Product Description

Microsoft Money 2006 Standard helps you stay on top of day-to-day finances by consolidating all your account information in one place. Keep an eye on your spending, create a budget, and manage bills. Spend less time worrying about your money and more time enjoying it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1246 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 105-00521
• Released on: 2005-07-05
• Platforms: Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Financial software for staying on top of day-to-day finances
• Track spending in categories like dining out, entertainment, or clothing
• Monitor and schedule bills; generate reports, registers, and budgets
• View accounts all in one place with just a single password
• Works with your bank to update account balances automatically

Customer Reviews

Good product; beware of online service expiration
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.

Poor Interface, File Transfer Problems and Calculation Errors
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.

Money is better than Quicken
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.