Home Manager, which cover all of the above applications. Ken Ryder finds out whether, at £12.50 on tape, and £15 on disk, this budget package can solve your domestic problems.

Each program in the suite is menu driven, and all are of a similar format. So once you've mastered one, the others follow naturally. Output from all the four main programs can be printed, but only to Commodore's own serial printers: the 1515/1525 or equivalents. The files created are sequential; but one caveat, since there are no disk handling facilities, if you use a filename which already exists, it will be overwritten without warning.

The first of the quintet is a program for storing and retrieving names, addresses and telephone numbers. There is enough space for two telephone numbers per name, perhaps one for home and another for work. Once the data has been entered, the address for a particular surname can be searched for and displayed. It may also be edited or deleted when friends move house - or fall out of favour. If the exact spelling is not known, the search can be made on the first two characters of the surname only. Alternatively, the addresses of all names beginning with a specified character can be listed.

Individual addresses can be selected for printing, or all the addresses can be sent to the printer in either label or list format, with or without telephone numbers. Just imagine, at Christmas you could impress your friends by commanding your C64 to print out a load of sticky labels for your cards.

The system is capable of storing up to 250 average sized records, and gives a warning when remaining memory falls below 500 bytes. A very small business with a standard mailing list could possibly use this program to good effect. But it should be noted that the addresses can only be sorted by surname so you cannot just print labels for customers based on a town or country; all your clients in Manchester, for example.

The events which can be stored in Diary Manager are divided into two categories, special occasions and daily appointments. There are only four classes of special event: birthdays, weddings, engagements and the ominous 'other'. A few more headings would have been useful here such as anniversary or AGM, in addition to the all-encompassing 'other'. Mundane daily events are associated with a time, specified on the 24 hour clock, a name and an event. The event must be fairly concise as it can only be described by 24 characters.

When all the entries have been made, they can be searched in a number of ways: for dates to remember, for all entries for a given date, by name or the entries may be browsed through page by page.

When deleting an entry, the date is requested and all the entries for that day are displayed, each one may be deleted or retained as required. All, or a specified number of entries from a given date may be printed. In addition to loading and saving the data to disk or tape, just the special events may be loaded, so that regular annual functions can be transferred from year to year - like birthdays, or they day your cat had kittens.

Monthly expenses can be recorded with this package under fifteen headings. But ten of the headings are already determined by the software, such as mortgage/rent, groceries, and clothes. The remainder are user definable. Some of the system headings are a bit odd (miscellaneous and clothes) whilst there are some more useful headings like gas and rates missing, but you can include these in the user-definable ones.

Data is entered under each heading for each month, including the date and method of payment. Unfortunately, there are only four methods of payment to choose from: Cash, Cheque, Credit Card and, you guessed it, the Other. Personally I pay many of my monthly bills by standing order or direct debit through the bank and would like to have seen these in the options, rather than the vague 'other'. Any entry may be deleted; in fact, this is the only way to alter a record after input - it must be deleted and then rewritten.

To delete the type of expense, date and amount must be specified. The record is then listed for checking before deletion.

The data can be analysed and displayed in three ways: by month for all fifteen expenses together with the percentage of the total expenditure that each heading represents, and the yearly total. A single expense in a month can be viewed showing the date, amount and method of payment - in my case usually the 'other'. Finally, the titles for each expense over the year can be displayed, together with a percentage breakdown and grand total (how depressing). All of the above analyses can be sent to the printer instead of the screen.

Bank Manager enables you to produce your own monthly bank statement. First, bank details such as the branch, account number and the present balance are entered. Then withdrawals by cheque or other means, such as standing orders, direct debits, credit card and yes, the 'other'. Deposits can be entered, and deleted at will (deletions are listed for verification before removal).

There are several methods of sorting all the data: details of a cheque can be found by cheque number, and other types of transaction can be located by specifying the date and amount. Alternatively a starting date is specified and all the records before or after this date can be browsed through.

The most impressive facility is the itemised statement that's produced of each transaction from a given date, page by page. Credit entries are shown in green, debits are highlighted in white and overdrawn figures appear in reverse characters - so when you're in the red you're in reverse.

A printed bank statement can be produced for all, or just a certain number of entries from a specified date. The loading and saving facility offers a security code. When saving data the user is prompted for a four figure security code and filename. The data is then saved and may only be reloaded if the correct security code is given, so don't forget it!

This is the smallest program and is used to forecast the cost of a loan against three variables: the principle, the interest rate, and the repayment period in years. The interest rate is based on the flat rate, not the APR (annual percentage rate). The total cost, monthly payments, and total interest paid are all displayed. Any or all of the variables may be changed as desired. This is a useful program to help decide the best way to spread the cost of your car, furniture - or even your Commodore 64.

The instructions for all the programs are contained in a rather small six page booklet. It is very brief, but all the information is to the point, and in any case, the program menus are self explanatory and shouldn't cause any problems.

All the programs are written in Basic and are not protected so you could possibly tailor them to your own particular idiosyncrasies. For instance, you could replace the dreaded 'other' with something more profound, or change some of the expense headings.

Generally the screen displays are all rather bland and a few audible prompts would not have gone amiss. To make full use of the Diary and Expense Managers, you really need a printer to take a hard copy for reference. It is much more convenient to look through your printouts than to load the program, load the data and search it, especially if the file is on cassette. Under test the menus seem fairly idiotproof but the RUN/STOP and RESTORE keys are not disabled - so be careful. At £12.50 for tape and £15.00 for disk the package is good value and should make a worthwhile addition to any software library.

Summary: Good value for money.