Microsoft Money (PC)

The software comes with a converter for changing your Quicken files to the Money format to help migrate your old data. I suspect if you only used the Quicken software at the simple level it will work fine. If like me you have complex transactions recorded like stock splits or share buybacks recorded then you will find the file converts with some errors. Also my mortgage account was thousands of pounds out for some reason (it was trying to make me reconcile against an incorrect starting balance). It seriously took me an afternoon to reconcile all the errors.

That said, if you have no data to import, or if your quicken files are simple, then what of the program itself? Well, they have tried to make the front end very 'web' like. It is all very integrated with the internet - and so interesting articles and links are onhand. The thing is I don't want my financial software to look like the web - I want it to look like an accounting package. It is not that obvious where to click to find your balances! In short the front end stinks.

The reporting is adequate - it can slice and dice your data any which way you like - but if you're not expereinced with reporting programs I fear the casual user will be lost getting Money to show your data the way you want to show it.

What does work well is importing downloaded credit card statements etc. This is far, far better then quicken with the program making very good guesses at the categories which really speeds up reconciliation.

Also good is the portfolio section - it manages to find even my most obscure stocks and update them real time (something that Quicken failed at). Again though, the front end of the portfolio manager stinks.

This software does the job but is flawed. Given there is no competition on the market I fear Microsoft now have little incentive to improve it. A real shame, as tracking my finances has been one of the more useful benefits I have got from my home PC.

I've had nothing but trouble with MS Money 2005 since I bought it, and have in fact, gone back to using Money 2004 (which, incidentally, is excellent!).

A few of the problems I've come across are:

1) The new "merge" accounts section really doesn't work for me. In older versions of Money you could simple select which on-line accounts Money downloaded statements for. With Money 2005 it downloads all accounts from your financial institution. Annoying if you either don't want to take all accounts, or you share accounts (eg a joint accounts) with a partner.

2) For some reason it changed all my opening balances, so my balances were wrong for every account

3) My previous 3 months of bill payments were reset, so I had to manually go though nearly 200 transactions and "skip" them

4) My ISA and share account balances were way, way off. Looking at it, it transpired that Money 2005 decided to subtract money from my associated cash account for both "buys" *and* "sells"!! (Sells should obviously be a deposit to my cash account

And a few other minor niggles such as I couldn't get on with the new UI, although to be fair, I expect I'd get used to it in time.

In conclusion, most of my problems appeared to be due to upgrading from a previous version (although I've never had this much trouble upgrading older versions). So if you're already running a version on MS Money, stick with it. If you're new to MS Money, and you don't use a UK bank which supports background banking (I think Nationwide are the only), then you'll probably be okay. Mind you, I'd still recommend you try and get hold of a copy of Money 2004!