Money 2003 Financial Suite (inc. Tax Saver Deluxe)

In recent editions, Microsoft has increased integration with Internet features, linking to MSN Money. The increased dependency on signing into MS Passport continues to baffle users, as the updates it provides can be handled without signing into Passport. In this edition the reliance is even greater: when loading Money Express (the Money-lite) reminder system, it presents a sign-in window when Internet access isn't required, thus slowing down use.

Users upgrading from a previous edition will find very little to write home about apart from some user-interface and report tweaks, a more customisable and detailed homepage, background connection to your banks and more links to MSN Money and FTyourmoney.com. There's a small performance improvement over 2002: users of the Financial Suite edition get improved investing tools for research and portfolio management and Quicken users will as usual find that there is a converter wizard should they want to transfer their Quicken data.

As with all personal finance management products, the benefit users get from this will be determined by the effort they put in. Money 2003 is a high-quality personal finance package that with regular use proves extremely beneficial. --Colin Neal

The share graphs and comparisons are the best feature of
"money " 2003 and the expert assistants are very useful.
This programme is a must for all money control people.


The Jury's Still Out on the Upgrade   April 13, 2003
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

I recently upgraded to Money 2003 from the dinosaur 99 version... not entirely sure it was a good move. Yes, this version has a nicer looking interface, but looks aren't everything. A couple of my accounts that used to download from Nationwide no longer do, and quite a few tasks seem harder to perform than in my old faithful version.

Having said all that, if you DON'T have a version of Money at all, then don't waste time. It's an excellent programme for keeping track of spending and well worth having if only for the "happy noise" you get when you reconcile your accounts (I still get a thrill after years of successful reconciliations!!)


A note for Quicken users   February 12, 2003
 65 out of 67 found this review helpful

A decided to migrate from Quicken to Money. Reason: as far as I could tell Money had caught up with Quicken (or blatantly copied!) in terms of features, and Intuit seem to be investing less and less resource into keeping Quicken fresh.

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.


Immensely useful, though not worthing upgrading from 2002   January 31, 2003
 11 out of 13 found this review helpful

A recent newspaper report said that over 9 million Britons suffer from "financial phobia" - a condition which renders them incapable of forming a "consistent and productive relationship with their money".

if that's the case, MS Money ought to be available on prescription. It's incredibly easy to use for anybody who's not used to keeping track of their finances.

If you have a compatible bank or building society internet banking facility (for example, Nationwide's, which I use), you can download items directly into your "account register". Company names, etc., often come down in the same shorthand code that appears on your printed statements - but correct this to a fulle rversion once, and future downloaded items automatically use the corrected name. It's touches like this that go a long way to curing one's phobia about sorting out your money!

If you already have Money 2002, there possibly aren't enough improvements to make upgrading an essential purchase. Some of the "upgrades", such as a task-based home page, are less than useful, especially when the customisable "normal" front page is so useful. But as an upgrade from hiding from the bank manager, it's an essential purchase!


Useful tool..   December 2, 2002
 69 out of 71 found this review helpful

I was a user of MS Money a few years back and pressure to sort out my finances drew me back. To keep this brief..

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.