Microsoft Money [Archive] - David Allen Company Forums

kglade

09-02-2003, 07:51 AM

Dave:

For me, the value added comes from paying bills electronically rather than writing or printing checks. This saves me a few hours per month, well worth the effort.

When I was single, I used a checkbook program and printed the checks. Check printing saved me some time, since I printed the checks with the sendto address and just signed them and popped them into a window envelope. The reminder functionality kept me from missing bills. Even if I didn't get a bill, I knew that I had one due so I could call the biller and pro-actively pay without being late.

From time to time the search feature helps me to know if I already paid a bill or renewed my magazine subscription. Some of the magazines will prompt you to renew when you still have YEARS left on your original subscription. When I pay a magazine bill, I put in the memo field the number of months or years I am renewing for ('12 months') so with the search feature I can tell when the subscription ends.

Some doctors are notorious for double-billing or failing to apply a payment to my account. With a program like Money (I use Quicken) I can make sure I don't overpay. Almost no doctor will refund you an overpayment, they apply it as a credit balance to your account.

Just my 2 cents...

DayneB

09-03-2003, 06:22 AM

That's a question, really only you can answer. I find it very valuable for tracking spending, planning long term finances, etc. I can see my entire financial picture in one program. If those types of things are not valuable to you then you won't find much value.

In terms of effort required, the newer versions are much simpler. Again it depends on how much of the program you choose to use. I download my transactions from my bank, sync the information with my PocketPC and away I go.

Again I believe the value you gain depends on how much you value tracking and planning your finances.

Unregistered

03-29-2005, 09:07 AM

I’m a consumer advocate for a company called Video Professor. My role as consumer advocate is to ensure a better understanding of Video Professor and how our products can give you the tools to use various software programs to your desired level.

Video Professor is the leader in computer software tutorials for most of the major software programs, and we have helped educate over 5 million people.

We have a tutorial for Microsoft Money (PC only) that is available either on CD-ROM or online. One FREE lesson is available on CD-ROM, or your first 5 days online are FREE.

Our tutorial will show you how to analyze your spending habits, start banking online, and prepare for the tax season with ease. Money 2004 tutorial will help you create reports and charts, calculate loan payments, track cash purchases, and keep a budget. You'll also learn how to set reminders to pay bills, add investment accounts, reduce your debt, and much more.

Please visit http://www.videoprofessor.com/computer_training_lessons/money.html for additional information.

I hope this information will help you become more proficient in Money.

MsftMan

03-29-2005, 11:05 AM

Consumer Advocate?
Actually, that is called a Salesperson working for that company.

Interesting, an anonymous "question" about MS Money, and then the anonymous salespitch for MS money training.

Granted that could be the case, however the member that goes by Anonymous (who started the thread) has been posting here for a very long time and any other threads that he/she has started do not reflect this type of behavior. The fact that a "real" anonymous poster chimed in might be coincidence?

-Steve

Unregistered

03-29-2005, 11:27 AM

I have been using Money for probably 6 years now and I do find it to be worth it.

Even if you don't do the categorizing of transactions by category, you can use it to download the information from many credit cards, as well as your bank. By doing this pretty much every day I was able to see very quickly when I had been double-charged by a payee, as well as catch it right away when my credit card number had been stolen and was being used to order things online.

It can also be a matter of a few mouse clicks to balance the checkbook.

If you do take the time to put categories into your transactions when you accept them, then it is possible to go back at a future time to see what you've been spending your money on (i.e. if you find yourself needing to control it, as we did when we started an expensive house renovation, and our old system of "spend less than you take in" wasn't working any more), and at tax time those categories are useful to find records of charitable contributions, property taxes paid, etc., saving lots of time going through folders of receipts or checkbook records.

I don't use it to track investments or do anything particularly sophisticated with it, and, because of server problems and low usage, my bank finally discontinued offering an interface between their online bill-paying service and Microsoft Money (so I have to use their web site to pay the bills, then the bill payments get downloaded to Microsoft Money when I connect). I've also never tried their web-based version, which I assume has you constantly connected when you're online and downloading information as it comes in, so I can't say whether that is any use or not.

But at this point I would have a hard time imagining going back to a paper-based system for keeping track of money.

morias

03-29-2005, 02:30 PM

I use Quicken and PocketQuicken from Landware on my Palm. I use PocketQuicken mainly to track personal and business cash transactions while I'm out and about. There's a Pocket PC version of PocketQuicken available as well. I currently run Quicken on a Windows PC and I'm in the process of migrating to the Mac version. So having a flexible cross-platform solution is very important to me. With Quicken and PocketQuicken I have the option to run any combination of Mac/Windows with Palm/PPC, YMMV.

