Money 2006 - Does not work as advertised!!!!

I have had Money2006 for over a month and during that time I have been
unable to have it download my account information successfully. I have
accounts with 2 different institutions, one for savings and checking
and the other for investments. Only once did money properly download
info from the bank. It correctly downloaded the 2 account numbers and
the checking transactions. It did not download any info for the savings
account other than its number.

As for my investment accounts, I tried to download my accounts from an
investment institution. I have 4 accounts there. After the attempted
download it displayed 4 accounts without any details except some
transactions. No positions or account numbers.

I bought this product because I thought I wouldn't have to go the pain
of manually transactions.

My mistake was not getting around to setting it up until it was too
late to return it.

argh!!!!

Dick
Mon Jan 02 16:52:01 CST 2006

Sorry to hear of your situation. Many people expect miracles here, in part
because Microsoft promises them. The whole downloaded transaction thing its
a kludge and a fake. For some people with some FIs it works great. For
others, it's a wonder it ever works at all.

But the only real Microsoft issue here is that they promise more than the
technology can reliably deliver. The real issue is that the banks just
aren't interested in supporting a purpose-built interface designed to make
this work well.

Personally, I've used Money for more than a decade and entered tens of
thousands of transactions without ever downloading anything more complicated
than a stock quote into Money. It just depends on what you want to
accomplish and how much effort it's worth to you to accomplish.

"john coltrane" <tendengarci@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1136225790.357819.311390@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>I have had Money2006 for over a month and during that time I have been
> unable to have it download my account information successfully. I have
> accounts with 2 different institutions, one for savings and checking
> and the other for investments. Only once did money properly download
> info from the bank. It correctly downloaded the 2 account numbers and
> the checking transactions. It did not download any info for the savings
> account other than its number.
>
> As for my investment accounts, I tried to download my accounts from an
> investment institution. I have 4 accounts there. After the attempted
> download it displayed 4 accounts without any details except some
> transactions. No positions or account numbers.
>
> I bought this product because I thought I wouldn't have to go the pain
> of manually transactions.
>
> My mistake was not getting around to setting it up until it was too
> late to return it.
>
> argh!!!!
>

Scoop
Mon Jan 02 17:47:51 CST 2006

With more than a dozen different accounts, only one of mine works well
"online". For most of the others, I can download .qif files. It's not
quite as seemless and in both cases there is always a lot of clean-up
that needs to be done. I some cases, the workload isn't that different
from entering all transactions manually, especially for accounts that
don't have that many. I just accept it for what it is...

Howie
Mon Jan 02 18:22:38 CST 2006

On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 15:52:01 -0700, "Dick Watson"
<littlegreengecko@mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:


>
>Personally, I've used Money for more than a decade and entered tens of
>thousands of transactions without ever downloading anything more complicated
>than a stock quote into Money. It just depends on what you want to
>accomplish and how much effort it's worth to you to accomplish.
>

I only have eight years of Money experience and manually entered
everything (except for the stock quote updates) until a couple of
months ago. For a two month period I downloaded transactions from my
bank and discovered the amount of time to clean up that information
and then subsequently reconcile was greater than my age old practice
of inputting receipts as obtained and reconciling when the bank
statement arrived. I have since "upgraded" to M2006 (from M2004 most
recently) and can't imagine it offers any speed increases to this
process so I plan to revert back to the "old fashioned" method.

I found that nearly every downloaded transaction had to be
edited/modified in some way and this exercise was especially tedious
and slow when working with the scores of transactions on a monthly
basis which would "attach" themselves to an existing item of like or
equal value. The program is very slow in responding to the commands
required to "unseparate" these pairs and as a result, as I mentioned
earlier, the whole process became comparatively inefficient.


--Howie

Ron
Mon Jan 02 19:24:45 CST 2006

On 2 Jan 2006 10:16:30 -0800, "john coltrane" <tendengarci@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I have had Money2006 for over a month and during that time I have been
>unable to have it download my account information successfully. I have
>accounts with 2 different institutions, one for savings and checking
>and the other for investments. Only once did money properly download
>info from the bank. It correctly downloaded the 2 account numbers and
>the checking transactions. It did not download any info for the savings
>account other than its number.
>
>As for my investment accounts, I tried to download my accounts from an
>investment institution. I have 4 accounts there. After the attempted
>download it displayed 4 accounts without any details except some
>transactions. No positions or account numbers.
>
>I bought this product because I thought I wouldn't have to go the pain
>of manually transactions.
>
>My mistake was not getting around to setting it up until it was too
>late to return it.
>
>argh!!!!

