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Show Me The Money - Microsoft Money Vs. Quicken
prostoalex writes "The weblog entry 'Show me the money' is an interesting tale of Microsoft Money from a developer who now manages software development in the Tablet PC group at Microsoft. Having worked before with Money, which was assigned a task of beating Quicken, Philip describes the disasters that happen when marketing and advertising people rule the software development: 'Money's success or failure was judged using the same metrics as MSN's websites. Metrics like minutes viewed per month. Like ad revenue. Like click-through. Stickiness. I am not making this up.'"
...now with 95% MORE corruption!
Most people don't use either because their bank/credit card doesn't support them.
The biggest thing I have found useful is online bill pay.
Yay
This just adds credence to a problem that Microsoft seems to be suffering from. The Marketing and Advertising divisions of Microsoft dictate the direction of the company. Sure, there needs to be some work done with their code-monkeys to stop these exploits from even being created in the first place, but maybe the programmer's jobs would be easier if they did not have to perform on a tight deadline created by those who have nothing to do with the products' creation. A shame too, considering that not all MS software is crap. I'm not an apologist, I'm just not afraid to admit that it's not entirely the fault of the coders that they have working for them.
The weblog entry 'Show me the money' is an interesting tale of Microsoft Money from a developer who now manages software development in the Tablet PC group at Microsoft.
That should read: The weblog entry 'Show me the money' is an interesting tale of Microsoft Money from a former Misrosoft developer who now waits in line for his free cheese every week.
Wow, I don't expect him to last long there making public statements like this!
Put identity in the browser.
Sure there are folks who have disperate accounts and complex fincial arrangements where that might make sense, and they're the 1% actually using these products. For everyone else, a decade ago there was a demand because people wanted to keep track of their finances between bank statements. Today you just click online and your bank shows you exactly where your finances are.
As banks try to differentiate themselves in the online marketplace, you can bet they'll expand their offerings until they compete with the offerings from Intuit and Microsoft. Perhaps those firms should stop trying to sell millions of copies to customers and instead try and sell server based software to the banks to produce a customer interface, or are they already doing thatas well?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From what I know, Microsoft money is a standalone application for Windows. How, then would they measure minutes viewed, click-through, etc unless they secretly transfer these statistics when the computer is online?
I went to the Microsoft Money (TM) website, and they don't seem to have a web-based or online version of it, in which context these stats would make sense.
Does M$ track and report the amount of time each application was in use on a PC? Sounds improbable, but with a TFH on, it's hard to say.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
You're missing the point completely. MS & Quicken both managed to screw up their personal offerings to the point that even regular users still bitch and moan. Please don't send these same developement teams to build the back-end for web apps that people are currently happy with. There's a certain point at which even intelligence can't compensate for complexity.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
OMG the author mentions Telemate! I've forgotten all about it. Well, not really forgotten it, only forgot its name (the name Terminate, from its l33t competitor hangs in my mind for some reason).
Telemate was the ULTIMATE BBS terminal application! It did all sorts of funky protocols (like Z-modem with resumed downloads), it did chained downloads with correctly guesstimated time-left for current/all file(s), you could use plugins (like one plugin that let you see JPGs when downloading so you could easily cancel the ghey ones before having completed them) it was multi-threaded, had cool text-based windows, scripts, it was totally the bomb!
*snif* finally a Microsoft employee brings a tear to my eye for something else than excruciating frustration..
Excuse me while I wallow in nostalgia..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I keep all my financial details in a spreadsheet (OpenOffice.Org calc of course :) and with a few simple formulas to calculate totals, I can keep track of all my cash with no issues whatsoever.
does this make anyone else wonder that MS is finally beginning to feel the pinch from all lawsuits and the growing popularity of linux and other OSS products?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
I don't play games much anymore and can do anything I need on my FreeBSD box, but for my finances all I use is Quicken. I update it daily and use it to plan budgets and future savings. I've seen some of the open source finance programs but Quicken really rocks.
As opposed to a bunch of propeller-beanie techies who wouldn't know what a customer wants if he was screaming it in their faces? I've worked on projects where the technologists were in charge, and it's equally ugly. The best result seems to come from collaborative efforts where the marketing types say, "We need X," and the tech heads tell them why it's lame, derivative, and technologically uncool. The two sides squabble for a while, then someone in management threatens both sides with unemployment and it gets done.
I am shocked, shocked!
Microsoft has never needed a decent marketing team -- they were handed their monopoly on a silver platter by IBM. Since then, their business strategy has had more to do with intimidating OEMs than appealing to customers. Still, I don't think their office ads are as bad or dumb as their choice of a bug as the spokesmodel for MSN! :)
...even with those type of metrics vs. real software quality metrics Microsoft Money is a superior quality product compared to Quicken.
