Customer Reviews

Microsoft Money 2004 Standard [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

...Basically, Online services are now a "SUBSCRIPTION" service and will self destruct (ie stop working) after a period of time and FORCE you to upgrade to a new version.

Thanks, but NO Thanks Microsoft. What a way to force users to upgrade to Quicken or some other competitior. Won't be long until your copy of Windows will stop booting 2 years after you installed it.

"Online services valid two or three years from first use. Online bill pay, downloading transactions from your financial institution, downloading stock quotes, and the ability to synchronize with MSN® Money Plus or MSN Money expire two years from first use of Microsoft Money Standard or September 1, 2006, whichever is earlier. Online bill pay, downloading transactions from your financial institution, downloading stock quotes, and the ability to synchronize with MSN® Money Plus or MSN Money expire three years from first use of Microsoft Money 2004 Premium or September 1, 2007, whichever is earlier."

In comparison to the competition, MS Money 2004 is really a superior product. I had been a Quicken user for years, and the change was easy and refreshing. I am not a financial mogul, nor am I an extremely diversified individual, but the features in Money go far beyond my needs. I'll be perfectly honest, I bought the program to have an updated checkbook register, and I have come to find the other features almost as useful.

I'll summarize my favorite items:
1. The budgeting feature that allows you to customize and categorize your weekly, monthly and annual expenditures. This is really a handy feature for trying to stay within a budget, and the program clearly ties the outcome of the budget to savings goals.

2. The reporting features. At first, the sheer volume of report types that you can generate is a bit intimidating, but after a few times of working through what was available, it became clear the select few that I liked. Another handy feature is the fact that Money will save the settings of each report independently. I find that the best report is the monthly report, as it tracks your top expenditure categories, how you are doing on your savings, and how your net worth and investments are changing over time. Really a pretty useful thing to look at once a month.

3. The debt reduction feature. If you have a lot of loan, credit card or mortgage debt, this feature will be a great tool. You can select debt accounts that you want included in the calculation, tell Money how much you want to spend each month, and it will calculate the most effective way to make monthly payments for each of the loans to get you out of debt ASAP. Really a nice feature, and the best part is that you can run several scenarios very easily so that you will get a quick feeling for how much money you will save in the long run if you pay 500 a month vs. 250.

4. The feature that ties it all together for me is the monthly bill pay feature. While it is possible to use Money to get your account balances and pay your bills on-line (if your bank will let you), this feature will simply let you create a list of all of your monthly bills, paydays, and other recurring expenses/credits. Then, you can see what bills to pay in between what paychecks, and maximize the use of your money for a given period of time. Of course, the debt reduction feature is integrated into the bill summary, and the bill summary outputs to the monthly budget! Really a nicely done and tidy little package.

Before software like this existed, I used to do all of the same tasks, but keep them all on a MS Excel spreadsheet, which required a lot of extra work on my part, and really didn't look as good at the end of the month. Suffice it to say that MS Money 2004 really gives you more data, and more options, than you will want, but doesn't clutter up the program by making you wade through them. The interface and data entry methods are all very clear and straightforward.

That being said, often times people have a certain way that they like to do their finances. You may like to transfer money between accounts, or you may have odd types of accounts. In some cases, the program doesn't easily recognize what you are doing. For instance, I would make weekly savings deposits, but the program kept telling me that I should start making savings deposits or else I wouldn't meet my savings goals! I tried everything but eventually just learned to live with it (and then for some reason it started working). I think that the documentation for the program (all in the form of a help file) is good, but misses a lot in how to completely customize the program to capture the nuances of your financial plan. Despite that, I wholeheartedly recommend this program to both the financial fanatic and the average person with a checking account.

I purchased Microsoft Money to keep track of my monthly budget and a couple of small investments that I had. While there is some good stuff there, Money has quite a few shortcomings which make it much less than what I expected.

The Good
- Connects directly with financial websites such as Ameritrade to download stock portfolio information and banks to get check information which is then seemlessly integrated into your budget/analysis/etc. Very useful.

The Bad
- Confusing interface which was hard to transfer from one view to another
- No financial tools to analyze your holdings. No ROI, no NPV, no aggregate betas, nothing beyond stocks current price.
- No way to aggregate accounts of stocks and bonds or to analyze your holdings across accounts.
- The budgeting software was not very effective. It was hard to categorize checks. You had to do it one-by-one in a process that takes a pretty long time.
- If there was an automatic bill-pay mechanism, I didn't figure it out.

Overall
For my needs, I would not buy this product again. I thought about upgrading to the professional version, but did not see that it addressed the problems of the standard version.

There is really nothing in Money that you can't do just as easily in an Excel worksheet and a Yahoo! Finance portfolio. In many ways, Yahoo's free web service is superior to Microsoft's software.

