Accounts 2010 - Home Edition

With time being a notion that seems to pass faster and faster because of the abundance of activities we carry out to earn a living, little effort and a few minutes need to be spent every once in a while to analyze funds. Computer applications make it all easier, with Accounts 2010 – Home Edition being dedicated to personal use.

The one and only advantage is that the application requires no installation process, so you can easily keep it on a removable storage device. On the other hand, the application saves your data in fixed directories you need to manually move, because they cannot be changed and are created in the operating system volume.

Running it brings up a desktop-like window which you can fill with several tools in order to calculate and view changes in your budget. The first mandatory step is to provide account details, which only translate to a name of your choice, as well as an initial balance.

There are no options to select currency symbols, but nor are they displayed so this shouldn't be a major inconvenience. Once you reach the main screen, all tools can easily be accessed from a contents window, with entries for accounts, entry forms, interest calculator, incomes and expenses and reminders.

Each tool brings up a new window you can arrange around the main one. However, the major disappointment is not represented by visuals, but the incredibly poor feature set. The overall design leaves a lot more to be desired, with only a few fields you can fill in, such as date, description and amount for entry forms.

Accessing incomes and expenses only bring up separate tables with corresponding entries and no relation between them other than an impact on your balance. Every now and then you have the possibility to save values to file, pressing the dedicated button triggering the process, which simply means having a TXT file created that contains a few numerical values.

There are no other export options and it's rather difficult to keep track of your funds, with text editors proving to be at least an equally matched opponent when it comes to practicality. Even the integrated reminder might lack use, with no possibility to set alarms, but only a few words accompanied by a date.

To sum it up, although the name tries to come up with an excuse for the extremely poor overall impression, Accounts 2010 – Home Edition is far from being at least as practical as a plain text editor. Even though you don't come across accommodation problems, nor do you find any useful feature that helps you with planning your budget.