In October, 2005, I tried Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006 and wrote it off after two minutes because of its lack of realistic account hierarchy support.
Today I tried the new version, Office Accounting Professional 2007. My first impression: there is no longer an artificial account hierarchy depth limit! Yay! My second impression: there are a ton of new concepts that I need to learn in order to use it as a basic ledger for my personal finances. I've set up a sandbox chart of accounts to play around with for the time being. What's confusing me now is that there are multiple ways to enter transactions, and they all seem to have different meanings and show up on reports differently. I'll keep playing...maybe I'll even RTFM. The user experience seems quite nice, so I think it will be worth investing some time to learn.
In related news, Quick Books Free Edition only supports one level of account hierarchies. GnuCash has released version 2.1.0 (Unstable) for Windows, their first non-alpha Windows release. I've been using GnuCash on my Linux box for about five years now. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with version 1.8.11 because my Linux distro is so far out of date the required packages for the new version can't (easily) be obtained—and I'm not willing to invest any more time in Linux at this point in my life (it's just too undocumented and takes too much time to figure anything out). Once the .msi gets posted (currently just source is online), I plan to try it out. GnuCash is the last real vestige holding me to Linux....
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