Customer Reviews

Microsoft Money 2006 Standard [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I've been using MS Money for the past 6 years, getting a new version almost every year. You can't beat the price for this product - the Standard version is practically free with myriads of rebates and special offers (or simply get it from eBay). The latest versions (05 and 06; 06 isn't that much different from 05) are very stable, rich in features and generally easy to use. The improvements made over the years in the online features are especially impressive - I am now getting automatic updates of 2/3 of my bank/credit/brokerage accounts.

My biggest complaint - you find this only after installing the product, not anywhere in the Amazon product description or on the retain box - is that you are limited to 2 years of online update services. This means you will have to get a new version of Money at least every other year. I personally don't make a big deal of this restriction, but the practice of advertising all the cool online features without mentioning their term limits (not even in fine prints) is rather questionable.

I have used Intuit's Quicken since 1998, upgrading about every 2 years. I have Quicken 2005 Deluxe on my computer and found that it to be very poor at managing my investment accounts. It has gotten so bad, that I have gone to tracking my investments exclusively in an Excel spreadsheet and only my bank and credit card accounts on Quicken, so I wanted to try MS Money to see if it was any better.

I have also been using Turbo Tax since 2000, but it always makes mistakes with my state return (I am from NY and in the military). This year, I am trying H&R Block's TaxCut software. The version I purchased at the military exchange here (Amazon does not ship software to FPO addresses) included a 100% rebate on Money 2006 standard, so I bought them both (since Money was free).

It took me 2.5 hours to convert my Quicken .qdf file to Microsoft money. The instructions in Money did not include telling you that you have to remove the password protection (if you have it enabled) on your Quicken file. Then, once I was able to convert the file, I tried to download from my bank to Money. This worked quickly, but it created 43 new entries (there should have been only 3 or 4). Once I reconciled these, I used the balance feature in Money and it showed over a $9,000 discrepancy between my online balance and my balance in Money. That is what killed the next 2 hours, going through 7 years of records to find the missing entries.

What I found is that Money randomly failed to carry over some entries - I could not figure out a reason why. Once I had entered the 14 missing entries, I visually checked the balances in Money and Quicken (which had the correct balance) and I saw that they matched. My wife checked them as well, and agreed they were correct. I tried to balance function again because it is the only way to reconcile an entry (whereas in Quicken, you can manually mark an entry as cleared or reconciled). This time, Money indicated a balance error of 98.26, which was a mistake. I clicked to make an extra entry to balance the account, which the program did twice for some reason. Then when I returned to the registry, there were no entries at all. Here again, I am not sure why this happened.

I have only worked on reconciling one account, but I have 19 other accounts I track in Quicken that I imported into Money, plus 12 investment accounts I would like to track in Money. I am not looking forward to spending hours fixing all of these accounts to repair glitches in MS Money. I have only had MS Money for a few days, but already I feel that it is an inferior product to Quicken and not worth buying, even if you can get it for free. This is especially a shame because Quicken's quality has really dropped off in the last two versions and there are no other comprehensive personal financial programs that I am aware of. Instead of wasting my time fiddling with Money or Quicken (which I have had since January 2005), I think I will spend my time transferring all of my accounts over to Excel or a hard copy ledger and get rid of the hassle all together.

Other issues I have seen in MS Money 2006 Standard:
1. Creating the MS Passport account is a hassle
2. The registry for a single account does not let you insert an entry by using a right click drop-down menu. Instead, you have to go to the bottom of the registry, which is a long way away when you are trying to insert a missing transaction that is 5 years old, and click on new.
3. Home shows your "favorite accounts" rather than you full portfolio and you current asset and liability balances, and upcoming scheduled transactions, which is the type of information I really need right when I log in.
4. The registry entries do not look like a typical check book, so there is a new format to get used to. Quicken at least uses this standard format for all of its cash, bank, and credit card accounts.
5. The Investing tab in the main display has the same problem as Home - it does not show you your accounts or performance when you click on it. Instead, you have a Web-page looking screen that has index performance and business news, but not my portfolio - and that is what I want to see.

I've been using either quicken or money since the late 80's. I started out with Quicken, but then one day my computer hard drive crashed. I thought I would be OK, since I always backed up my quicken to alternating floppies; however, Quicken could not recover my files from the floppy backups. I switched to MS Money in '95 and NEVER LOOKED BACK. I have been using MS 2006 for several months (it was preinstalled on my Compaq laptop) and find only one annoyance; they seem to be keen on you putting your Money data on the web. Sorry, I don't trust MS security that much, but I do like MS Money 2006. I hear there are not enough improvements in the 2007 version to justify an upgrade. Also, if you have 2005, no real need to go to 2006 either. I did trial a copy of Quicken last year just to see if they'd caught up with Money, but I was not impressed enough to switch.

Microsoft went with an interface that looks more Web-like than Windows-like. I think I would have preferred a Windows look and feel but I think I'll be able to get used to it.

I was able to down-load data from my credit union and AMEX card quickly and easily. That is very cool. If it were not for this labor saving feature I never would have bought the software.

Now for the bad news: Once you download all the data you have to assign it to a category. There is nothing wrong with that but Microsoft could have made it easier. For instance, I buy a lot of gas from the same place and I charge it to my AMEX. It would be really nice if I could tell Money, "When you see a charge from this place add it to this category". According to Microsoft's press package there is an "Auto-Categorization" function but it doesn't appear to be customizable and it didn't work for the vast majority of my transactions. If there is a way to customize it I haven't discovered it yet but I've only used the software a couple of nights.

