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From: landman@hanami.Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman x61391)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacMoney vs Dollar & Sense (&& Managing Your Money)
Message-ID: <129126@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 12 Dec 89 20:43:02 GMT
References: <1989Dec1.153215.20583@csmil.umich.edu> <1989Dec1.220829.7396@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: landman@sun.UUCP (Howard A. Landman x61391)
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In article <1989Dec1.220829.7396@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> dks@shumv1.ncsu.edu (D. K. Smith) writes:
>And if anyone has had good or bad experiences with MECA's MYM please comment.

Just got Managing Your Money a few days ago.  It seems really well thought out.
There are lots of shortcuts so once you get familiar with it you can really
cook.  At the moment it looks like it will take about 15 to 20 hours TOTAL
to enter and reconcile all of 1989's activity, including multiple checking
and savings accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts, tax categories, and
so forth.  This includes learning time on the program, AND setting up accounts
the way I want them the first time.  There are some minor frustrations, but
they tend to be of the form "They got this 98% right - why couldn't they have
done the last 2%?".

I haven't tried the automatic export to MacInTax yet, but expect to use it
in a few weeks.

At the same time I ordered For The Record from Nolo Press.  For The Record
is nearly useless - it is basically a Mac version of a paper list of your
assets.  It is often obtuse - is the "value" of a stock certificate supposed
to be the per-share value or the total value? - but this ultimately doesn't
matter because there's nothing you can do with the data you've entered
except print it out.  There's not even a way to add up the total value!
Plus, the software is fairly slow.  The same functionality could have been
built into a HyperCard stack and been several times faster and MUCH more
flexible.  The only good thing about FTR is the book that comes with it,
and the list of assets to consider already built into the program (but even
that had some holes, and you can't fix them.)  I'll be sending FTR back;
MYM can do most of the same data entry, with the additional advantage of
tying the data into the rest of my financial universe.

RECOMMENDATION: Forget For The Record - either pay the extra money for a REAL
package like Managing Your Money, or do it in HyperCard, or stick with paper.

PRICES: MacConnection has MYM for $124, FTR for $28.  (They accidentally
sent me Adobe Type Manager at first instead of Managing Your Money, but
one phone call straightened everything out.)

	Howard A. Landman
	landman%hanami@eng.sun.com