Personal Finances Editor's Review

Keep track of the cash with this handy finance application.

Keeping track of all of your personal finances can be difficult, especially when most of your income is outgo. In today's economy, you need all the help you can get. That's why making use of Personal Finances may be one of best things you can do for yourself. It’s a finance management application for Windows.

Right now, budgeting is very topical in the USA. While the government may have problems staying in the black, with a glance at its summary view, reports and graphs, users of Personal Finance will gain deep insight into their financial health, pinpointing areas of excessive expenditure, allowing them to control and trim their budget. Using the Scheduler, the program also allows you to track expected income and spending to see how much money you’ll have at a future date.
 
One of the application's biggest pluses is application portability. Personal Finances can be installed and run from a USB flash drive. This way, regardless of what computer you might be using, work, a relative's, or your personal PC, you can keep track of your money and where it's going. PAF and U3 Smart drive editions are also available for your convenience.

Pros: Unlimited number of accounts and categories, category grouping, portability.

Cons: Manual only account reconciliation.

Conclusion: One of the biggest problems with non-connected apps like Personal Finances is its inability to do automatic account reconciliation with your bank. If you want to reconcile your checking account so it remains accurate, you're going to have to do it manually. Depending on the size of your account and the number of transactions you process every month, this can be a huge deal breaker. It was for us. Despite its reasonable price point, the application simply is not a replacement for other applications in this class and category that provide a similar or improved feature set for a similar or even higher price.

version reviewed: 4.5