Rating: 
Summary: What a joke
Review: I bought this as a substitute for Quick Books, big mistake. You cannot access a general ledger, there is no function for the recognition for consigned inventory, the list goes on.I think my favorite part is that it will not allow me to make custom invoices until I sign the end user agreement. I have spent most of yesterday and sevral hours today looking for access to that agreement. The program is worthless - I think they skipped the focus group on this one. Of course software is nonreturnable, I would auction it but I wouldn't involve anyone else in a program so dubious.
Rating: 
Summary: Business functionality lacking
Review: I run a small consulting company from my home. (Small meaning, just me.) I purchased the Small Business version of this software to help with my business as well as manage my personal finances. My business is consulting, I sell my time to customers. Although the software supports creating time items for customers, there is no reporting for time items other than create an invoice to print out the current uninvoiced time activity for a customer. This is unacceptable to me. I need to provide detailed time reporting to my customers, as well as a summarized invoice for payment. I'll have to continue to track my time in a spreadsheet. Regarding invoices, although the software offers "emailing invoices" as a feature, what it emails is a text invoice, and there is no way to print the invoice to a file or word document to email something a bit more professional. Being in the computer consulting business, text invoices would appear a bit tacky. So, for me, the two main things I do, track my time on consulting projects and invoice my customers via email, are not possible in this software. I have to continue to use spreadsheets to track my time, and word processing to create the invoices to email to my customers. The personal finances functionality seems to be the same as previous versions of this software, but be very wary about paying the extra $ for the small business feature set. It seems quite lacking to me.
Rating:
Summary: Get Quicken Home & Business 2002 or 2003 instead
Review: I tried this software for the first time after getting tired of Quicken's quirks. But after four months of infuriation, frustration, and wasted time, Quicken seems like heaven to me. If this is common for Money, I'll never use it again.
As other reviews have stated, there is no customization at all. If it isn't a selection, you don't get it. Just trying to set up a simple home budget is infuriating enough. You cannot select your catagories if they do not appear in their selection. Instead of being able to make layers of catagories like in Quicken (for detailed budget breakdowns), you are stuck with only one. As for downloading account information, it decides what account and where the download should go and refuses to let you change it--even though it is very wrong. You have to search out where it went and remove every single incorrect transaction one at a time. In sum, I hate this software and it has cost me more lost time than it was ever worth.
Rating: 
Summary: I Like it.
Review: I was in major trouble when my 8 month old 80 gig hard drive crashed. I was able to salvage about half of my files but my accounting system "Quick Books Pro" was lost. Having a back up floppy I tried to restore my data but it refused to accept my data. I called Intuit tech support to see if I was making a mistake but the tech told me that version 6 was obsolete and would not work with XP. I could upgrade for $300.00. Good bye QuickBooks! I found MS Money 2004 in Amazon.com for about $53.- and recieved it in 2 days. My job was to enter all the data, my income, expenses, sales and customers from Jan. 1 2003 for my small business. MS money 2004 is quite different. The first day was the slowest. It allowed me to start back to the first of the year and from there it became easier, faster and again backed up. It even tells you what's deductible. I'm pleased.
Rating:
Summary: I Like it.
Review: I was in major trouble when my 8 month old 80 gig hard drive crashed. I was able to salvage about half of my files but my accounting system "Quick Books Pro" was lost. Having a back up floppy I tried to restore my data but it refused to accept my data. I called Intuit tech support to see if I was making a mistake but the tech told me that version 6 was obsolete and would not work with XP. I could upgrade for $300.00. Good bye QuickBooks! I found MS Money 2004 in Amazon.com for about $53.- and recieved it in 2 days. My job was to enter all the data, my income, expenses, sales and customers from Jan. 1 2003 for my small business. MS money 2004 is quite different. The first day was the slowest. It allowed me to start back to the first of the year and from there it became easier, faster and again backed up. It even tells you what's deductible. I'm pleased.
Rating:
Summary: MS Money 2002 is still better
Review: I will not upgrade from 2002 version, even though invoices are not very customisabe. The only problem 2002 had was you could not save your invoice design for use, if you need to reinstal. And it does not seem that it is fixed in this version. So I will not purchase this product this year. I may even switch to Quicken.
Rating: 
Summary: needs a little help
Review: I've been using MS Money for my personal accounts for years. I like it, and now after starting my own business, I especially like the price of Money Small Business compared to alternatives. The user from Western North Carolina (mmj...) pointed out correctly that the except for printing, the Invoices are not very professionally looking. He's absolutely correct unless you have the FREE PrimoPDF (from download.com) utility installed. This extremly handy utility (did I mention it is free!) allows you to save your invoice as a PDF file, that looks just the way you layed it out! Just select PrimoPDF as your printer, select the name and location of your desired output file, screen or file quality option and you're ready to rock and roll! This just made my day!!!
Rating:
Summary: No IE 6.0? No functional Microsoft Money small business.....
Review: Important note before you purchase Microsoft Money: you must be able to upgrade to IE version 6.0 (if you don't already have it installed) BEFORE you install the program. No other browser will work with this program, and you have to have the browser to open it. Also, if you are upgrading from IE 5.0 or 5.1 you cannot directly upgrade to 6.0. You must first upgrade to 5.5, then remove your old version, then upgrade a second time to 6.0. After endless problems trying to accomplish this, I finally found success by installing the Internet Explorer 6 Admin Kit (IEAK). This was the only thing that worked. And that was after a complete system reinstall, over 30 hours of work and 6+ hours on the phone with microsoft tech support. My general feeling after spending hours reading accounting software reviews in an effort to see if there is something better out there, is that no ideal or perfect accounting program exists- every program will more than likely have annoying bugs or errors of some sort. Even after all of the problems, I'd buy this program again, I'd just read the system requirements very carefully and perouse some Microsoft Money message boards for problems BEFORE installing it. OR, if I was a software guru, I'd design a fancy new flawless accounting software program for small businesses and reap a fortune. One more thing: make sure you COMPLETELY disable any antivirus software and/or uninstall/remove it from your machine BEFORE you install the program. Also, you need to completely uninstall Microsoft Money 2000 and any of its components (if it exists on your machine) before installing this program to avoid corruption.
Rating:
Summary: What a joke
Review: MS Money does the job, but not as cleanly as Intuit products. Only advantage here is the price is a lot lower. This software really feels like I've paid for a program that is mainly about advertising for other companies and other MS offers. I really don't care for that.
If you're on a serious budget, this will do the job. Otherwise, look towards Intuit products. They are cleaner and simply do the job better.
Rating:
Summary: Better programs out there
Review: MS Money does the job, but not as cleanly as Intuit products. Only advantage here is the price is a lot lower. This software really feels like I've paid for a program that is mainly about advertising for other companies and other MS offers. I really don't care for that.
If you're on a serious budget, this will do the job. Otherwise, look towards Intuit products. They are cleaner and simply do the job better.
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