Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

I know what you're thinking: what does ABP stand for? Apparently just "A Banking Program"! And quite a good one, as it happens, running on the Psion Series 5. I've been reviewing v3.14, downloaded from Malcolm Bryant's minimalist web page.

First impressions of ABP are good, with dialogs leading you gently through the account setup process. Data can be imported from (or exported to) Quicken on a PC, as you'd expect from any bank account program worth its salt. Transactions are intuitively handled, being entered by pressing the space bar and edited with the Enter key or with a tap of the pen. Each transaction seems fully specified, with categories, reference text, multiple currencies and reconciliation, and the program's speed is really impressive throughout.

In common with the other various Series 5 banking programs, ABP allows standing orders, future account prediction, password protection and the like, all of which I'm sure you're familiar with. ABP takes its transactions seriously, with full double-entry book-keeping in the original Money style. Categories, sub-categories and split transactions all make for a comprehensive financial solution. There's also an excellent Find facility, allowing simple filtering of groups of transactions and categories.

Although the interface is largely standardised to the Psion way of doing things, the use of Control-C, Control-V and Control-X for operations other than Copy, Paste and Cut is bound to cause a bit of confusion. I also found the view control confusing, as switching to the otherwise excellent account or category views with the toolbar buttons required a keypress on the keyboard to revert to the normal display.

Printing support is well integrated, with 8 different text-based report types available, though there's little you can do to customise the output. The Help facility is comprehensive and includes all the program's documentation 'on-line', though most users will find the screen layout and menu structure easy enough to use from day one.

Containing 99% of the functionality of other (shareware or commercial) bank account managers, ABP is, quite amazingly, completely free!

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