I'm looking for an alternative to Quicken, and Money would seem to be an
obvious possibility, but what I have just read about its handling of
foreign currencies would make it useless to me. If I understood it
correctly, Money provides a long list of predetermined currencies but
makes it impossible to add any more.
If this is true it is stupid, almost beyond belief. Nobody needs
seventy currencies (or whatever the number is) but even if you only need
half-a-dozen there are several reasons why you might need to create new
ones:
(1) New currencies come into existence from time to time, perhaps
because of a regional grouping like the euro zone, or because new
countries come into existence, like Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Money has picked up both of these, but how does Microsoft know that
there won't be others?
(2) You may need to preserve transactions in a currency even if it no
longer exists. For instance, I lived in Belgium before the euro was
adopted, and I had accounts in Belgian francs which I want to keep -
they include security transactions and details of a house purchase, any
of which I may need at some time for tax reporting.
(3) From time to time, a country may reform its currency, typically
because its value has fallen so far that there are too many zeroes in
all the numbers. When this happens both the old and new currencies will
be in circulation for a time. And even when the conversion is complete,
users may still need to keep records in the old currency - as in (2) above.
MS could have learned all this from a brief discussion with any
accountant or banker with a little international experience. Why don't
they make their people take a few steps in the real world before turning
them loose on program design?