I've seen Palm and PPC apps that will sync with MS Money, so that option is also available. But there is no version of MS Money for Mac.

good luck!

-michael

Unregistered

04-14-2005, 03:58 AM

I run a small non-profit foundation and keep track of all income and expenditures with Money, been using it since 2001 and now have all that info in one place. I also use it to do all my financial reports to fund raisers and to government agencies here in Europe.
sandie

Scott716

04-16-2005, 05:14 AM

For about 5 years, I have tried using MS Money for expenses, both personal and small business.

On the positive side, MS Money is an excellent repository for all financial transactions -- credit cards, checkbooks, etc. It's great for finding quickly how much we spent on, say, automobiles in the past year, or late fees, or restaurants. It's great for finding what the name of the restaurant is that we went to in 2004 in Chicago.

But Money is also very complex. It has taken several weekends for me to try and understand even the basic functionailty. Its main screen dazzles with so many options it is overwhelming. Drawbacks include:

- Many tasks in MS Money are easier done on paper or in Excel. That includes creating a family budget. Just do it in Excel.

- Bill payment is usually much simpler and cleaner when initiated by a person's bank directly rather than through MS Money. Many banks offer that, free.

- It is difficult to track retirement accounts (and net worth) because every monthly contribution to an IRA or 401K has to be entered manually into MS Money (because not all financial institutions allow automatic electronic interchange with MS Money). This is very time consuming. And I found it difficult to track retirement accounts because most mutual funds do not have public tickers so they can not be tracked. I had to constantly update the value that MS Money had for retirement accounts. Frankly, I found it impossible.

- Also, for MS Money to capture 100% of our expenses, I would need to track pocket expenses (like how I spend money taken out at an ATM) and that is not worth it. Then I would need some form of MS Money on a PDA, or I would need to file receipts for any cash items. Too much!

With MS Money, I was spending more time processing transactions and learning how to process them than I was living life. Now I just use it to download financial transactions as an adjunct to print statements.

Any others share this perspective?

hcd

04-18-2005, 09:23 AM

Any others share this perspective?

Yes, I've had a very similar experience. In fact, I think as I've gotten better about applying GTD, I've become more and more frustrated with MS Money.

I think it's a good tool for the "runway" and 10,000 ft levels of managing finances, but I was never able to get to the point where it was very useful at a higher level.

I've started just using Money to reconcile accounts monthly. For budgeting I've gone to Excel (found this template (http://pearbudget.blogspot.com/) to be an interesting starting point). I've been doing this for about three months now -- I feel like I have a better grasp of my actual financial situation and spend less time fighting with software.

I've considered looking at Quicken but fear it'll just be the same thing all over again.

ceehjay

04-22-2005, 05:11 PM

For budgeting I've gone to Excel (found this template (http://pearbudget.blogspot.com/) to be an interesting starting point). I've been doing this for about three months now -- I feel like I have a better grasp of my actual financial situation and spend less time fighting with software.
The link doesn't work -- takes me to the dreaded HTTP 404 Not Found screen. I Googled, and it took me back to your link. Then I looked at the Comments, and EUREKA! He has set up a new page: PearBudget (http://pearbudget.com). I am going to give it a whirl.

Carolyn

Unregistered

04-27-2005, 07:24 AM

All i can say is i'm 28, debt free except for a house payment which will be paid off in 12 years, and owe it all to microsoft money. I've been a user for 3 years now.

Yeah, I had to spend a few weekends learning all of the features and programming stuff. I'll even say that the first year was very hard, especially with the tracking of spending. Now I spend less than 5 minutes every weekend updating accounts and tax time was a breeze. I know it takes a lot longer for paper users. The debt/life planners got me back on track (I had $36000 of CCard debt alone) and it helps you feel like you have control over personal finance.

I also found the cash flow planner to be a great help. It helped me identify some extra cash I could save every month until I had enough saved up so that I paid cash for a newer but still used car. By the way, when you walk into a dealership with $100 bills, the price of the car drops really quickly :)

However, like everything else, the budget had to be accurate, and it took some time to figure out were it got the numbers from...but it was time well spent.

So think of it as a small time investment in order to get your life back. I very strongly recommend using it!

