Customer Reviews

Microsoft Money 2004 Premium

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

money itself is nice enough, but paying more for the premium version over deluxe is a rip-off--every single additional "feature" is actually part of a limited-time trial for a 3rd-party Web service called Gainskeeper. Nowhere will anyone tell you how much this costs until you register for it. The regular Gainskeeper service is $20/yr, which is (surprise!) exactly what you paid to upgrade from Deluxe to Premium, so much for the "free" trial. Among the many ways this sucks includes you have to create and maintain a completely separate second version of your portfolio, store it on their web site instead of your own PC, and then (once you go past an introductory number of trnsactions annually) you have to pay per-transaction to enter your own trade data, anywhere from 20-90 cents each. Very very weak, there's no reason why this can't be included within Money itself for the extra $20. By all means choose Money over Quicken, but stick with Deluxe and save some bucks.

As I've been a Quicken user from the beginning for my personal finances and investments, I decided to upgrade to Microsoft Money 2004 Premium for the following reasons.

1. Quicken has not shown me and upgrade that is worth buying since I purchased Quicken 2002 deluxe. If the new quicken is going to do the same as my Quicken 2002 Deluxe, why upgrade and that's all I see in the new Quicken.

2. Free stuff from Money 2004 that Quicken can't match. Such as a free year of your credit report monitoring service. Two free years of online bill paying are just a few.

3. Better financial and stock watching information and software.

These are a few reasons why I moved from Quicken. But don't be fooled believing that Moneys interface is like Quicken, It's not. It will take Quicken user some time to become familiar with the way Money works and sometime to setup Money to your liking. But in all It's worth the change for a better product.

As a Quicken user for over 10 years, this product is far superior to Quicken 2004. The interface is different and takes a few days to get used to, but is relatively intuitive.

I've been a Money user for many years. I love the design and find it easy to work with.

Imagine my horror, then, when doing my tax reports this year I discovered that Money failed to list all my tax expenses. I noticed this only because a major expense was missing from the report, so the error was glaring.

When I then went to check, I found Money failed to list around 20% of my expenses. If I had not discovered this error, I would have ended up paying $5000 more tax than necessary. I haven't checked past years' returns, yet, but if this flaw has existed in previous versions, then I've been overpaying my taxes for years thanks to Money.

I have checked and rechecked over a dozen times to ensure the error is not my own. It's not. The missing expenses are correctly categorize as tax expenses, they are in accounts which are included in my tax reports, and they are for the correct reporting period. Strangely, Money will report a similar expense and then skip the next, similarly categorized expense.

If you're going to use this product, treble check your reports at tax time.

Been using since 2003 because it has better customized graphing/reports than Quicken.

MS Money 2004, despite its major and minor quirks, is at least still usable everyday without much fuss.

The debt planner is fairly useless except to schedule payments, and to "guess" when you'll be out of debt, unlike Quicken 2003. Mortgage accounts don't allow you to switch between arbitrary frequency of payments per month, as well as always predicting the WRONG interest/principal payment split.

However, I still like the fair ability to customize; from page displays to reports although I prefer Quicken's more modal interface over Money's free flowing "browser" interface.

Looking forward, Money 2005 is a horrible new product that doesn't carry over any of the "it just works" philosophy of 2004 especially with the even more "browser" interface that leaves huge tracts of white screen space (in advanced mode) compared to 2004. Combined with the huge amount of complaints about Quicken 2005's new 'forced' "upgrade" features, Money looks golden.

Stay with 2004.. it's the lesser of many evils. Until maybe 2006.

I've been using MS Money products for about a year now after switching from Quicken. I was tempted by the lower costs and on-line freebies. While the product overall works ok, I believe that the reviewer that made this comment

>>>2. It's a typical Microsoft product. That means the software tries to outsmart you rather than letting you work the way you want to. <<<<

makes a very good point. This is very frustrating to me because we don't all think alike. I've always been able to set up Quicken exactly the way I wanted and it was always very intuitive. I've never felt that way with Money. Just this week I was trying to get Money to set up my budget the way I wanted it. Paychecks can be entered in several different ways. I told Money that I was paid every other week. After entering the bi-weekly amount it then proceeded to calculate a yearly total and then avereaged it over 12 months. This then is the budgeted income amount that shows up on budget reports. Being that there are some months with 3 pay periods instead of 2, this averaged amount is never what I am actually paid. It's just one of the frustrating little ways that Money trys to outsmart you. I'm going back to Quicken.

