Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!tellab5!wiseman
From: wiseman@tellab5.TELLABS.COM (Jeff Wiseman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Dollars and $ense 5.0
Message-ID: <2002@tellab5.TELLABS.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 18:54:02 GMT
References: <175513@<1990Jan16> <8400226@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: wiseman@tellab5.UUCP (Jeff Wiseman)
Organization: Tellabs, Inc. Lisle IL
Lines: 45

In article <8400226@m.cs.uiuc.edu> emuroga@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>  Which is considered the best personal finance management program on
>the mac? Is the Andrew Tobias program the best? Dollars and Sense?
>
The answer to this question is really based on a persons needs. I have a friend
who only wnat to track where everything went. He doesn't want any real
complicated programs so he uses Quicken.

My personal preference is Dollars and $ense. I do not need all of the fancy
estate planning and futures capabilities of MYM. Also, I am a real interface
freak :-). MYM does not use the Mac feel very well IMHO. D&S does. D&S's
transaction entry is totally orthogonal. (ie a transaction of a check being
written and dispersed to a "groceries" expense account acan be entered in the
asset account for  the check and dispersed to the expense account, or it could
be entered in the expense account and dispersed to the asset).

D&S has a very good reporting mechanism in terms of its flexability. If you
want to see something, you usually can.

The dark side is, if you do unusual things that you SHOULD be able to do (eg
dispers two peices of a transaction into the same expenses account with two
different flags and then try to re-edit the transaction from within the expense
account itself), you will accasionally find bugs prohibiting you.

One other program to consider is MacMoney. Many people also seem to like it.
From everything that I have seen and heard, You can not do quite as much with
MacMoney (eg. its reporting mechanism lacks some flexability compared to D&S)
but its makers (Survivor Software) appear to provide excellant service and
technical support for their customers.

You might want to track down the February 1989 issue of MacWorld. It has a
comparison of finance packages that may give you more info.

By the way, I have talked to several frustrated D&S users who have tried
MacMoney because of its apparent better support and solidity and they all
returned to D&S simply because of D&S's "better" interface and flexability IN
SPITE of the service and bug problems. I am in the same boat and understand. I
use D&S version 4.1c, the latest.

Hope this helps!


-- 
Jeff Wiseman:	....uunet!tellab5!wiseman OR wiseman@TELLABS.COM