The management of our personal finances is a chore most of us avoid like the plague, for a variety of reasons, especially not wanting to face up to our over expenditure, as well as the fact that personal finance management is normally a pretty boring pastime. SplashMoney won’t stop you buying all those Ferraris but it can take make the task of managing your income, outgoings, loans, mortgages and cards much easier and more enjoyable.

The first thing to note about SplashMoney is that it comes in to robust versions: one for your Palm and one for your Windows or Mac desktop. The desktop edition is powerful enough to be used on its own as an alternative to Microsoft Money or Quicken. Including all the usual features (budgeting, cards, multiple accounts, recurring transactions etc), SplashMoney makes it easy for you to take control of your home finances and can even help you with producing reports of transactions over a given period.

SplashMoney’s main feature is, of course, its Palm functionality. Being able to keep track of purchases, payments, cheques and bills while on the move makes the program so much more useful than its competitors. If you’re using a Palm PDA with wireless capability, you can even let SplashMoney access your online banking service via the Direct Connect service. This feature in particular makes it unbelievably easy to stay up to date with account changes, but unfortunately will only work with selected North American banks.

SplashMoney makes it really easy to start managing your personal finances. With a wide range of customisation options and features, it may well be the best money manager available for Palm users. While the genre doesn’t usually set hearts racing, SplashMoney is highly recommended for anyone who’s shied away from finance management software in the past.