Go to the Money 2004 site and READ the FAQ. Basically, if you convert from Quicken or an older version you can never go export your data back out. No version of Quicken can read Money 2004 and no older version of Money can read 2004. Also this version has a subscription service which you need to renew in order to keep it going. A last it is fully integrated with .net, which I don't find a good thing. Even when you turn off all the features to make sure your financial data does not get sent anyway, the product still finds a way of bombarding you with the latest and greatest financial news, at least the way MSN sees it. Stick to you're old tried and true, or you'll find yourself up late reinputting all your last months transaction. It's 3:53 am now...

If I could give this "application" no stars I would.

"Features" within the application are nothing more than a direct link to several of Microsoft's websites. When I inquired about deactivating these "features", Microsoft's reply was essentially "sorry, this is part of the software."

As an avid and loyal user of Money since 2001, I will be switching to another package or trying to find my MS Money 2001 disks.

I already owned Money 2001 Standard Edition and expected similar feature sets in Money 2005 Standard....oops. If you want "retirement accounts", you need to purchase the 2005 Deluxe. If want the monthly Cash Flow forecast (like in Money 2001), that feature is GONE!

This is nothing more than brochure-ware for Microsoft's web sites, YOU have to pay for it, AND M$ has the audacity to actually have pop-up messages built into the product ASKING YOU TO UPGRADE.

[...]

I find this software is a good tool to help me track spending and investments, though it does have some annoying flaws. The first is the forecasting that it does on accounts is worthless, it takes an asset account that receives a nominal increase monthly and projects a two month increase far in excess of what the historical trends, and common sense, would suggest. It does this as well with credit accounts, for instance I had a credit account with $700 with a 6 month no interest period, over a 5 month period, with monthy payments and no interest, it was paid down to $35, the forecast tool took this information and predicted in two months the account would be at - $5,000. Other annoying things, the prompt on the home page that I should enter the monthly interest on my AMEX card, the advertisements and notices that my money would do better in accounts held by advertisers, the difficulty enterering the actual price paid on fractional share purchases, and the difficulty in handling the mortgage payment transactions when part of the monthly payment goes to a escrow account to pay taxes and home insurance.

That said, the product is a good tool for househiold budgeting and financial record keeping.

I downloaded the free trial of Money from Microsoft's website and decided to give it a try. The trial runs for 2 months and it allows you to do pretty much the same things as in the full versions.
My first impressions are mixed. On one side, the interface is very slick and it sure looks like a good tool for managing everything. On the other side, my Excel files do the same thing for free, lacking only cool graphics and buttons.
While updating accounts seemed to work pretty fast, what it updates is a mess. I spent most my time working with my Brokerage account, since that was my main interest. For once, while the stocks were imported correctly, the tools were showing me bad stocks as leaders that make me the most money. Follow that and you'll either become a Warren Buffet or file for bankruptcy ... Second, the info was really not personalized. I was being sent to the MSN Money site for further information or for plotting the stock shares evolution ... Well, how can I say this: MSN Money, same info I was being sent to, is actually free. I go there anyway, to update my Excel files.
Some of the other features were not of big interest either. The only that were, required additional payments (GainKeeper, for Schedule D, etc).
Overall, I am not impressed and will not buy this software. I think everything it has can be done in Excel and while it may take you a while, at least you'll know what you do.

I was sailing along quite happy with my lil ole Money Standard 2000. I used the budgeting and reporting some, but mostly just kept track of my accounts and downloaded bank activity. THEN my bank upgraded and "recommended" we upgrade to the most recent version of Money. Oh, WHAT A MISTAKE! I hate it. Downloading items from the bank website, Money just enters them into your statement, matches the entry with a VERY wrong mate. I think it looks at your upcoming bills before it actually looks at the transactions (which, okay, I don't always have entered exactly right penny for penny). Before, in 2000-land, I didn't know how good I had it matching entries. A simple 8-transaction download can take 15 minutes at a minimum. Way, way too time consuming for something that's supposed to make my life easier. I can't imagine that ANY product testing was done before this was released. Save your money if you can. I'll deal with it until I can't stand it anymore and then convert to Quicken. ARRGHHH.

I wanted to update my old Quicken software because it has a clunky way of editing your entry errors. Quicken does calculate correctly. I purchased Money 2004 Deluxe edition and installed it. It imported my data from the Quicken files correctly. However, when handling bond fund transactions, it does so incorrectly. To make the values turn out correctly, it has to fudge the numbers (number of shares and prices) because it assumes you are holding individual bonds rather than shares in a bond fund. I talked this over with the Microsoft person over the MSN chat room and got a stupid answer. In going to their old help files, I found this was a problem with Money 2001-it appears to still be a problem. Quicken does this correctly--I am going to trade in the Money 2004 for an new version of Quicken. This is a serious problem.

I'm not quite sure what everyone has been having trouble with... I started using Money 2003, soon after it was released, and was very happy with it. I'm not convinced that the upgrade was worthwhile, but Money has certainly done the trick. I've had no problems connecting to my accounts, setting up budgets, creating and viewing reports, etc...

Yes, it is a glorified spreadsheet, but Money saves me a ton of time, and I've found it to be a wonderful tool.