Customer Reviews

Microsoft Money Premium 2005 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

I am going to skip this version of Microsoft Money and return to the prior version (2004 Deluxe).
Normally, I upgrade every September, but this new version is disappointing.

Pros:

+ Choices between simplified and advanced views, this affects
account managers, reports, bills, planning etc.

+ Better setup process, generally more intuitive navigation.

+ Better online operations, this was improved dramatically.

+ Ability to merge accounts

+ Ability to share the data file between users (up to 8 people, signed via Microsoft Passport)


Cons:

- Bad User interface. Work Area (the register) is less
than 30% of the screens real estate. The rest are menus,
toolbars, web toolbars (huh?) etc.
There is no way to maximize work areas.

- Sponsorship links and products are everywhere. There is no
way to turn any of these things off. At some point the line blurs
at where is your financial data and where is solicitation.

- There is no way to customize anything. Some of the first
versions(1994, 95) allowed the user to customize the colors,
layouts, etc. This gradualy decreased to 2 color choices + some customization in 2004 version.
In 2005 there is no choice whatsoever, except for (largely useless) home page layout changes and ability to modify the web toolbar.

General:

Bugs: If there are any bugs, they are not obvious.
The software is stable, as the previos version was nearly
flawless, so I assume most of the fixes went into the rarely used
part of application.

Yodlee: This version includes Yodlee engine, which allows for a
very nice view of your aggregated financial data.

After seeing the reviews in every magazine saying the new Microsoft Money 2005 beat the new Quicken hands down, I thought maybe I should upgrade from 2003 to 2005 premium. I was particularly enticed by claims that it allowed you to sync automatically with almost any bank. I have Fleet and Citibank accounts, neither of which would auto-sync with 2003, so I was relegated to downloaded statements each month and importing them. I was also expecting to be able to sync with my online brokerage accounts at Charles Schwab and Ameritrade.

But not only did the Fleet and Citibank accounts fail to sync, Ameritrade, whichhad worked before failed to sync, and the other Schwab did so about half the time. I called in to tech support and they weren't able to fix the problem, but said they'd been getting a lot of such calls. The product only came out in the last week, so I will cut them some slack and wait for updates which they said would be coming in a few weeks, but I must say I was disappointed after hearing such glowing reviews from magazines. The problem with building software from the ground up, as Microsoft has done with this new version of money, is that things that worked perfectly well in previous versions often don't work. I would have thought the magazines would mention these syncing difficulties, considering how common they appear to be... but then again, Microsoft does have a lot of money (no pun intended), and if you're a magazine you probably wouldn't want to get on their bad side. Oh well. If the updates work ok, I'll post an update in a couple weeks.

overall, not much different from 2004 with some bugs with online updating

pros: prettier interface, better portfolio features, web integration (not too useful as most people prefer security of their own computers vs. microsoft servers)

cons: home page customization options more limited (miss the home view, auto view, etc), online problems (sometimes doesn't sync right, had to reinstall windows to fix this so that the work offline option was showing and so that the downloads wouldn't freeze), slower updates and balancing, toolbar not as customizable as in past, only one color interface instead of three before

I am a MS Money fan so was quick to get the 05 version. Well I am uninstalling and rolling back to last years version!

First there is a new Internet Services Policy you must agree to. It starts out with "Microsoft® Money 2005 includes up to two (2) years of Internet-based Services. You will be able to use the Internet-based Services in Microsoft Money 2005 for a period of two (2) years from installation of the product or until September 1, 2007, whichever is earlier."
**** In two years you can not perform online banking!!!

Second the little Money Express program that reminds you of upcoming bills is gone.

I have 3 words for this program - Do Not Upgrade!
Stay With Your Current Version

Microsoft Money Premium 2005 is a lost cause. The bottom line is that this product is VERY difficult to use and not at all user friendly. I have a number of different financial accounts (all with web-based logins), and could get less than half of them running because of Money's poor integration with financial institutions. The product is useless unless you're able to sync your real-time account info so this a crucial point.

Beyond the setup issues, I found myself spending 80% of the time just looking for the correct buttons/links in order to do simple tasks such as change/add account information. The program is clunky and feels more like a web browser than a piece of software. Read: SLOW. There are links are all over the place, and it looks like they've really thrown this thing together without a lot of thought. It's a mess. Shame on the product manager who put his/her okay on shipping the product in this state.

I upgraded from Money 2004. Money 2004 was good. I liked it. That's why I upgraded in the first place -- the new one can only be an improvement, right? WRONG.

I can't remember the last time I used a piece of software that infuriated me as much as this package has. It is first and foremost a usability nightmare. I haven't found anything that just doesn't work; but the experience of using the software is so incredibly bad you wouldn't believe it until you actually sat down and used it. It's like a bunch of people sat down in a room, discussed what they wanted the software to do, and then didn't think about how anyone would actually go about doing it. And then, as random programers implemented it, nobody sat down and actually tried to use the software to do anything other than verify technical accuracy.

Sure, it started off ok, with it's nice new slick blue color scheme and an improved login screen. But it goes downhill from there.

First problem appears to be automatically downloading transaction data from online providers. It won't do it, unless you sign up for a passport account. No thanks. Without a passport account, you have to click a down arrow that shows up after you highlight an icon with a pair of arrows pointing at each other, then select update now, then click "Update now", and then wait. If you click the arrow icon, you go to a summary page that doesn't give you the option of performing an update. Heaven forbid you actually look at the update screen while the update is occuring -- it shows an error message until the update completes. If you don't look at the update screen, you've got no idea of the progress of the update or it's status.

There is a new toolbar area, with starts life off cluttered with oversized icons wasting a good chunk of realestate at the top of the screen. And there isn't a way to get rid of it either.

