Rating: 
Summary: M$ Sucks
Review: I just bought this product. After installation, I can not even start it. It really sucks.
Rating: 
Summary: Fair Financial Software
Review: I purchased Microsoft Money to keep track of my monthly budget and a couple of small investments that I had. While there is some good stuff there, Money has quite a few shortcomings which make it much less than what I expected.
The Good
- Connects directly with financial websites such as Ameritrade to download stock portfolio information and banks to get check information which is then seemlessly integrated into your budget/analysis/etc. Very useful.
The Bad
- Confusing interface which was hard to transfer from one view to another
- No financial tools to analyze your holdings. No ROI, no NPV, no aggregate betas, nothing beyond stocks current price.
- No way to aggregate accounts of stocks and bonds or to analyze your holdings across accounts.
- The budgeting software was not very effective. It was hard to categorize checks. You had to do it one-by-one in a process that takes a pretty long time.
- If there was an automatic bill-pay mechanism, I didn't figure it out.
Overall
For my needs, I would not buy this product again. I thought about upgrading to the professional version, but did not see that it addressed the problems of the standard version.
There is really nothing in Money that you can't do just as easily in an Excel worksheet and a Yahoo! Finance portfolio. In many ways, Yahoo's free web service is superior to Microsoft's software.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing
Review: I recieved this product with my new dell computer and have been trying to figure it out for the past 3 weeks! I was hoping it would be somewhat easy to use, but no luck! I am now going to buy quicken 2004 because this product is in my opinion poorly built. I am not a computer saavy person, so hopefully quciken will not be as confusing.
Rating:
Summary: Problem with bond fund calculations
Review: I wanted to update my old Quicken software because it has a clunky way of editing your entry errors. Quicken does calculate correctly. I purchased Money 2004 Deluxe edition and installed it. It imported my data from the Quicken files correctly. However, when handling bond fund transactions, it does so incorrectly. To make the values turn out correctly, it has to fudge the numbers (number of shares and prices) because it assumes you are holding individual bonds rather than shares in a bond fund. I talked this over with the Microsoft person over the MSN chat room and got a stupid answer. In going to their old help files, I found this was a problem with Money 2001-it appears to still be a problem. Quicken does this correctly--I am going to trade in the Money 2004 for an new version of Quicken. This is a serious problem.
Rating:
Summary: Don't upgrade unless you have to!!!!!
Review: I was sailing along quite happy with my lil ole Money Standard 2000. I used the budgeting and reporting some, but mostly just kept track of my accounts and downloaded bank activity. THEN my bank upgraded and "recommended" we upgrade to the most recent version of Money. Oh, WHAT A MISTAKE! I hate it. Downloading items from the bank website, Money just enters them into your statement, matches the entry with a VERY wrong mate. I think it looks at your upcoming bills before it actually looks at the transactions (which, okay, I don't always have entered exactly right penny for penny). Before, in 2000-land, I didn't know how good I had it matching entries. A simple 8-transaction download can take 15 minutes at a minimum. Way, way too time consuming for something that's supposed to make my life easier. I can't imagine that ANY product testing was done before this was released. Save your money if you can. I'll deal with it until I can't stand it anymore and then convert to Quicken. ARRGHHH.
Rating: 
Summary: I've been very happy with MS Money
Review: I'm not quite sure what everyone has been having trouble with... I started using Money 2003, soon after it was released, and was very happy with it. I'm not convinced that the upgrade was worthwhile, but Money has certainly done the trick. I've had no problems connecting to my accounts, setting up budgets, creating and viewing reports, etc...Yes, it is a glorified spreadsheet, but Money saves me a ton of time, and I've found it to be a wonderful tool.
Rating: 
Summary: Top Notch Personal Finance Solution!
Review: I'm very new to managing my finances electronically, but Microsoft Money made it extremely easy! I have multiple accounts set up, and it ties right into my Pocket PC! I can enter transactions and track my account while I'm on the go! This tool has been indispensible, the reports it provides are in depth and easy to understand. Worth every cent I paid for it, so what if it's made by Microsoft, it's great software!
