FAssistant for Windows

FAssistant is a free multiuser personal finance tracking and reminder application. It also analyzes your finances, generating useful reports that give you both a "Big Picture" as well as deep details. You can set up multiple user accounts, each with multiple financial or information accounts for FAssistant to keep track of.

FAssistant's installer creates a database, and we had the opportunity to import data during the setup process, which many users will appreciate. Once our database was created, we needed to set up an account, which can be either an Application User or Admin User, though the Admin User option required us to also create a User account. We restarted the application to apply the changes. The program's main interface, the Dashboard, opened with three scrollable reminder fields for the current month: Important Date Reminder, Maturity Date Reminder, and Message Reminder. We started by creating a Monthly Expense Accounts via an easy wizard that let us configure expense type, mode, and other parameters. The drop-down currency list offered three options--U.S. dollars, Indian rupees, and U.K. pounds--but this tool is widely customizable, and we simply had to open the Manage Currency wizard to add any international currency and symbol to our settings. In this way we were able to add Bank, Stock, and Loan/Policy Accounts as well as Information Accounts and Reminder Accounts, which we could customize in any way we liked. Double-clicking any reminder opened its details, while right-clicking any of the tables let us customize it to suit our needs. From the menu bar, we could generate reports, manage our accounts and passwords, transfer accounts, configure Preferences, and log on as an Administrator. The Help menu includes specific assistance for plug-ins, release notes, and other documentation, plus a link to a Web page with more instructions.

Early issues with 64-bit systems have been resolved, and we had no trouble installing or running FAssistant in 64-bit Windows 7 or 32-bit Vista. It proved a powerful, flexible, yet easy-to-use personal finance tool.