Product Description

Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe brings all your personal accounts – banking, credit and investment – in one place and provides the tools you need to improve your credit and debt and tackle tax time with ease, so you can spend less time worrying about your money and more time enjoying it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2496 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 860-00433
• Released on: 2006-07-27
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Savings & Spending Budget helps you plan for retirement, savings, and debt repayment
• Money's Spending Tracker automatically categories your transactions and compares them to your budget
• Manage your bills using multiple online accounts, even schedule the payment of bills in advance
• Simplify your taxes by automatically exporting your information for tax software
• See all of your accounts--checking, savings, investments, and credit--in one place

Amazon.com
Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe brings all your personal accounts—banking, credit, and investment—together in one place. With its easy-to-use tools, you can improve your credit, decrease debt, and tackle your taxes. Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe lets you spend less time worrying about your money and more time enjoying it. From balancing your checkbook to improving your credit score, Money 2007 Deluxe can help you get—and stay—organized.

Money's customize homepage gives you a convenient snapshot of your financial picture. See your current account balances, upcoming bills, cash flow forecast, and more. View larger.

The Spending Tracker automatically categories your transactions, and then lets you see how your actual spending compares to your budgeted amounts. View larger.

The cash flow forecast lets you predict how much money you'll have in your day-to-day accounts in the coming months. View larger.

Money's budgeting tools help you allocate your monthly income so you can create a savings plan and gain better control of your day-to-day spending. View larger.

Money makes it simple to get started and stick with it
It's easy to get started with Money 2007 Deluxe, no matter if you are upgrading, switching from Quicken, or using Money for the first time. If you have been using a previous version of Money, Money 2007 Deluxe can automatically update your existing Money file. If you have been using Quicken, Money 2007 Deluxe can convert your Quicken information so that you do not have to start from scratch. And if you're using personal financial software for the first time, Money can walk you through the process to get set up and download your account information.

If you already use online banking, Money lets you see all of your accounts—checking, savings, investments and credit—in one place, with one password. Money connects to thousands of banks and updates automatically, so your balances and other information stay current.

See where your money goes
After you've set up your accounts, Money can analyze your transactions and assign them to categories. Then you can easily track spending in categories you want to watch closely, such as dining out, entertainment, or clothing. Easy-to-understand charts show you exactly where your money is going. Money lets you see the big picture or drill down to the details. Flexible views let you easily move between top-line information like daily spending, savings and budgets to more detailed information.

Manage your bills and cash flow
Money 2007 Deluxe allows you to manage your bills using multiple online accounts. You can see what bills have been paid and which ones are due, so there are never any surprises. You can even schedule payments in advance. The cash flow forecast lets you predict how much money you'll have in your day-to-day accounts in the coming months.

Tax time made easy
Money 2007 Deluxe makes it easier to prepare and file taxes with expert tips from tax professionals. Tools such as the tax estimator and deduction finder help identify opportunities for tax savings. It's even easy to export data to tax preparation software.

Improve your financial outlook
Money 2007 Deluxe helps you protect and improve your credit, reduce high-interest debt, and learn more about your credit rating. Improve your investment strategy with access to tips, guidance, and relevant articles from the highly regarded experts on MSN Money.

Savings and spending budget
Money 2007 includes a new savings and spending budget to help you plan for retirement, savings, and debt reduction as well as your monthly expenses. It is the comprehensive budget solution that helps you see your savings grow and your debt shrink.

Compare the features in Money 2007 Deluxe, Money 2007 Premium, and Money 2007 Home & Business (PDF file)

Customer Reviews

(Almost) nothing new under the sun
Microsoft has recently launched the 2007 version of their Money product. Money 2007 (M2007) Deluxe has been available as a trial version on Microsoft's website even a week before the official version was available in Retail Stores. I strongly advise everyone considering a purchase or an upgrade to take advantage of this Trial version, before buying the product. It is good for 90 days and has few limitations.

I have been using Money 2006 (M2006) Premium which is essentially the same as M2006 Deluxe, execept for some special offers. I installed M2007 and told it, NOT to remove my M2006 installation. Since M2007 upgrades the data file to a new format that is incompatible with earlier versions of money, I made a copy of my data file to be used with M2007, so I could still access my data through both versions. When I started M2007 for the first time and selected the newly made copy of my data file, M2007 converted this file to its new format without any problems and saved a copy in M2006 backup file format.

