A Computer For All Seasons
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday August 22, 1989
YOU work, have a superannuation scheme, money in the sharemarket and unit trusts, insurance bonds, savings accounts, cheque account, ATM card, Bankcard, Visa, Mastercard, American Express - and a huge headache keeping track of it all.
The computer industry has focused a lot of attention on developing business software, a lot of which is not purely business-oriented but which can be adapted for use by personal investors.
Some of the software is in the public domain and is dirt cheap. Uni Systems at Brookvale, for example, sells Managing Money for $10. At the other end of the scale 4-in-1 Basic Accounting from RealWorld costs $795.
What you can't say is that you get what you pay for. Much of the public domain software (that is, freely available and freely copied) works well and is as good as, if not better than expensive software.
If you are perfectly happy stuffing receipts in shoe boxes, bank statements at the back of the cutlery draw, bills under the lounge suite and salary slips in the glove box, doing things by computer may seem anathema.
But for investors and home owners - even those with straightforward investments and financial details - much of the software available may be very valuable.
Of course, often you can do precisely what the programs do with a blunt pencil on the back of an old menu. All you are aiming to do is keep track of income and expenses. It's just that computers are much more efficient and do all the adding up for you. There are complex questions some of the programs can answer, too, such as what you would be worth in 20 years if you invested$3,000 a year in a superannuation fund at a return of, say, 14 per cent. Try working that out longhand on the back of an old menu.
Three programs from I-Optic Computing at Parramatta show just how easy it is to make a start at managing your finances by computer.
FS-Calc is a simple almost fail-safe calculator program. With it you can calculate monthly mortgage payments at different interest rates over any period you care to choose. Because the table can be printed out, you have a ready-reference to see how much more (or less) you will have to pay when interest rates rise or fall. You could also use it to see how much you need to pay each month to knock five years or so from your loan period.
FS-Calc will also let you work out future values and present values of investments and what annuities are likely to be worth. If you want to know what $17,000 is going to be worth after six years at 15.35 per cent (interest compounded) the program will work it out (the answer, by the way, is$40,045.57).
The calculator part of FS-Calc (add, minus, subtract and divide) is a bit cumbersome and of limited use. Pocket calculators are much easier to use. But at $20 for the whole program, who is complaining?
The Bookwork Wiz is a straight cashbook program with no fancy bells or whistles. You record your income and expenses - under different headings named by you - and any time you like you can get a balance, change or alter figures(ahem |) and print out columns. If you have never seen a computer program before it is the type you could sit down and use immediately.
For people with income from diverse areas - salary and wages, simple investments and real estate, for example - Bookwork Wiz should handle the figures easily. It costs $49.95.
A different kettle of fish is I-Optic's Free-Style cash-flow journal. It costs $299 and for first-time users could be described as a bit daunting.
Its potential is excellent once you settle into the program. But because its applications are for professional and industrial users, too, the home user may initially feel a little out of his or her depth.
What can you do with Free-Style? Read the manual for a start, then you can record your income and expenses and get summaries, set up budgets, determine cash-flows for the past, present or future and keep your cheque book on computer (brilliant for ensuring accurate balances).
You can even produce bar charts of your finances.
Business software can be a little like one person's meat being another's poison. It's difficult (if not impossible) to be objective. If the program works and does what its creator claims, the only real guide you are left with is how easy it is to use.
Sometimes, though, processes can't be reduced to the lowest common denominator and a certain amount of grey matter and perseverance is needed.
That's the case with Free-Style, and that only shows it shares a common thread with many similar packages.
Should you buy it? I-Optics will give you a free demonstration disk of Free-Style, a not-bad indication of the company's faith in its product.
I-Optic's manager, Mr Robert Grosche, says the software is always being refined and updated. Suggestions from users were often incorporated into program updates.
FS-Calc, Bookwork Wiz and Free-style are available in 5-1/4 inch and 3-1/2 inch disks for all IBM and IBM-compatible computers and recent Amstrads.
Contact numbers are: I-Optics Computing, (02) 8915419; Uni Systems, (02)9050031 and RealWorld, (02) 3603600.
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald
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