Is MIcrosoft Money any good?

gimpymoo

Just wondering if anyone uses it and if it will help with beginning to manage our finances?

Is it just as good to use a spreadsheet in Excel?

What are the benefits of MS Money?

Thanks for any help.

Lorian

Money takes a little time to set up but it is VERY good.

bekkithedevil

I ordered the 2005 version (ie latest UK one - how comes USA gets 2007 already?! I want one!) yesterday and am awaiting it's delivery!

I had an older version years ago and remember it being good but I'm glad someone else agrees it's good!

I use a really complicated spreadsheet I made myself at the moment (yes, I'm a number counting freak! lol) and I like it, but would prefer something else to do the work of allocating cost categories (for example) for me!

The MS Money website is quite good btw - http://www.microsoft.com/uk/homepc/money/default.mspx

Hope I made some sense in all of that!

calleyw

don't use MS money nor excel use openoffice it works as well as MS products at no cost.

As I will not pay for things like that if I can get it for free.

Yours



Calley

Grade_A_Reject

You can download a free 90 day trial of Money 2007 from
http://www.microsoft.com/money/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=003

It's the American version but I'm using Money 2006 (also Americanised) and it works fine for UK. The only bits which are noticably American are if you try setting up fancy things like calculations on mortgage schedules but for logging of transactions it's the same as the UK version.

Personally I set up all my recurring bills and get them to appear on the account register just after payday. i.e I get paid on the last working day of the month so if a is DD due on the 17th I'd set it to appear on the account register 18 days before it's due. This way I can see what my money left over for the rest of the month is. It would be nice if you could forecast to a given date but you can't but the method I've described works equally well.

It's stopped me going overdrawn many many times over the time I've been using it. You can also setup budget categories and assign any income/expenditure to a budget category so you can analyse your spending

Grade_A_Reject

Just remembered a package I used to use called Smart Accounts. It's shareware which you can download from http://downloads.theregister.co.uk/Windows/Business/Accounting/smart-accounts.html

This has many features which are better than MS Money (i.e being able to forecast your balance). I's one of the few pieces of software I actually liked enough to buy, I think the registration cost about £28.

saver_sam

We've been using Money for years and recently updated to 2005. I would recommend it, and believe it has a cash flow which looks like it forecasts your balances. You can keep track of your accounts, mortgage, loans, shares unit trusts, all sorts and we like it.

Gemmzie

Yes, very good

As others have said, the cash flow is very helpful and it can "trend" items, so will look at what you roughly spend on a certain area and trend your future spending

It also has a section for car costs

And the debt reduction planner is excellent - works out your min payments and if you want to regularly or once-off overpay it tells you were to allocate the payments

maryb

Grade_A_Reject wrote:

You can download a free 90 day trial of Money 2007 from
http://www.microsoft.com/money/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=003

It's the American version but I'm using Money 2006 (also Americanised) and it works fine for UK. The only bits which are noticably American are if you try setting up fancy things like calculations on mortgage schedules but for logging of transactions it's the same as the UK version.

Personally I set up all my recurring bills and get them to appear on the account register just after payday. i.e I get paid on the last working day of the month so if a is DD due on the 17th I'd set it to appear on the account register 18 days before it's due. This way I can see what my money left over for the rest of the month is. It would be nice if you could forecast to a given date but you can't but the method I've described works equally well.

It's stopped me going overdrawn many many times over the time I've been using it. You can also setup budget categories and assign any income/expenditure to a budget category so you can analyse your spending

Hope this isn't a stupid question but if you download your statements through online banking how do you stop the entry going through twice. ie once because you have set up an automatic entry for gas or whatever and then again when the direct debit actually goes through. If I could get this sorted it would make Money really useful for me because I find the cash flow forecaster is a bit hit and miss.

One thing I really like about Money is that they do a version you can download onto a Pocket PC for free (there's probably one for Palm as well) as long as you have got the desktop version. I rely totaly on my Pocket PC to synchronise my calendar at work with my calendar at home. It means I can have three diaries and they are all up to date - that would just never happen with a paper diary. With the pocket Money version I can remind myself what my fiancial position is even when I am at work

smokybabe

can I ask a stupid question as well? I've just bought microsoft money 2006 excel (off Ebay of course!) and I can't figure out now to get my Lloyds bank connection set up for the online banking. Maybe I'm being a bit thick but I've puzzled over this for the last two days. The link posted in one of the previous posts above shows that Lloyds is affiliated so it is possible but when I try I only get a list of ?American Banks in the list in money itself. Any help would be much appreciated.

Jaymz

I have been using it for years too, its great and I couldn't live without it now!
Its perfect for tracking accounts (if you have lots of them) and it even had a debt management planner built in too plus loads of other nifty little features