Overall M2006 and M2007 are extremly similar. Looking at the kind of things I use Money for, there is NO difference whatsoever. They both have the same minor shortcomings/bugs and their behavior is indistinguishable from one another. I do not download online statements, so I cannot say, if that area has been improved. Also M2007 has a new kind of "Spending and Savings budget" feature, which is the only noticable change compared to M2006.

All things considered, M2007 does not add much (if any) value over M2006, so I will only give it 3 stars. If you haven't upgraded in a while, consider M2007, since it seems at least to be stable (which couldn't be said, i.e. for M2005). If you haven't used Money before, then M2007 seems like a good version to start. But don't forget to try before you buy! Go to Microsoft's website and search for the Money Trial version.

Not new, but a great program
As many of the other reviewers have mentioned, there are not a ton of new features in Money 2007. However, as a user of Money 2002 and Quicken 2006, there are several upgrades over M02, and I am very pleased with M07. Having used M02 for about 3-4 years, I decided to upgrade so that I could take advantage of the online banking/statements features offered for the newer programs. With everyone and everything referring to Quicken while speaking of financial software (much the way people refer to a "Kleenex" for tissue), I figured that I would give it a shot with Quicken 2006. Having spent the last 8 months or so using Q06, it had some good things about it, and some annoying things (the budget isn't very workable, no reallocation between budget items so if you go over in one, you can't "borrow" from another item to balance your budget. The investment updates aren't as complete as with M07, either. These are just a few.) Deciding that I would see what was available on the Money front, I discovered the M07 Trial version on Microsofts website. After loading it onto my system and painlessly converting my Quicken file over (which was FAR simpler than getting my M02 file converted to Q06), I began to fine tune the program. Needlessly to say, having spent 8 months using Q06, I felt like I was "home" again with M07. It still has some quirks in the program (still can't figure out how to use the savings goal feature in the budget,the debt reduction planner isn't as controllable as I'd like, the cash flow forcast has more assumptions than I would, but these level off over time, etc.), but these features work fine for my money management. Rest assured, when my trial period is over, I WILL be purchasing the full program.

Performance is harassment and functionality is faulty
I am a seasoned user of "Microsoft Money" since 2001 and used Money-2003, 2004, 2006 and 2007 versions. On the subject of convenience and integration of multiple financial activities, Money (and for that matter even Quicken) does a fantastic job.

However, with 4-5 years of usage of 'Money', my money file has grown to nearly 19MB. Due to the large file size, I am getting pathetic performance which is quite annoying. I have a laptop with 2.4GHz dual core CPU and 1GB RAM, however very basic activity such as looking at monthly report, budget report etc. takes 2-3 minutes to display on the screen ! Even if I retry, it once again hangs for 2-4 minutes. I will be lucky if I could get 'any' operation finished faster then 5 seconds/transaction. The problem isn't with specific version but the way Money is designed to store its information. There were some discussion on improving performance by using money data on Database but Microsoft chose not to invest money on any such design change.

Another annoying thing I observed with Microsoft Money is with every newer release one will get fancier but more BUGGY software. So far I found '2004' release best in the bunch but once you upgrade the version and make new entries it is not feasible to go back to earlier version.

Let me give you an example that will explain the problem. Most common activity a user will have is it to download data from financial institutes. Money will connect to these institutes and get the data. It will turn back in 2-3 minutes with newer data and shows status 'done'. On the "Account List" you will see, for example, 5 new transaction and when you inside this account, there is no new transaction listed ! Reason is, though you got 'done' status data hasn't finished downloading. After 2-3 minutes you will get the data in the account. When you see the transactions, you won't be able to 'accept' them as it is waiting on 'something'! In short, after getting data downloaded from the institute, you won't be able to 'accept' them for nearly 3-4 minutes. I am surprised to find that Microsoft is selling software w/o testing such basic functionality !
NOTE:I noticed above mentioned bug only in 2007 release.

I wish to have a better software for my need w/o losing existing data but Microsoft hasn't offered better (not just newer) version yet. Quicken seems to have similar issues. Quicken doesn't allow any migration facility to use existing Money files under their software. Once again, I can just wish that Microsoft Money 2008 comes with higher performance and basic testing.

If you are a first time user, prefer to compare both Money and Quicken for yourself before locking your data with one of the them. With 'Money', once your file grows larger, performance deteriorate significantly.

One last point-- even with above limitations, I am better off using this software then not having it at all. Here I jotted down major limitations of Money; Microsoft does good job of marketing good points so I won't spare much time on that.