High-powered financial manager

Money is a new product just released by Palmtop BV in the Netherlands. We just recently reviewed another product of theirs called Halliwell’s film and video guide. This product, Money, was one of the biggest selling Psion programs on the earlier Series 3 range computers. Money uses a combination of double entry and, the more common, mans system of categories used by Quicken and MS Money. I’ll go into this more later. This shouldn’t scare you away though as the program still looks and works like a consumer product.

I found that Money was able to do most of what the everyday user would like and much of what the small business owner would be interested in. Money has an intuitive user interface, with filing cabinet style tabs on top to switch between the various views which include Accounts, Categories, Book, and Scheduled. This terminology isn’t the greatest for the American consumer market, but it only takes a few minutes to understand it. Book is the Register and Scheduled is for recurring or future transactions.

Money includes the basics that you would expect to find in any good finance software, such as multiple account types, transfers, split transactions, currencies, categories, and budgeting. However, it goes further than the basics with its excellent reporting capabilities, forecasting, and great responsiveness. The top notch reporting capabilities in Money make the program stand out as an excellent stand-alone program. There are some users out there that aren’t really looking for a companion to the desktop, but for a program that stands on its own. Money does this with flying colors. The reports include a daily balance sheet, net worth, profit & loss, and forecast.

The big plus with Money’s reports is that they all have graphing capabilities. Money taps into the graphing used in the built-in Spreadsheet program, so they really look great. Money imports and exports to Quicken by supporting Intuit’s QIF format. The benefit to using QIF rather than synchronization is that QIF doesn’t ever get broken when new versions come out. Synchronization is a lot easier, but has that one drawback.

My only minor complaint with Psion Money is the small text used in the field headings. All in all, Money from Palmtop will once again become the standard for EPOC based machines. -

Product: Money
Company: Palmtop +31 20 4469496
Contact: info@palmtop.nl
Web: www.palmtop.nl

-Mark Esposito