MS - Louisville, KY

Unregistered

05-02-2005, 10:04 AM

I work for a business and for some reason printing checks is not working, but wierd thing is it will work if you have two checks to print...does anyone out there know what has happened and how i can fix this problem. thank you in advance
susie

please email responce to susiepage@a-m-u.net

thank you

kkirksey

05-02-2005, 11:41 AM

Is finance management software such as Microsoft Money worth using?

It depends. Personally, I couldn't keep my financial life in order without some kind of finance software. Well, I could, but it would be a lot more work. I've been using Quicken since 1989, but after the all of the bugs and terrible tech support for the Mac version, I recently switched to Moneydance:

http://www.moneydance.com/

It runs on nearly every operating system, it's simple, and it's fast. It's what Quicken used to be.

Ken

buzzard

05-25-2005, 12:29 PM

I have used Money for 4-5 years and the only thing I do with it is download my banking transactions which include many debit card charges for groceries, gas and the like plus the usual ATM and checking activities. Every Saturday I balance my checkbook to Money and also to the banks online balance. If I can't make things equal I usually ask the wife about purchases that she "forgot" about :lol: I don't bother balancing my checkbook to the old bank monthly statements because I know what's on them before I get them.

tonester

05-26-2005, 12:00 AM

I've been using Money for around 8 years and at different times have tried to do many different things with it.

One previous poster though about tracking money they pulled out at the ATM - I have even done that. I used to carry around a little notebook and write in it when I spent cash. I've been really happy with it (probably when my finances were much simpleter) and really unhappy with it - at one point I started moving to excel and wrote a spreadsheet that implements the account register, and which my wife now uses for the household account.

I now use it for reconcilations, a balance sheet, monitoring regular outgoings (bills screen), monitoring investments, and a high level view of spending.

To achieve the last point I deleted all the built in expense categories and now only use about five or six. These include budget essentials (sub categories will be things like house payments, electricity bill), budget optionals (e.g. gym membership, magazine subscription), spending (more on this below) and a few special categories like loans and tax. Everything that isn't a regular outgoing is in spending, again in a reasonably small number of categories (e.g. essentials, house/diy, computer, baby, wife, and misc). Almost everything that I do with cash or credit card goes into misc spending. Essential spending is things like car repairs and dentist bills, new carpet goes into house/diy, etc. About 90% of my transactions (by number, not by amount) are in misc.

Having a small number of categories makes the reports much simpler, and having a small number of sub-categories under the only real variable (spending) makes monitoring spending pretty simple. Misc spending contains a huge range of stuff but what I really care about is that my monthly budget for misc is $1000 and I spent $1100. I don't care whether the extra $100 was a cash withdrawal, dinner out, or a new

I find the automated share pricing quite useful and also use money to hold details of shares and funds.

I completely ignore the budget which just sucks. The budget creation process is semi-useful, as it will work out from your income and bills how much you have left over at the end of each month, however tracking expenditure against budget is a disaster, just use excel (again something that became much simpler with my category reorganization).

I also found the cashflow projections to be useless - I had a relatively simple cashflow pattern I wanted to layer on to the budget cashflows and it couldn't handle it. Again, I use excel.

Having a PDA version is quite useful, as I try to enter receipts same day (in GTD inbox fashion). You can use ultrasoft money on Palm or pocket money on PPC.

As another poster mentioned - if you find these functions valuable then you will find money valuable.

Regards,
Tony

DKnumberOne

10-31-2005, 07:45 AM

I purchased MS Money earlier this year, about February-ish. I find it useful to download transactions. That's basically all I do with it at this point.

I've considered becoming more interactive with it, but I've noticed problems with MS Money that keep me from getting too involved. (These could be just cases of me doing something the wrong way, so if you guys have any suggestions, I would appreciate them) - I'm using 2005.

First, say you have bank account A and bank account B. You transfer $1,000 from bank account A to bank account B. So, in the end, you have not increased or decreased any of the money in your accounts. To me, I would call this a transfer; however, if I categorize it as such, Money places an additional "balancing" transaction in the other account. So, it puts values out of sync by adding in the additional transaction amount, which I consider to be unnecessary. I would have this same problem if I were to transfer a balance on a credit card as well. How would you categorize these types of transactions?

Secondly, MS Money seems to get out of balance quite frequently. I'll download transactions from my bank and it will be off the adjusted balance by various amounts. I noticed several times it will double up on transactions and post them twice. I originally thought this might be just a problem with downloading transactions from my bank (as it is a smaller bank), however, it started doing this with American Express as well, so I don't think it would be a problem with the banks. Is anyone else encountering problems like this?

