alex.moskalyuk

Suggestion to upgrade Microsoft Money 2005 to a better and improved Microsoft Money 2006 was among the things that MS Money links to on the welcome screen. The release notes implied that Microsoft added ETF funds to the stock menu, it fixed some bugs in the bill management, and threw in some coupons into the box that Microsoft Money 2006 is sold in. Doesn’t it look like they ran out of suggestions, and pretty soon the What’s New page will present “features” like “Brand new box, now in red color”.

Perhaps some day the company would actually try to improve and streamline the functionality of the product, but since it doesn’t look like Intuit is doing anything radically new with Quicken this year, Microsoft might have decided to play a lame duck. Even those some issues are still there.

First off, following the Windows Media Player route, MS Money developers figured they needed to introduce some brand new user interface, completely different from the tried old MS Office grey toolbar layout, and when you launch Money, you feel like you’ve just downloaded a brand new skin for Internet Explorer and switched it to full-screen mode. What’s ruining the experience is some random irrelevant menu options that keep appearing when I hover the mouse over the MS Money menus. They are not clickable, they are not relevant to Money, they don’t come from the underlying application, but they’re there. Notice the greyish Bookmarks tab - why would it be there?

The expense graph feature, the one that company probably views as important, as they portray it on promotional screenshots, did not get any improvements either. After using MS Money 2005 for a while, I hoped I could customize the expense graph feature for each of the accounts I have. Usually my paychecks and other income goes into checking account, and later on the savings part of it goes into Emigrant Direct high-yield savings. I try to pay everything through credit card, and at the end of the month the bill is paid from the checking account, which by that time has money in it, withdrawn from savings.

MS Money never imported the spending categories correctly for my checking account, but it did work well with Chase credit card, so I was hoping I could see the spending for that credit card only. Fat chance - Money keeps bringing in all accounts combined, presenting me with a detailed view of my household spending.

Gotta stop spending so much on that Unassigned stuff, I suppose, 90% of which is transfers from the checking account into the savings, and then at a later stage payment for credit card spending. And what’s with the smarts in MS Money 2006? If there’s an expense item from Conoco, and I assign it to Automobile category, there’s a pretty good chance that the next one down the list assigned to Conoco is also a gas purchase, don’t you think?

That’s not how MS Money Standard 2006 operates, as it makes you go down the list and indicate the category for each specific purpose, never remembering anything about the patterns. In essence, it looks like if you’re trying to track your spending and keep an eye on investments as well as general financial situation, you might just as well do it with another Microsoft product - Excel. Microsoft Money 2006 requires much hand-holding, and frequently complicates things instead of simplifying them.