Microsoft just continues to top itself year after year with the continual poor quality of it's software. In that one regard, Money 2004 does not disappoint.

As other reviewers have noted, many previously functional parts of the (mostly well-designed) program have been crippled, or do not work at all. A prime example that I can site is the Debt Reduction Planner... the whole point of the tool is to allow the user to create a program to automatically pay-off the highest interest debt first. It no longer does this--- or much of anything else! When you set up a debt program, the tool used to schedule all of your payments in your Bills and Deposits listing to present an accurate cash-flow forecast. Now it only presents the most immediate payments... USELESS!!!

Add to this sporadic unexplainable data corruption and a complete absence of I/O load balancing in the "background banking" sub-app and you get a software tool that destabilizes and imperils your critical financial data. Oh yeah, and you're paying out the nose for that privilege!

MS Money used to be the only reason I stopped thinking about switcing to the Mac. At this point, Quicken is beginning to sound appealing.

I recently was subjected to inane blather from a financial number-cruncher about how MS is going to eventally conquer everything and everyone in the distributed computing arena.... I say it won't happen. They are committing the one sin that all companies have paid for eventually... arrogance and distain for the needs of their customers. Yeah, Windows will still be around in 30 years. But not much else... and who knows if MS will still be the owners.

very intuitive user interface, easy to use. I have finally abandoned Quicken after 10 years of use, and after Intuit has failed to produce a compelling version since 1999. Money has good support for multiple currencies, and the upgrade was smooth and even fixed a longstanding discrepency in a cash account balance that I could never chase out of Quicken. My biggest complaint so far is that the portfolio update feature is really slow (about 3 minutes), even with a 512 dsl. I don't really have that much data....

I'm a longtime Quicken user, but because of the sunset on Quicken 2001 I decided to take a look at Money 2004. Money converted my Quicken files, but ALL of my accounts (bank, IRA, mutual fund, brokerage) had errors.

Money outputs a word file saying there were problems, but gives no details. The file only says "Your Quicken file contained invalid transaction types". It does not list out what transactions had problems. Other accounts have the wrong balances and no explanation at all. Some transactions are missing for no apparent reason.

OK, so I resigned myself to stepping through each account to try and find the problem transactions. I found the problem in one of my mutual fund accounts: Money defaults to average cost basis for mutual funds, and I had used FIFO in Quicken. It was a challenge to find a way to correct this. Just reentering the transaction doesn't work. Even though the program allows you to select the lots to be sold, it still calculates the account basis using average costs. After much searching, I found that going into the security detail page and changing the tax lot accounting there would correct the problem. Not an obvious place to find a solution to a transaction problem.

Now, when I change my "home view" to "Investing", the program crashes. There's probably some way to tiptoe around to make the program happy, but I don't really want to invest the time. Luckily I had a backup I could restore.

Money 2004 has many nice features, but I need a stable product.


Note that Money 2004 Deluxe has a sunset in Sept 2007. Money 2004 Standard has a sunset in Sept 2006.

This is the worst software purchase I have made in the past 2 years! The password protection -- Passport vs. standard -- is extremely confusing. The fact that the software talks with Microsoft gives me the creepy feeling that it's collecting data on me. I do not like the idea of an institution like Microsoft having complete access to my monetary data. This idea of remote access is rubbish. In my entire life I have never ever needed to check how my investments were doing while in the middle of a busy day. Not only does it have all my information, it also has a nice little banner that cheerfully asks me to Upgrade Today to Microsoft Money 2005. I paid for this software, and I'd appreciate that, if Microsoft wants real estate on my desktop it should pay for it!! The amazing thing is that, while it uploads my most materially important information to MSN.com and forces an advertisement in my face, the anti-adware/spyware softwares do not even detect this hellish piece of trash. I'm seriously considering going back to Money 99.