A lot of people seem to report a lot of problems with downloading. I've
occasionally had problems getting a particular version of Money properly set up
to do so, but in general, I have not had problems with downloading -- either
directly or by using the financial institution web site to generate an OFX or
similar file.

However, I have NEVER used "automatic" downloading or downloading in the
background (with Passport). I have no idea whether this makes a difference or
not, but most of the people writing and having problems seem to be using the
automatic, background downloads.

I click on the "internet update" bar at the bottom of my screen to initiate
downloads from four of my institutions. Two are credit card accounts; one is
CheckFree which I use for bill-paying; and the fourth is a brokerage at which I
have two and my wife one account. These downloads rarely, if ever, require
clean-up. We used to also have multiple accounts at ETrade, in addition to the
above, which also downloaded OK using the same methods.

We have two other credit card accounts as well as my regular bank for which I
visit their web sites, from time to time, and manually initiate an account
download from the FI's web site. Again, no problems here. There are some
other accounts which I could download from the internet, but the activity is so
infrequent that it's not worth the effort to do so.

Oh, I've been doing this since Aug 1997, and my money file is now 91.6MB, so
size clearly is not an issue.

Just another point of view.
--ron

Glenn
Tue Jan 03 00:19:42 CST 2006

Dick,

I agree with you. MS needs to change the advertising and the BANKS need to
stop changing things so they can profit from what MS has to offer. The Banks
don't have to create software(although in the late '90's, BofA offered the
"Managing Your Money" software that was a direct dial-in for transaction
updating and BillPay-an overall good program) yet they are making it more
difficult to manage the money we keep in their institutions.

Eventually, this will catch up with them.

Glenn

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko@mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:%23A$yf8%23DGHA.2912@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
> Sorry to hear of your situation. Many people expect miracles here, in part
> because Microsoft promises them. The whole downloaded transaction thing
> its a kludge and a fake. For some people with some FIs it works great. For
> others, it's a wonder it ever works at all.
>
> But the only real Microsoft issue here is that they promise more than the
> technology can reliably deliver. The real issue is that the banks just
> aren't interested in supporting a purpose-built interface designed to make
> this work well.
>
> Personally, I've used Money for more than a decade and entered tens of
> thousands of transactions without ever downloading anything more
> complicated than a stock quote into Money. It just depends on what you
> want to accomplish and how much effort it's worth to you to accomplish.
>
> "john coltrane" <tendengarci@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:1136225790.357819.311390@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>>I have had Money2006 for over a month and during that time I have been
>> unable to have it download my account information successfully. I have
>> accounts with 2 different institutions, one for savings and checking
>> and the other for investments. Only once did money properly download
>> info from the bank. It correctly downloaded the 2 account numbers and
>> the checking transactions. It did not download any info for the savings
>> account other than its number.
>>
>> As for my investment accounts, I tried to download my accounts from an
>> investment institution. I have 4 accounts there. After the attempted
>> download it displayed 4 accounts without any details except some
>> transactions. No positions or account numbers.
>>
>> I bought this product because I thought I wouldn't have to go the pain
>> of manually transactions.
>>
>> My mistake was not getting around to setting it up until it was too
>> late to return it.
>>
>> argh!!!!
>>
>
>

Chris
Tue Jan 03 06:54:36 CST 2006

"Glenn B." <pkguy323@NOSPAMMyahoo.com> wrote in message
news:2Iouf.6597$uv.2624@trnddc06...
> Dick,
>
> ... the BANKS need to stop changing things so they can profit from what MS
> has to offer.

They apparently consider web applications the better choice. That's what all
banks seem to offer, at a minimum. From there perspective, it's a much
easier system to manage. They don't have to write their own - I believe
several vendors offer packages, but the big banks obviously have the
resources to create something from scratch.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

john
Tue Jan 03 08:23:22 CST 2006

I used to use Quicken a while back and I used to fall behind in
updating transactions (can you say procrastinate).
I figured this would at least make things more bearable. I guess the
answer is to not fall behind.
One other annoyance while I'm here is all the advertisements in the app
while I am connected to my passport account.

oh well

cheers

john

Chris
Tue Jan 03 08:34:45 CST 2006

"john coltrane" <tendengarci@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1136298202.381228.119980@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> One other annoyance while I'm here is all the advertisements in the app
> while I am connected to my passport account.

You can reduce, but not totally eliminate, the ads. Poke around in the
system settings. You'll find something about sponsorships.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

john
Tue Jan 03 17:00:42 CST 2006

I there anyway I can set the default to work offline?

thanks