Expenses Manager for Windows

Expenses Manager is a free personal finance manager that uses wizards, icons, graphs, and an intuitive, flow-oriented interface to make it quick and easy to enter the level of detail and specificity you need to get an accurate picture of your finances. It can generate accurate reports as well as analyze your expenses and income for specified time periods to identify potential savings.

During the installation, we were prompted to create and name a database. Expenses Manager's striking interface is based around a flow chart-like tree view summarizing our Database, Operations, Expenses, and Incomes. Although the interface is unique, its left-hand navigation panel is familiar in feel and function. The program opened with sample entries that do an excellent job of explaining how things work, which is just as well since there doesn't seem to be a Help file, although the program's Web page offers screenshots. Expenses Manager proved easy enough to understand by clicking on clearly labeled entries. For instance, under Products, we could expand categories labeled Groceries, Clothes, Transport, Cleaning Supplies, and others, many with detailed subcategories such as Dairy Products and Phone bills. Instead of conventional buttons and icons, Expenses Manager uses Web-like links to open a series of pop-ups specific to each function. Configuration options basically amounted to language, currency, and mobile synchronization settings. We followed the program through its sample settings and then clicked Reports. Expenses Manager generated several useful, color-coded financial reports identifying and categorizing expenses over various time periods.

We were also able to open multiple instances of Expenses Manager at once. When it came time to enter our own data, we simply deleted the example user and clicked Add New User, created our database file, and entered our data in each of the Operations categories as we'd observed, which took a while though nowhere near as long as a more traditional app would have required of our challenged accountancy skills. Although Expenses Manager does things unconventionally, it adds up to a useful, free personal financial tool.

• Recurrent transactions and simply reminder