Home Bookkeeping Lite

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on November 17, 2009

Home Bookkeeping Lite purportedly is a tool to help users manage their personal finances. Our experiences with it, however, suggest it is a tool of annoyance and time-wasting.

The program's interface is pleasantly uncluttered, so we were optimistic. The first major drawback that we encountered is that the program does not allow users to import transactions from their bank's Web site. We acknowledge that there may be some users who don't use online banking, but we suspect that most people will want to import the data and not spend hours entering transactions manually. For users who do want to enter transactions this way, more annoyance is just around the corner. It's easy enough to establish different accounts and start entering transactions--the interface is fairly intuitive--but some of the features make no sense at all. For example, when entering a transaction, users are forced to create a subcategory for each one. Subcategories are a great option to have, but they needn't be mandatory. Even more bizarre and frustrating, users must select a quantity and unit of measurement for each transaction. If you go shopping, Home Bookkeeping Lite will want to know that you bought two pairs of pants. This is idiotic, and as far as we can tell, there's no way to turn it off. The program doesn't seem to have any particularly interesting features or redeeming qualities. The built-in Help file is basic.

Home Bookkeeping Lite is free, but it requires registration and will pester you to upgrade. The program installs desktop icons without asking and leaves a folder behind on removal. We do not recommend this program.