Microsoft Money - Auotmatically Updating Share Prices

gordonr

Quote:I have the same problem. MS pulled the share price update service overnight.

There is clearly a demand for this service. What are the alternatives to MS Money to manage my finances now Quicken has gone as well?

There are a number of Finance Packages - a search will find them.

The problem is share price updates. No other Finance Packages do this as far as I am aware. The only solution appears to use one of the workarounds mentioned above.
I suspect there may be others as Microsoft pulling the plug has affected as enormous number of people

BreamoreBoy

stmary wrote: »

I have the same problem. MS pulled the share price update service overnight.

There is clearly a demand for this service. What are the alternatives to MS Money to manage my finances now Quicken has gone as well?

What do you want, direct drop in replacement, split desktop/online functionality, commercial or open source...? For starters search sourceforge.net for personal finance, then sort by downloads and the first 6 or so should give you some ideas. Also search getrichslowly.org for good-bye microsoft money. Be aware that many of the lite versions of commercial products are useless in that they'll only give you 1 account. There's also a strong US bias for all of these products. HTH.

LucianH

stmary wrote: »

What are the alternatives to MS Money to manage my finances now Quicken has gone as well?

I have over a decade of my accounts on MS Money which I currently run on an old XP machine. To date Money has done everything I need (keeping track of income/outgoings with extensive use of categories etc.). And with all history of my (many) accounts, it gives excellent trend reports and analysis. I also like the user interface.

I intend to continue using it (even when I upgrade my PC I will, hopefully, continue to use it (I've heard it runs OK on windows 7)). I’ve worked out ways to import statements from CSV downloads for all my accounts (which I needed when Nationwide stopped supporting Money!) and the only thing that the latest service withdrawal did was to stop the share price update.

So back to the original point of this thread – what I need to know is how to format a file for importing the share prices into Money. It’s easier enough to download share prices into an excel spreadsheet and, if I can work out what the minimum file content needs to be for Money, I’m prepared to attempted to write a macro to do it.

When I first noticed that the service had been removed I did a search but I only came up with US oriented sites – one of them being the “Ameridan's Microsoft Money Offline Weblog” mentioned by gordonr earlier in this thread ("microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/java-app-to-update-quotes/”) but I couldn’t get it to recognise UK shares - is there anybody that can shed light on how to do it for UK Shares?

SteveQB

LucianH, looking at the example, they use Ford, which has a symbol of 'F'. At it's very simplest, usually quotes in London use a .L after the company symbol, so Standard Chartered would be STAN.L Do you want to see if that works? Like you, I would like just a download from Excel, and get the prices into Excel myself.

LucianH

SteveQB wrote: »

LucianH, looking at the example, they use Ford, which has a symbol of 'F'. At it's very simplest, usually quotes in London use a .L after the company symbol, so Standard Chartered would be STAN.L Do you want to see if that works? Like you, I would like just a download from Excel, and get the prices into Excel myself.

Thanks, SteveQB. I've had a quick play with it and you can indeed add UK stocks to the list. However, when I try to "import into MS Money" or generate an OFX file and attempt to import that into Money I'm getting an error that the currency is USD.

As an experiment, I've manually edited the OFX file from USD to GBP and Money seems to go through a sucessful import process but it takes you through a process of selecting which account etc. and it appears as a sort of "downloaded statement". After a bit more fiddling of processing this statement it appears to have treated it as a statement of shares with zero holdings. This then removed them from the portfolio in Money. (I've now restored my Money file from the backup I took before I started this test!!!)

This was only a very quick test I did and I will need to investigate further (won't be 'til the weekend). I'd appreciate more posts to this thread in the meantime if anybody can help me understand how to import only the Share Price update info into Money. I'll be more than happy to share the answer (and any Excel Workbook I may need to create).

mikegreenland

I too am annoyed that MS has pulled the plug and have 16 years of data. If you LucianH (or anyone) can tell me a way to import just share prices that would keep me happy as well so please share info if you succeed. I don't think I am clever enough to achieve it myself.

To help out others this link is useful and the ideas work as I have tested it. If you have Money 2005 and want to re-load it then it goes for an immediate update - which is no longer there. This link tells you how to make a CD with the update embedded so it runs straight away. You do however need a working copy of Money and the original CD to start with.

money.mvps.org/faq/article/630.aspx

Seems I am not allowed to post a proper link so http etc needs to be in front.

LucianH

mikegreenland wrote: »

If you LucianH (or anyone) can tell me a way to import just share prices that would keep me happy as well so please share info if you succeed.

I want to see this one through to a conclusion and I hope that the collective "We" can work out how to do it. However, it may take some time and we need to pool as much info as possible.

One thing that has filled me with a bit more confidence is that if I put "ms money update share price" into google then this thread comes second on the list. The bit that that knocks that confidence is that the first one on the list is linked to social.microsoft.com/Forums/eu/money/thread/2c03e3d8-9bc1-4fc9-8862-78fcdb7e29d9 which links to a thread that "died" in July 2010 without, from what I can see, a conclusion.

Again, I will do what I can (but normally I can only afford time at the weekends) so if anybody else can contribute and do some investigation on other links then we'll try and pool the info.

prixon

Best idea is to read this thread which is still being updated on a daily basis and contains specific advice/workarounds for Money 2005 UK users:

http://microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/java-app-to-update-quotes/

For a further explanation also read this:

http://code.google.com/p/hle-ofx-quotes/wiki/UKUsers

P

LucianH

prixon wrote: »

Best idea is to read this thread which is still being updated on a daily basis and contains specific advice/workarounds for Money 2005 UK users:

http://microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/java-app-to-update-quotes/

For a further explanation also read this:

http://code.google.com/p/hle-ofx-quotes/wiki/UKUsers
P

Thanks. I have tried the hel-ofx-quotes as I mentioned above without much success. I would appreciate to hear from anybody who has got this working in the UK.

I've had a quick look through that site and it's a bit out of my depth at the moment. I'm not familiar with java. I'll try and spend some time this weekend to see if I can work it out.

prixon

it worked OK for me.

You don't need to understand Java, you just download and run the program as any other. You also have to set up a share portfolio on (preferably) the FT.COM website with the companies you want to update, and use the download to CSV option to creata a data file. Make sure you have a dummy investment account set up in Money then follow the instructions on previous link to upload the CSV data into the app, which creates the OFX file and triggers Money to autimatically upload it.

P