Simon Fell > Its just code > Money 2006

Sunday, February 26, 2006

I've been using a pretty old version of MS Money for a while (Money 2002 OEM), it has its flaws, but is generally ok. I decided to "upgrade" to Money 2006 today, so far I've been pretty disappointed.

• Many of the tools to download transactions from bank (e.g. E*Trade bank) require you to sign up for the service to access your money account on the web. I don't remotely understand (nor will the docs tell me) why these 2 features are intrinsically linked, I can't think of anything worse than having all my bank details uploaded to MSN and it being available from anywhere on the web, WTF should downloading transactions from E*Trade require that ?
• I had a bunch of to-do's setup in M2002, but this feature seems to have completely gone in the "upgrade", so not only have I lost my notes/todo's, I no longer seem to be able to do these in Money any more.
• The manage on line services is annoyingly context free, you can goto a page where it lists your accounts and for those that offer online setup there's a link, but you click the link, and if you're lucky it'll remember the name of the company and that it (it couldn't even manage that for Wells Fargo), it goes on to ask you about the company, the account type etc, all of which it already knows, dumb-ass
• The auto reconcile feature could come in handy, not sure yet.
• I got the premium version, but it appears that most of the premium specific features aren't in money at all, but free for one year deals with external services, and again some of which require you to sign up for the money on the web nonsense.
• What's with all the advertisements ? most pages have a related links sections most of which seem to be adverts from various things, the investments home page even has externals adds on it, stock charts have multiple adds on them, I don't appreciate paying for the privilege of being advertised too, really sucky
• The reports section seems unchanged, lots of reports, most of which don't quite tell you what you're really looking for

I haven't looked at everything yet, but so far, I haven't seen anything that is significantly better than the 4 year old version I was using, most of the new features require you to sign up for putting your money file on the web, and now its littered with annoying advertisements. If you have an existing version, save your money and don't bother "upgrading", its a waste of time & money.

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