Home Budget

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 5/10

Mike Wright 5/10

DOMESTIC FINANCES Cashflow problems? Kuma attempts to find the answer Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Home budget from Kuma Computers is intended to help you plan your finances. The program is cassette based and has no manual or written instructions. Instead, a series of Help pages are included in the program. You keep track of your finances by defining a 'year' and entering income and expenditure for each month. The amount entered can be a forecast to be updated later. Expenditure can be entered as one of 10 user-redefinable categories. On the first run the program eases the entry for each month by prompts. Entries can be changed using the back-up option which permits you to re-enter a previous entry. Option 1 on the main menu allows you to add data or create a new file. It also has a special rolling budget feature which allows new files to be created using the existing data. Entries for a particular month are displayed using option 2, which also shows the following month's data. The results for any category can be displayed as a three-dimensional bar chart. Those allow you to define the vertical scale and they do look impressive. The effect, however, is lost when a chart is printed. A printout can be obtained from any of the display options by pressing P. When the file is saved a six figure security code appears which must be re-entered when the data is loaded. Though Home Budget is easy to use it cannot be described as user-friendly. The Help pages, which are a great idea, are not effective and the overall lack of instructions is disappointing. That is characterised by the back-up option, which does not make a spare copy but moves back one entry, which is not explained. You will probably find the biggest obstacle to using the program lies in the fact that monthly totals of expenditure have to be entered. Since such information is not usually kept in that form a separate program such as Finance Manager may be needed to get category totals first. Kuma Computers Ltd [redacted].

Your Spectrum

I WANT MONEY... Those with more money than they know what to do with - or no money (which is just as difficult to organise) - may appreciate a couple of new programs designed to help them sort themselves out. The first is Home Budget, a package that sets out to enable people to keep track of finances and build up a file of incomes and expenditures. These can be used in 'what if' calculations, and income and expenditure can be produced in clear tabulated form or as a bar chart. All data can be logged for date and time and is security coded by the user. For more information, chase up Kuma Computers Ltd on [redacted]. The second program, from Sinclair Research, is called Which? Tax Calculator. It's a personal tax program that will reckon accurately the true amount of tax owed for the 1983-1984 year. It's been written to include all relevant basic UK tax rates and allowances and is divided into three sections: the first defines personal circumstances and job earnings, including overtime and fringe benefits; section two contains questions on additional income like pensions, social security benefits and investment income; and the third covers personal allowances and outgoings. The package is priced at £12.95 and comes on cassette with a 59-page reference manual. It's available mail order from Sinclair Research Ltd (phone [redacted]) and through selected retail outlets. You never know - the cassettes might end up tax-deductible!