Accounts and Budget Freeware

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on September 17, 2010

We review a lot of personal finance software, and to be frank, most of it is pretty bad; such programs tend to have terrible, confusing interfaces and a decided lack of important features. Accounts and Budget Free is a happy exception to this trend. Although the program doesn't compare to the big-name financial software that dominates the marketplace, it's definitely a good choice for users who want a decent program without having to spend money to get it.

The program's interface is attractive and intuitive, with just a few menus and a handful of well-labeled buttons. Although users can enter transactions manually if desired, Accounts and Budget Free makes things easy by letting users import transactions from their bank in QIF, OFX, CSV, and TXT formats. Users can view income and expenses as graphs, a fairly standard feature, but there are a few other features that really make Accounts and Budget Free stand out. The program includes a due date tracker to help users pay their bills on time and a budget tool that helps users develop plans for spending and saving. Our only real complaint about the program is that no matter how many times we told it our currency was U.S. dollars, it kept resetting to the euro. This didn't seem to have any real impact on the program's function, but it was a little annoying. Accounts and Budget Free comes with a 77-page PDF Help file that is quite thorough, although it's obvious that its author was not a native English speaker. Despite its minor flaws, Accounts and Budget Free is an easy-to-use and effective financial management tool.

Accounts and Budget Free installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to everyone.