Don't even get me started on the lack of a 'real' money management software package on Mac OS. Quicken is a joke.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Quicken has much better set-up, more support, and a more professional look. Money has the ONE "killer" feature for me. It can show a chart, based on your bills and paychecks you enter in, showing how much money is in an account.
I use this to look at my checking account, and make sure that my lowest point of money each month remains at a certain level. Its very obvious weeks in advance if your checking account is going to drop below the minimum balance, etc.
I used quicken for a few days and couldn't find this feature, so I went back to Money.
I forgot about the reports that Money and Quicken produce. My bank at least doesn't produce anything like wht Money produces and it only shows checks or CC charges that cleared.
One time, this doctor's office said that I didn't pay one of their bills. I produced a report showing the payments, dates, and even check numbers. I made sure all the checks cleared - they did. I then walked in with the report, showed it to the office manager, and she just took it and said she'd confirm it. After not hearing anything for two days, I called. She said thta everything checked out and appologized.
Or a marketing genius.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I worked in retail back then. We dealt with a lot of Microsoft products, and I saw their play many times.
First, you find a market with a clear leader. Then, you produce a knock-off, and use marketing to move eyeballs towards your product, convincing the masses that it's superior. (This is the only part that the actual product quality plays. If it sucks so bad that nobody will be fooled into thinking it's superior, then the quality needs to be better.) Finally, if it looks like the market leader will survive, then buy them out; otherwise, drop your price to something minimal and wait it out.
This was played out nowhere as clearly as Quicken. Microsoft made MS Money (which sucked terribly). MS did everything they could to make people see Money. Then they tried to buy Intuit, the makers of Quicken (but Unc' Sam put a stop to that).
Microsoft was clearly dumbfounded. Their three-step plan didn't work. What could they do? MS Money thrashed in agony for a year or two until Microsoft realized they might actually have to put some engineers into improving their product.
Not long after that, I left retail, and knocked the last dust of Microsoft products off my boots. So I don't know what's happened since then; only that every bank I've used supports MS Money downloads.
Most of us watched something similar in the browser wars, but more pronouced. Didja notice that IE was constantly improving lots, right up until IE 4? That's when they started to bundle it with the OS to get eyeballs instead of having to rely on other people who might be able to form opinions of their own. (Actually, the bundling started with IE 3 IIRC, but towards the end of its lifecycle.)
Anyway, when you think of things in those terms, then you want eyeballs. You want people thinking about MS Money as long as possible. That's your only goal. Meeting customer demand is irrelevant, so long as you don't fail by enough to lose eyeballs. And eyeballs are what marketroids know about (well, that and gin).
This entire business strategy is exactly the way for a successful monopoly in one market to expand into other markets. (Leveraging the monopolized markets, like happened with IE, is good too when you can pull it off.) It's terrible for the society, because it mutilates Adam Smith's invisible hand and leaves one finger. But it's good for the share prices.
Money has the ONE "killer" feature for me. It can show a chart, based on your bills and paychecks you enter in, showing how much money is in an account.
First, you need a bank that doesn't have bullshit minimum balance fees on their checking accounts.
Second, Quicken can show a dollar amount, based on your bills and paychecks you enter in, showing how much money will be left in an account on the latest date for which a recorded transaction exists. I enter all my bills in when I get them with the on-bill due date as the date entered. Quicken then shows me the current day's balance as well as the balance that will be in the account after all the entered transactions occur. It's very obvious weeks in advance if I'm going to have to transfer money into my checking account or wait until the next paycheck is direct-deposited so there's enough in there to cover all the bills.
If you need a graph to tell you that sort of information, then you're just the kind of customer Microsoft wants-- one who eschews thought.
The learning curve was fairly high, not being an accountant and not knowing anything about this Double Entry Bookkeeping thing.
I had used Quicken before, and found it OK, but I don't normally run windows...
Once I made it through the Included tutorials and documentation, I have used GNUcash regularly for the last year or so and am a very happy user.
It is unfortunate that GNUcash is not on enough radar screens to show up in a weblog like this one. A REAL comparison would be nice.
..is it that disgruntled Microsoft employees just write scathing online criticisms and/or exposés of their former employer, but disgruntled people who work at every other company in the world go on shooting sprees?
I guess the Microsofties are just a bunch of pussies.
I tried Money back in 2002. My Quicken files were up to 1.7M and would no longer fit on a backup floppy
Money imported my Quicken files and they swelled to 20 megs.
Must have been all of the Ads taking up space.
A friend I know runs a small business. They use MS Money to keep track of small finance items, sort of like a cash book.
:-)
They still use the 16-bit version of Money from the Windows 3.11 for Workgroup days. Why? Because it's simple, and all it does is the books. They won't upgrade because all the later versions of Money want to go on the internet and do other fancy things making it harder - not easier - to use. This is one of the points that the article mentions first.
