                     Mondial World Class Accounting
                         by Gail B.C. Marsella

        Despite its very reasonable price, Mondial World-Class Accounting
appears designed for a large, complex organization. Its network ready, has
an elaborate password system, and provides a very large number of muscular
accounting features. The one generating the most interest in the vendor's
forum on CIS was the conversion function for international currencies
(apparently fairly rare in accounting programs).  Mondial also tracks
projects, warehouse inventory, product assembly/disassembly, formulates
departmental budgets, allows a choice of cost systems, and can combine
several companies into one integrated set of books. It can keep several user
generated tables of information  such as sales tax and discounts  readily
available, and logs the receipts and purchases of individual users for
auditing purposes. It can even time transactions so that no one can tie up
an account for more than a specified number of seconds. An optional module
can be purchased separately to do payroll.
        As I worked with it, however, I began to narrow my view of who might
buy it. The only clue to the intended audience appears in the manual's
introduction, which mentions "vertical markets." Despite the packages claim
that everyone from individual consultants to multinational corporations can
use it, the program is really designed for medium to large businesses with
highly specialized accounting requirements, skilled bookkeeping personnel,
and insufficient resources to hire their own programmers.
        The system requirements seem very modest at first glance: IBM or
clone, DOS 3.3 or better, and 640 K of RAM. They are not kidding about the
RAM. You need more than 580K of conventional memory absolutely free of any
other device drivers or TSRs. I had to ditch nearly the entire contents of
my autoexec.bat file just to free up enough to load the program. It
apparently cannot use extended memory at all, although I did not try a third
party memory manager with it. (The manual makes little mention of extended
memory except vague instructions to "consult your DOS manual.") Do not even
think about running under Windows.
        Mondial loads fast, as expected with a DOS program, and the first
screen is blank except for a menu bar across the top, and the company name
and current date along the bottom.  It's a nice interface - clean and
uncluttered. With the mouse, you call up individual screens as you need them
to enter transactions, and you can enter new accounts, tables, customers,
and other information as needed from many of the screens. The data entry
screens are designed to look like regular paper forms, so skilled workers
should be able to make the transition from paper to computer fairly readily,
once they have figured out which menu choices call particular screens. (This
brings up another problem with the manual; its index is completely
inadequate - there is not even an entry for billing - so finding the right
screen requires considerable trial and error at first.)
        Mondial provides import filters for data from Quicken, Pacioli 2000,
and ASCII text files, although I cannot imagine Quicken user trying to
convert to Mondial; the contrast in friendliness between the two is just too
great. Even Mondial's manual tries to be all things to all users, and not
surprisingly falls short. It is hopelessly terse for the beginner (there is
no tutorial on either the program's operation or on setting up a small
business accounting system), but an experienced businessperson would not
need the accounting jargon definitions that are provided. Even worse, the
directions in the manual for setting initial account balances individually
(instead of importing from a file) are practically unintelligible.
        An earlier review (August, Computer Shopper) mentioned several
rather nasty bugs, and I was indeed bumped back out to the DOS prompt
occasionally without warning, so you will want to save frequently. Mondial
does have a backup feature, but it only works with disks, not tape. If you
back up to tape (and a large organization often will, in order to store the
tapes off site) you will need another backup program.
        A large variety of standard business forms are available with the
program, and paper blank forms can be purchased. Also available are video
and audio tutorials on Mondial (I certainly hope they are better than the
user's manual.) The technical support is free for the first 6 months (well,
okay, only if you consider a toll call to be free), and then costs $60 for
the next year.  (Actually their literature says that the retail price of the
tech support is $150, but Mondial users get it for $60. Who else would buy
it?) There are a variety of other technical support options, including fax
back and a 900 number. They maintain a section of the PC Vendors C forum on
CIS, but my message was removed by the sysop after only a day or so, and no
one ever answered my posted question.
        Even without the bugs, I would not switch to Mondial, as a sole
proprietor I do not need this much accounting power. To broadly paraphrase
Pournelle: if you need what this program does, you need it bad, maybe even
in spite of its quirks, but then again maybe you can wait until version 2.0
comes out. I think Mondial will eventually do just about whatever you need
to keep your books - however sophisticated those requirements may be - but
you are going to need experience in both accounting and DOS computerese to
get it up and running reliably.  It's not for beginners.

                       Mondial World Class Accounting
                        M-USA Business Systems, Inc.
                             15806 Midway Road
                          Dallas, Texas 75244-2195
                               (800) 280-6872

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