Money 2003 Financial Suite (inc. Tax Saver Deluxe)

Putting it simply, Microsoft Money 2003 Financial Suite will allow you to record & track financial data such as your bank accounts , investments, bills, savings, and other assets.

The REAL power, however, of this package comes from the ability to download your transactions from your online bank account - Only a limited number of banks support this feature, so you'll need to check with your bank first .Once a statement is downloaded ,all payees from your transactions will become automatically registered with Money. You can then, for example, set up your bills to transfer automatically to one of your list of payees.

The transactions on your downloaded statement can also be categorised according to what items you are spending on, and Money can then track your expenditure by category or payee by giving numerous reports, views, and statistical data.

Also, if you're looking to record investments such as ISA's, one piece of advice, Money suggests that you should record your ISA's in the "Savings" section, under investments. - This may not very beneficial, as the information will remain static. What you really want to do is to break down you ISA's into individual funds and record the information in the "Portfolio" section according to the quantity & price of each fund unit.

Once you enter the "symbol code" for each fund, money can download and calculate (provide you have an internet connection) the total value of your investment based upon the current price of your individual funds online. This is an exceptional feature as not even my ISA provider gives online valuations yet!

There are numerous features in Money, including everything from planning to retirement , organising records (insurance, household documents) to making a will.

The Tax saver deluxe is advertised at being worth £29.99 and is perhaps a superfluous addition to the Money package. This is essentially a tool to allow you to complete your tax return online and I'm not sure why anyone would want to pay the quoted price tag for this component given the choice, but its included "free" anyway.

Before you decide to buy "Money 2003 Financial Suite" you'll need to consider how you're going to use it. You can begin recording your investment details and transactions by entering the information manually, but this may become cumbersome, and you may not reap the full benefits of Money. However, if you make use of the online features of Money, and want to keep track of your holdings, then this could be the single most important product you can buy for your pc.

Microsoft Money 2003 won't change your life, but considering the current economic climate, with constantly fluctuating markets, it's an excellent tool to get your finances organised and track your net worth on a daily basis.

Things I really like:
- Easy to use screens that you can customise.
- Ability to track just about anything with a value.
- Items are easy to import once they're in the right format.
- Auto income/expense category allocation for statement uploads.
- Great reporting capability.
- Ability to track costs associated to several proprties.

Things I don't like:
- The online prices for valuation updates only come from msn - they do not have a comprehensive list of funds.
- You can only import in money format. Not all online statements can provide this - e.g. AMEX in the UK. (Although I have found an excel add-in that helps).
- The online banking functionality has not been adopted by many UK banks - with the exception of statement downloads.

Almost a 5* subject to the above.

In other words, Microsoft have won again. And at some point I will need to move across from the withering Quicken to the strengthening Money. With the price drop to £23.99, I decided this was the time.

I have only been using Money for a week so I dont yet have any long term usability comments, but in general Money does everything Quicken did, and in similar ways. There are some niggles, but that is only to be expected when you change user interface. Here's one: when reconciling an account, in Quicken you could drag the mouse over all transactions you wanted to clear; in Money you have to click on each one individually. Not the end of the world, but something I would like changed.

At this stage there is one big gain from moving to Money - exporting reports to excel. For me that is a definite plus, for others it wont be relevant.

Now on to the migration itself...

Money will import your Quicken data file simply and easily, but in my case there was a big issue with transactions that have split categories. Money dropped all but the first category, leaving the other lines as unassigned. Where the line was a transfer to another account it did include the other side of the transaction in that account, but again unassigned.

The upshot is that the balances will be correct, but any income and expenditure report will have unassigned items. The totals are correct but the detail is not. For me that was not good enough, so I went through and edited all the split transactions to correct them (about 500 lines in total). This was made easier by a search function that allows you to look for unassigned transactions only. This took a few hours. The bigger your history the worse this problem will be. Or maybe it is not a generic problem and I was just unlucky.

The other migration comment is on file size. As with most MS applications, the file size is enormous. My Quicken data file was 2.8Mb. After converting into Money, I had a data file of 6.4 Mb! Very unlikely to be an issue for anyone, but worth noting.

To conclude:
- all the features of Quicken, so not a step backwards
- reconciliations take longer due to needing to click on all transactions
- exporting to excel (in .csv format) is potentially a big plus
- converting the Quicken data might result in a lot of unassigned transactions
- data file size increases dramatically

If I didnt think that Quicken was going to slowly fade away, I would not have moved to Money. And there is no compelling reason, from a feature and usability point of view, to do so. If you are thinking about migrating from Quicken to Money, you will be up and running very quickly, but be forwarned about split transactions.