wiseman@tellab5.TELLABS.COM (Jeff Wiseman) (10/12/89)
I know that this subject was beat to death about a year ago in this newsgroup. However at that time I wasn't paying attention :-) so I would like to raise the question again in a narrower sense. I would like to know if anyone has closely compared MacMoney with Dollars and $ense 4.1c in a real nitpicky way. I am considering changing to MacMoney but I need some convincing. I have used Dollars & $ense v4.1c for (NEARLY) a year now. I really like the feature set and in general how the product is INTENDED to function. However, I have found the product rather buggy. Most of the problems are in the output reporting software and are avoidable once you know where they are (nuisance type things). On the other hand, I CAN create the "dirty database" condition by not performing any illeagal type operations (although unlikely for some people. eg. dispersing a transaction into two entrys in the same account and then reediting that transaction from the dispersal account.) Note that I have not found anything that causes the system to crash but anything that causes instability in the database itself worries me. Another thing that concerns me is the response that I have had from Monogram. I spent over 8 hours one Saterday preparing a (long) letter with a series of questions along with a list of maybe a dozen bugs that I had found. That was a couple of months ago and I have yet to receive a response. Since then, I have found several more bugs. This along with the fairly rapid succession of releases (4.0, 4.1, 4.1a, 4.1b, and now 4.1c) makes me wonder a little what the "guts" of this product looks like. Since this is for my own use and I cannot afford the 20 to 30 minute waits to talk to their Tech support long distance (they have no 800 number) I am forced to deal by mail. Personal family budget is the MAIN reason that I purchsed a mac in the first place (I know, I know, it's sorta like spending all your money to buy a wallet :-). This software is very important to me so it has to be fairly solid and reliable. Let me once more say that I really like Dollars & $ense from the feature standpoint. It is wonderfull to automate a process that I performed on paper for the previous 8 years and the flexability of reports is great. But if Monogram finally fixes some of these and then puts the fixes in 4.2, they are probably going to want more money from me for an upgrade so that the features that I thought I bought in the first place can be made to work consistently. If I have to put out any more money, I want to be sure that I want to stay with this product. In summary, I would like to hear what the pros and cons of MacMoney are from someone who knows Dollars & $ense 4.0 (or later). -- Jeff Wiseman: ....uunet!tellab5!wiseman OR wiseman@TELLABS.COM