Personal finance management packages have been growing in popularity since the share market boom of the 1990s when households began looking for applications that could help them keep track of their investments.While the share market is not as popular as it used to be, Internet banking is attracting more converts daily and that has kept up the interest in personal finance software.

Quicken Personal Plus targets both of these areas, while also providing a basic household accounting system that will keep track of your credit cards accounts, prompt you when your bills are due for payment and keep an inventory of your household chattels and other assets. It will keep tracks of loan and mortgages and even provide cash flow forecasts and help you work out a budget. It has new interface that is more intuitive than earlier versions and work has been done on presenting a quick and easy summary of all of your active accounts. Setting up your accounts requires patience and pre-planning.

While it is not difficult, it is worthwhile making sure that you have all of the necessary paper work at hand. As long as you have some basic bookkeeping knowledge most people should be able to come to grips with Personal Plus in a few hours.

While Reckon suggests that you can use the program for small business accounts, it is not advisable, particularly if your business is registered for GST because, while there is a tax section, there is no specific provision for GST except on commission and stamp duty for investments, and the accounts payable function is designed more for household bills than for businesses that claim tax credits.

Personal Plus allows you to keep track of your investments such as your share portfolio and has special provision for tracking your superannuation. If you operate your own super fund it can become a bit confusing because you have to treat it as just another investment.

Quicken offers daily share price updates off the Net, but you have to register the program and subscribe to the service. Internet banking can be done from Personal Plus using Quicken's Internet connection set-up which integrates with Internet Explorer.When you set up your bank accounts in the program Quicken offers links to several banks, but don't worry if yours is not mentioned because once your are connected to the Net you can navigate their as usual.The problem is that the initial Internet connection will open in a Quicken window rather than the standard IE browser interface and the 'full browser option' could be highlighted better than it is.

Paying accounts is relatively easy and the program will even print your cheques for you if you still use that method, however, with a little more thought, it could have been made to be even easier.

For example if you are working on your credit card account and want to make a payment to the credit card company, you must move to your cheque accounts (or where ever the payment is coming from) and transfer the funds to the credit card account. It would have been simpler to have been able to do the entire transaction from the one account window by pulling the funds from the cheque account rather than having to swap windows and 'push' them. However, you can make entries in your accounts without having to open the full program using a new QuickEntry icon that sits on your desktop.

The new interface has certainly made Personal and Personal Plus far more user friendly. However, you have to wonder how many households will make use of all of the new features that allow them to do things like create pie graphs and work out their accounts in multiple currencies.

David Hellaby