Lately, I've been considering switching from MS Money to Quicken due to problems such as these. However, I wouldn't mind continuing use of MS Money if I had some resolution, specifically to my first problem. I suppose I could deal with transactions not balancing because it really only takes me like 2 minutes to figure out the problem...however, it's still a pain in the neck. Is Quicken prone to these same issues?

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated

Thanks,
Kyle

ggrozier

10-31-2005, 11:13 AM

It saves time on your tax returns, too. And even if you don't have mortage interest and property taxes, charitable contributions, home office expenses, etc., to track at the beginning of the year, your situation could be very different at the end of the year, and that information could be useful. By December something could have changed and then you might need the information about your medical expenses, business expenses, etc., if you have started a business or had a major medical problem during the year. You might get to take a deduction you would have missed otherwise.
And sometimes the information can't really be useful until you have a baseline--a year or so of data that you can look at to see exactly what you're spending money on, and how it changes from one part of the year to another. So if you're spending a lot during the summer but not much during the winter on entertainment, that might be useful for planning.

But I'd recommend Quicken instead of Money--just my personal experience. And by the way, I had a client who tried to switch from QuickBooks for windows to QuickBooks for Mac, and she hated it--the Mac version was like 15 years behind where the windows version was, so maybe that's the case with Quicken, too.

DKNumber One--I come across this pretty frequently with people who have multiple accounts and transfer money between them. It is a problem, just as you say.

You need to set up a Transfers account--a bank account that isn't set up for on-line banking. It could be an expense account or an income account, actually, but I always use a bank account. It will be a dummy account, and the only activity in it will be these transfers.

After you do a download, you go into the register for account A and code the amount you transfer out to B to the Transfers account. Then go into the register for account B and also code the incoming amount to the Transfers account.

The Transfers account will always net out to zero--you have to be careful and double check this every month and make sure that is the case, because sometimes you may forget to go and take care of it--and accounts A and B will have the correct balances. We have to do this quite a bit in accounting and bookkeeping, because businesses that do on-line banking or have internet business, or even small business people, tend to have this kind of transaction pretty frequently.

fossicker

10-31-2005, 11:23 AM

First, say you have bank account A and bank account B. You transfer $1,000 from bank account A to bank account B. So, in the end, you have not increased or decreased any of the money in your accounts. To me, I would call this a transfer; however, if I categorize it as such, Money places an additional "balancing" transaction in the other account. So, it puts values out of sync by adding in the additional transaction amount, which I consider to be unnecessary. I would have this same problem if I were to transfer a balance on a credit card as well. How would you categorize these types of transactions?

I'm not sure if I follow your problem -- I don't use Money, I use Quicken, but I think the principle is the same.

If you are transferring money from one account to the other, there is a debit from one account and a credit to the other -- one transaction per account. In Quicken, these transactions have a "category" of the other account. Such transactions can be excluded from any reports you create, since they represent accounting artifacts, not actual income and expenses.

I'm trying to imagine how you think it should work -- how can you balance the accounts if you don't show a debit from one and a credit to the other?

DKnumberOne

10-31-2005, 11:37 AM

Thanks for the suggestion; I'll give that a shot.

It's suprising that they don't make the program smart enough to say...OK we just made a transaction from one account on this list to another one on this list, the amounts are the same, so maybe we should prompt the user and ask if that's the case.

I just thought of another one of my gripes...Say, for the sake of this example, you used a credit card for every transaction you made in a month. You're very diligent, so you categorize every transaction into the appropriate "bucket". Your credit card bill comes to $1,000. So, you have expenses categorized totaling $1,000. When you make the credit card payment of $1,000, you then categorize that as a credit card payment. So, when you look at your special MS Money pie chart, it looks like you had $2,000 in expenses for the month.

Would the strategy there be to code the cc payment as "Not an Expense"? Because, I don't really consider Credit Card Payments an expense. It's a medium for paying for expenses you've already incurred.

DKnumberOne

10-31-2005, 11:53 AM

I'm not sure if I follow your problem -- I don't use Money, I use Quicken, but I think the principle is the same.

If you are transferring money from one account to the other, there is a debit from one account and a credit to the other -- one transaction per account. In Quicken, these transactions have a "category" of the other account. Such transactions can be excluded from any reports you create, since they represent accounting artifacts, not actual income and expenses.

I'm trying to imagine how you think it should work -- how can you balance the accounts if you don't show a debit from one and a credit to the other?

