Review: Ruksun Expense Force 1.1

John Ottini takes a look at the Ottini exchequor on the H/PC using Ruksun softwares freeware Expense Force 1.1 for Windows CE, but do the numbers add up?

Read the review and have your say here on the forums.

Review: Expense Force 1.1

Another informative, well-written article by John Ottini. Since my wife has all the money, my own personal expense tracker would only be salt in the wounds, but I'll read anythng that guy writes

Thanks, John,

Jake

That's one sensible woman you have there Jake. Can't be good for the old H/PC budget though

Chris

In all modesty.......since there is no mention of the review in the News Section (Home Page) nor in the Reviews Section....how will potential readers locate the Expense Force review?

John, I emailed you over an hour ago outlining this.

Chris

I just checked all of my mail sources at work, home, the newsletter and my inbox on this forum - I have yet to receive your email? Sorry, if there is any miscommunication!

Jake - I'm flattered - thanks for the nice comments.

Great review.

Can I suggest a slightly more direct link for the end of your article?

Windows CE Product Page.

Thanks.

Suggestions are always welcome

Review template policy is to link to the manufacturers domain only. That way when they change document url's we don't have the suggestion that we go back and change them because they don't work.

ah! Thanks for that. No problem. Good policy. Links change all the time!

Thanks.

Another happy customer

This might be something to consider for my purposes. Until last summer, I was able to skate by without a budget. In helping my girlfriend get on her feet, I found that not only was the budget helpful to track my expenditures, but it is a good behavior to model for her, as she was never taught about managing money.

Since last July, I have kept up a basic budget/expense tracking spreadsheet that I've modified as needed. Currently, I have a tab that has my categories and budget totals in one frame and monthly totals (with the last four months in view) in another frame. Until recently, this worked well. Even though the HPC is portable, I will sometimes forget to bring it on social outings or just not take the time to enter expenses. I recently added a tab to track these. Right now, I have two months of these all in one tab, so I can see how Expense Force would be beneficial.

If I understand correctly, you are able to customize the fields in Expense Force, correct? Also, you didn't mention all of the report options, but my main focus is over the course of a month. Furthermore, whatever tool I use needs to a way to handle bugeted funds. It would be really nice if it could do this on a monthly basis that by default is carried over to subsequent months for editing. The caveat to my current system is that any change to my budget affects previous months as well, so I have to create a new tab each time I vary my budget. The "bottom line" on each month tells me how much money I can move from checking to savings, so changing the numbers otherwise skews the savings line.

Any feedback on my HPC budget system or how Expense Force 1.1 can be useful to me are welcome!

Thanks for the review,

Kenny

There are 4 standard (preset) reports (no others) all of which I mentioned in the review.

I'm not sure that Expense Force will meet your very specific requirements, but it's freeware...so why not try it out for a month or two and see if it's what you're looking for. Worse case senario, you end up sticking with your Pocket Excel Spreadsheet.

Edited by Hurricane John 2006-02-23 9:24 AM

(rereads the review)

Ay carumba! I didn't catch that there were ONLY the four reports. Maybe I read about the limited customization and forgot. Yeah, I don't think this will work the way I have my current budget set up. However, once my DSL is back up I'll download it and give it a spin. I can keep both and do double-entry for a while and see.

Thanks for clearing things up for me,