The screen layout is heinous just about everywhere. It is so cluttered an unorganized it is almost impossible to figure out where to go for what you want to do. It is almost as bad as the front page for yahoo.com.

The UI is supposed to work like a webpage, meaning you've got a page of content and you navigate by clicking on links. But, instead of being intelligent about it and sizing the content in these pages to take up as much space as needed (because you can scroll the page), they make it take up a limited amount of space in subwindows.

And when I say limited, I mean LIMITED. The budget view has 8 lines of test displayed. EIGHT LINES! I can fit more text than that on the back of a friggin postcard!

The mousewheel support makes matters even worse. With the windows-in-windows concept, you can never be certain which window will scroll when you use the mousewheel -- but I assure you it will almost always be the one you didn't want to scroll. Normally a random subwindow scrolls, and there doesn't appear to be a way to convince the window you do want to scroll to scroll via the wheel.

If that wasn't bad enough, the mouse wheel scrolls through content in dropdown listboxes. Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen, if you use the mousewheel in a misguided attempt to scroll the main window, you'll scroll through a crapload of options that you didn't want to change (nor will you know which option you started with). Things get even worse when the listbox controls a long running calculation. One flick of the mouse wheel and you'll be waiting 5 minutes for the software to finish "scrolling."

The other day, as I was trying to find the budget view again (because lord knows it isn't anyplace obvious), I got a popup asking me to take a survey. "Great", I think to myself, "now I can tell these guys what blows and maybe they'll fix it." But no, it's a survey for MSN.com. Worse, I got the survey every other time I clicked on a button in the package. Friggin popups in my financial management software. ARG!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could probably write a book on all the things that just suck with this software package. I can't find one thing about this product that I would consider to be an improvement over the previous version.

Don't waste your cash on this piece of software. Get MS Money 2004 or a product made by a different company. I'm definately moving back to the previous version.

I've been a MS Money customer since Money 99. I bought this as an upgrade for Money 2004.

Upgrading from Money 2004 was a nightmare. After "upgrading", I had difficulty connecting online to brokers such as Fidelity and Vanguard. This worked in Money 2004.

The new feature that is most obvious is the new user-interface, which dedicates most of the screen real-estate to ads, downloaded (slowly) from MS Moneycentral. In general, the program runs slower than Money 2004.

I haven't found any new feature in the new version that I'd consider useful, or an improvement from Money 2004. It's definitely a step backwards, in terms of reliability, speed, and usability.

I've completely removed this product from my system, and reverted to Money 2004.

This is the worst Microsoft product I have ever used. I don't have much to add to what's been said already, but just to build a concensus ...

It crashes at least once every 10 minutes even with basic, light use - even after a clean Windows XP re-format/re-install up to service pack 2. Updates from many of my credit cards are either extremely slow, work very intermitently, or just don't work at all.

Amusingly, during online setup of my citibank card in Money 2005, the progress percentage kept incrementing and incrementing like it was doing something; yet CPU usage was neglible and there was no network traffic in sight for miles. Kinda like when you're using Internet Explorer and the little status bar on the bottom clearly shows little boxes being filled in ... you know ... like you're going somewhere or something important is happening, but no ... apparently microsoft is just toying with your emotions, because CABAM "Unable to do this or that" splashes up on the screen or worse yet a crash. But at least in Internet Explorer I don't have to enter my .Net password everytime I restart.

You're better off balancing your credit cards in Excel, well at least until Microsoft "upgrades" that ...

I upgraded from money 2001 so I was expecting a major improvement. I was particularly interested in the automatic updates where you don't have to go to your banks website and enter your password to get your transaction data downloaded, but the data is downlaoded automatically.

That feature seems promising but as of now it DOES NOT WORK with citibank's website. There is some technical issue that has not yet been resolved and the tech help have no knowledge of when this will to be resolved (The software is out a few weeks already).

This is surprising to me as citibank is the larget bank in the US and I wonder how many other banks a incompatible with the software?

I remain unsure how to set up the automatic updates on existing accounts (accounts transferred from previous versions of money). but it is easy to set up the updates if you are setting up the acccount for the first time. There is no writtin documentation with the software and the help is too breif not providing enough detail for not-standard situations.

On the plus side the phone tech help is great, the email tech help is also pretty good. In addition there are some valuable bonuses such as money magazine and credit report monitoring (included for free). I called the phone tech twice and the wait time is < 1 minute (for now anyway- as the software just came out).

The interface - appearance is less cluttered and neater than the 2001 version and alot of effort went in to that but the initial setup has been time consuming for me.

-Of significance the auto-update uses microsoft .net passport which also puts your data on the web potentially creating a secruty issue (if you beleive your computer is more secure than microsofts servers.)

It seems that some banks may charge for the automatic update service (I don't know if microsoft puts that in to protect themself or if that is common practise I don't beleive my banks charge for that.)

hopefully over the long run it will make keeping track of my finances less time consuming. ONe final point I should add is that there seems to be a heavy relaince on the web throughout the package as such someone with dial up internet service may find this very slow.-


I would recommend the update but expect a hassle in setting it up. I paid $75-$50 (in rebates)=$25 so my only siginificant cost was time.

I thought this product was sweet at first. The GUI is nicer than Quicken, and everything flows.
The only thing wrong, and this is a major, major problem with the software is that it doesn't sychronize with any of my banks.

I use T. Rowe Price, Bank of America, Fidelity, Pentagon Federal Credit Union, and American Express.

The only one it sync's with is AMEX. I'm not doing something wrong, I'm an IT guy and they show them listed, but for some reason it won't synchronize.

On the other hand, Quicken sync's with all of them. Every last one of them. No downloading of statements and importing etc.
This prog is a big failure guys, sorry. Fix the Sync and I'm back on board. It's that simple.