Well, first, I have an accounting degree, so I know that debits have to equal credits.

The way this works, in Money, is that say I have $2,000 in Account A and my balance in Acccount B is $1,000.

I make a transfer from Account A to Account B of $500. So, Money updates my accounts and then my balance in Account A is $1,500 and my balance in Account B is then $1,500. Right now we're ok.

Now, when I go to categorize the transaction for Account A, if I tell Money that it is a "Special" (probably your "Other") tranfer to Account B, Money then creates an additional transaction of $500 in Account B. Account B is now out of balance because, according to Money, I have $2,000 in Account B because the extra $500 was added in. So, basically, Money just doubled my transaction.

The way I think it should work is by using the "Special" categories, Money should look for an offsetting transaction (of the same $ amount) in whatever account you transfered from/to. Then it should match the transactions, which would net the transfer (suspense) accounts to $0.

The suggestion given above, would essentially do this, I just don't see why it's not added into the program - seems silly. Unless I'm missing something???

fossicker

10-31-2005, 11:58 AM

One thing I like about Quicken (it may be true of Money as well, but when I first started using Quicken in the DOS days it was _not_ true of the competitors) -- it is totally laid back about entering whatever data you want to and leaving the rest blank.

For instance, sometimes it is not immediately clear to me what category makes sense for an expense, so I'll just leave it uncategorized (but with a memo describing what the expense was for). At some point later when I'm examining my accounts, I might look at all of my uncategorized expenses and when seen together, I figure out a category that makes sense.

Along the same lines, it is worth setting up a Cash account even if you don't plan to track cash expenditures. Mostly, you'll just balance out the cash account with "Misc" transactions, but sometimes you'll want to record particular cash outlays. You can do that without a cash account, using split transactions, but I think it's cleaner to use a cash account.

someone earlier made a comment about having to keep track of everything and it's just too much effort, but that's not true. You can track as much or as little as you want, and add details when you're in an obsessive mood.

DKnumberOne

10-31-2005, 12:08 PM

fossicker

10-31-2005, 01:01 PM

MS Money also does do that.

Never thought of creating a cash account; not a bad idea though. So, basically you treat all your atm/cash withdrawals as a transfer to your cash account and manually key in entries until the account is netted to $0?

I plan on getting into this amount of detail at some point, but was considering, like you said, splitting the cash withdrawal into multiple categories.

That's it. I usually count the money in my wallet and balance account to that, but balancing to $0 would work just as well. If you balance to the cash you have, and do it every week or two, you can make some reasonable estimates on how you spent at least some of it (e.g. $ spent on lunch, coffee, etc)

ggrozier

11-01-2005, 06:53 AM

You really should be downloading your credit card activity. Then you'd have all the transactions recorded on the right date.

The time-consuming alternative is to enter all the transactions from the credit card statement, using a credit card account in Money or Quicken, manually. You could make one entry listing all the transactions for one month, and another entry for the next month's transactions, so at least they would be recorded in the right month.

DKnumberOne

11-01-2005, 08:02 AM

After poking around for a while last night, I found a couple good websites with some good information about MS Money. The first is a website of a MS Money MVP. The later is the "Unofficial" user guide for MS Money, created by various people from the microsoft user forum. (microsoft.public.money). The forum is a good place to get some answers as well.

http://money.mvps.org/faq/default.aspx

http://umpmfaq.info/index.htm

There's a ton of useful information on these sites.

It took me like 4 hours last night to create my suspense account and categorize all the transactions into them - but I have more accurate reporting now...thank God.

billjane1@earthlink.net

04-10-2006, 07:22 PM

DKnumberOne

04-11-2006, 06:31 AM

I pay off my credit card fully every month and have done so for 30+ years to avoid interest but Money assumes that everyone makes a set payment each month. The only way I can stop it is to click "disable for this payment only". This gets tiresome. Does anyone know how to prevent this pop up screen?

I'm somewhat confused by your post. First you say you pay your credit card off in full every month - and then you say Money assumes that everyone makes a set payment each month. You are effectively making a set payment every month, the whole amount.

Now, do you mean that you do not like how Money puts the monthly credit card payment on the bills section as an estimate? Money does this so you can estimate your cash flow. I can't imagine that you would want to "stop" this as you are making a payment. You can just edit the "estimated" amount. The only way around it is to remove it from your bills section and then manually enter the payment each month, which would involve more work. Since you make 12 credit card payments a year, I don't really understand now it is "tiresome"?

Also, what version of Mony are you using?