On the other hand, I spent a good bit of time looking around the on-line help with no success. I realize that Microsoft doesn't like to ship manuals with their software and I really don't have a problem with that as long as I can buy a book or there are good on-line resources. The only book that I've seen that covers Money 2006 is for dummies. Not being a dummy, I don't buy those. As far as I can tell Microsoft Press doesn't even have one. That's weak.

The on-line resource doesn't even have a search option and the index is pretty thin. Actually, the on-line manual seems pretty thin. Or perhaps it is the software that lacks depth.

Another problem is when you download bank account and credit card information. If you have $1,000 in credit card charges and you pay off your credit card with a $1,000 check then you end up with all the credit card charges plus the check so it looks as if you have $2,000 in expenses. That wouldn't be a problem if I could tell Money not to put the credit card charge in any category but if you don't assign it then you have to keep $1,000 balance of un-categorized charges which is messy. There should be some way to handle that.

Microsoft has spent their time getting partners tied into their software (like institutions that want to set you up with a mortgage) when they should have spent their time writing code and/or improving their documentation. For a program that has been around for over a decade, it has some very obvious short comings. You almost get the impression that Microsoft's priority is not to produce a useful piece of software but rather to get their tentacles into your finances.

After many years of using Quicken, I became frustrated, decided to try something new, and purchased Microsoft Money 2006 Standard edition. My biggest complaint with Quicken was their frequent insistence to upgrade to the newest version, implying that the one I owned was substandard. This year was most annoying, since they are no longer supporting Quicken 2003 and have decided to encourage one to upgrade for a charge of $40!! Well, that was it for me. I read about Money and decided to give it a try. So far, I really like it. It's as easy to use as Quicken and very complete. I went with the standard edition since the add-ons with the more expensive versions were unnecessary for my purposes. It has reports and summaries like Quicken. Also, I connect to their online services to allow easy downloading for my checking, savings, credit card, and investment accounts. My one gripe is that the credit card register does not allow for memo comments. To correct for this, I added more descriptive categories to distinguish more completely among the charges (i.e., the specific details for each job-related purchase).

We purchased this version when we upgraded to Windows XP. The old version of MS money we have been using for years did not work on windows XP. This version is terrible compared to the old version and we are going to move to Quicken. We can't figure out where it's getting the numbers for the budget portion of the program. It appears to be randomly multiplying deposits by two or just ignoring them. The budget numbers were just nonsense. We could not make corrections to investment stock symbols etc. The bottom line is this software has gone downhill and we no longer even trust it to add 2 and 2. It doesn't even deserve one star.

The interface between MS Money '06 and your bank/credit union is much improved (meaning it doesn't hang in limbo like it used to). It also shows the statement balance and the bank balance, which can vary due to credit card charges and other e-payments that haven't posted to the account. The initial charge categories have been simplified, with room to expand as you need to (I usually categorize Automobile Fuel separately, due to the cost and budget accordingly). All in all, an improvement over the 2005 version I was using.

I'm a former Quicken user. I came to hate them with a passion for not supporting their own software just three years old -- intuit customer support was a bad joke -- and even after having used Quicken since about 1988, I never got used to their clumsy screens.

So when my last copy of Quicken became obsolete and they wanted more money for an upgrade, I decided to try Money.

I should have known better. This, after all, is a Microsoft product. It's loaded with hooks to get you to buy more stuff from Microsoft, it insists that you use their web browser, and quite frankly, when I read the fine print in the "Accept-our-license-or-leave" window that pops up as you load it for the first time, I really don't want to have any of my financial information residing on a Microsoft data bank somewhere. Why do they need to store my information on their computers? With every hacker in the world trying to notch their gun by breaking into Microsoft, why would anybody want to risk their account information with Bill Gates? Then there is the issue of the fine print in the privacy agreement. If you can wade through this boilerplate you'll see that it works 100 percent in their favor. They reserve the right to sell your contact information to third party marketers. Screw that!

There's got to be a better product out there somewhere -- one that doesn't get involved in your personal financial business as much as Microsoft wants to do.

Bottom line, by installing this software on your computer, you are exposing yourself and your most personal financial information to persons unknown. Maybe some people are comfortable with that, I'm not.

This version appears to be little changed from the 2005 version. I find little use for the enhanced versions as the standard version does everything I need in terms of tracking and updating my various accounts. I find the budgeting tools to be weak but highly recommend this as a very good tool for planning for expense and revenue activities and keeping score of actual for the normal family.

Beginning with the first DOS version, I've been a Quicken user for many years, both for business and personal use. Far too frequently, Intuit abandons their user base and forces an upgrade. Finally fed up with this, I switched to Money and couldn't be happier.

Initially, I downloaded the trial version from Microsoft. Money automatically and seamlessly picked up all my Quicken data. The two programs are similar enough that the change-over was effortless. The user interface in Money is more intuitive. Reports are easier. Compared to Quicken 2002, Money has a better way of printing that left-over third check on the sheet.

Using the basic functions, which is all I need at home, I have not encountered any third party advertisements. One of the Amazon reviews complains about that, and it would be a huge negative for me, but so far this hasn't been a problem. In fact, one of my complaints about Quicken is that Intuit-related ads appear from time to time, forcing a response before allowing the user to continue. So far I haven't noticed this in Money, but it won't surprise me if it happens. My bank is not capable of interfacing with either Money or Quicken, but in Money downloading credit card information was a snap. Quicken left me trying to do this for most of a morning without informing that my version was no longer being supported.