Rating:
Summary: Nice improvement over previous versions
Review: I've used every version of MS Money since Money 97 (off and on) including Money 99, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. There definitely was always room for some improvement but that's true of everything. Money 2004 seems to be a major improvement. Fast, easy, down to earth, but not "too stupid" for a normal person. I have a nice graphical display of all my bank and credit card accounts in an easy to understand and useful format. This program has come a long way and is one of the coolest that I've used in a while. Way to go Microsoft! :) (Good price too on Standard Edition, anyway)
Rating:
Summary: AWFUL PRODUCT!
Review: If I could give this "application" no stars I would.
"Features" within the application are nothing more than a direct link to several of Microsoft's websites. When I inquired about deactivating these "features", Microsoft's reply was essentially "sorry, this is part of the software."
As an avid and loyal user of Money since 2001, I will be switching to another package or trying to find my MS Money 2001 disks.
I already owned Money 2001 Standard Edition and expected similar feature sets in Money 2005 Standard....oops. If you want "retirement accounts", you need to purchase the 2005 Deluxe. If want the monthly Cash Flow forecast (like in Money 2001), that feature is GONE!
This is nothing more than brochure-ware for Microsoft's web sites, YOU have to pay for it, AND M$ has the audacity to actually have pop-up messages built into the product ASKING YOU TO UPGRADE.
[...]
Rating:
Summary: The best in Class, but not perfect
Review: In comparison to the competition, MS Money 2004 is really a superior product. I had been a Quicken user for years, and the change was easy and refreshing. I am not a financial mogul, nor am I an extremely diversified individual, but the features in Money go far beyond my needs. I'll be perfectly honest, I bought the program to have an updated checkbook register, and I have come to find the other features almost as useful. I'll summarize my favorite items:
1. The budgeting feature that allows you to customize and categorize your weekly, monthly and annual expenditures. This is really a handy feature for trying to stay within a budget, and the program clearly ties the outcome of the budget to savings goals. 2. The reporting features. At first, the sheer volume of report types that you can generate is a bit intimidating, but after a few times of working through what was available, it became clear the select few that I liked. Another handy feature is the fact that Money will save the settings of each report independently. I find that the best report is the monthly report, as it tracks your top expenditure categories, how you are doing on your savings, and how your net worth and investments are changing over time. Really a pretty useful thing to look at once a month. 3. The debt reduction feature. If you have a lot of loan, credit card or mortgage debt, this feature will be a great tool. You can select debt accounts that you want included in the calculation, tell Money how much you want to spend each month, and it will calculate the most effective way to make monthly payments for each of the loans to get you out of debt ASAP. Really a nice feature, and the best part is that you can run several scenarios very easily so that you will get a quick feeling for how much money you will save in the long run if you pay 500 a month vs. 250. 4. The feature that ties it all together for me is the monthly bill pay feature. While it is possible to use Money to get your account balances and pay your bills on-line (if your bank will let you), this feature will simply let you create a list of all of your monthly bills, paydays, and other recurring expenses/credits. Then, you can see what bills to pay in between what paychecks, and maximize the use of your money for a given period of time. Of course, the debt reduction feature is integrated into the bill summary, and the bill summary outputs to the monthly budget! Really a nicely done and tidy little package. Before software like this existed, I used to do all of the same tasks, but keep them all on a MS Excel spreadsheet, which required a lot of extra work on my part, and really didn't look as good at the end of the month. Suffice it to say that MS Money 2004 really gives you more data, and more options, than you will want, but doesn't clutter up the program by making you wade through them. The interface and data entry methods are all very clear and straightforward. That being said, often times people have a certain way that they like to do their finances. You may like to transfer money between accounts, or you may have odd types of accounts. In some cases, the program doesn't easily recognize what you are doing. For instance, I would make weekly savings deposits, but the program kept telling me that I should start making savings deposits or else I wouldn't meet my savings goals! I tried everything but eventually just learned to live with it (and then for some reason it started working). I think that the documentation for the program (all in the form of a help file) is good, but misses a lot in how to completely customize the program to capture the nuances of your financial plan. Despite that, I wholeheartedly recommend this program to both the financial fanatic and the average person with a checking account.
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