Personally, I use gnucash and it does for me
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Especially a creepy bug ... I mean, its this pudgy guy in spandex following children around. It portrays an accurate representation of the spyware you pick up with MS web products, but I wouldn't think they'd market that as a feature ...
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I read it as "Microsoft Money Vs. Chicken", I was pondering what the hell these guys were smoking when they wrote this article. Then i realised it was my screwup for once, not theirs.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
Just because of your response! I gave it to a less-affluent family down the street that has a PC so they can better manage their funds. Nothing like planting the seed for a new Microsoft customer for life!
Blar.
There is a difference between sales and marketing. As you point out, salespeople have to be reigned in and controlled, because they will sell anything. Many software salespeople truly don't understand the limitations of their product, and will try to put a square peg in a round hole if they can get the sale, even if that means shipping an engineer with every unit.
What the article was talking about was a Marketing organization that wasn't thinking straight. There is a profound difference. In this case, Marketing was out of control, not Sales. I have seen this many times. They made one of the most common mistakes that marketing organizations make, namely checklist selling against the competition. This is a no-win situation. First one product is "ahead", then the other, wake me up when you have something new to say.
In order to really make a dent in a market, you have to change the playing field, not just tweak the product. Microsoft is scary/dangerous not because they release new versions of Office occasionally, but because from time to time they do really profound things like boot everyone else out of the Office business by betting on Windows when everyone thought Windows was a non-starter. Remember when Excel used to ship with its own Windows shell, before Windows was available? No? Well, I do. I remember the difference between that early Excel and Lotus, too. Lotus had more checklist features for a long time, but Excel -- it was just plain beautiful and fun to use. Once you used it, you couldn't go back to Lotus, even if it had some bullshit statistical function that Excel didn't have (yet).
Now THAT'S product marketing -- long term perspective, vision, eye on the goal line, pick your cliche of the day.
I hate to admit it (as a Linux user) that I use Microsoft Money. I've used MS Money since 2001, and the reason? Because I could try it before I bought it. As far as I can tell there's no way to try the latest version of Quicken without first plunking down some cash. And then if I don't like it, I'm stuck with something that I don't like.
I've tried gnucash and Moneydance. Frankly, they suck. I would love to see a usable personal finance software package from the F/OSS crowd that will run on my linux boxes. But I haven't found one yet. The only two options (IMHO) are Quicken and MS Money. And I'm not going to pay for Quicken until I'm sure that it will meet my needs. And personal financial management software is absolutely critical in my ability to maintain what I espouse in my signature. I use MS Money every day. I skip a day every week or so. But if I ever skipped a week, I'd feel very uncomfortable about my personal finances.
So, I'd much prefer to use a F/OSS package that accomplishes what I can do in MS Money. And, in lieu of that, I'd prefer one that was platform independant. But nothing that I've tried yet has come even close.
FYI: I run MS Money under linux using Win4Lin
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Enough said!
what.?! those office commercials are awesome..
with people running to eachoteher and piling up like for sports and whatever.. it's awesome.. i think they're awesome.. i'm not being an ass or sarcastic or anything, i truely think their great
....hire or use any marketing or advertising people who are not programmers themselves. They should have a clear understanding what the process is *first* from hands on experience in some depth. Sort of like in a manufacturing factory, all the management should have come up from working the line originally.
Of COURSE he's not a feature, he's a...well, you know.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You know...I know you're right, but I think you're wrong.
:) and sometime utterly useless.
One month ago I had to pass a Marketing exam which basically was about "studying" a couple threehundred pages books on the subject of marketing and answer 50 multiple choice questions.Feh ! I bargained a not satisfactory vote for 3 more months of time wasted into memorizing silly "right answers".
+-80% of the book was well written vapourware with a glassing of rational analysis, but there were some valuable hints in the salesman section.The big point of all the marketing exam was "customer must be satisfied".
Now you say customer feedback is important and I couldn't agree more : after all, the customer is paying so we'd like him to be satisfied and to come back for more. But who's giving the job to the marketeer ? The Company is and according to that M$ guy, M$ was pushing Money as a "portal" to sell advertisement space for advertisers ; in other words the clients were NOT the Money end-users, but the advertisement agents.
So was the marketing team really so shitty ?I don't think so, as they were probably requested to sell Money to ad-agencies and probably concentraded their effort for this purpose, not for the purpose of end-user satisfaction.
This is consistent with the fact that relatively few people actually routinely use Quicken/Money every day, unlike Word. I think M$ choosed not to invest too much geek time on building a superior product and opted to make money on Money by selling ads ; which again is consistant with the end-user financial market, bent on extracting money from the customer rather then helping the customer make more money.
What M$ didn't like is the fact Quicken was and still is taking away customers from this advertising scheme ; marketing isn't to blame if some other company is making a better product, when marketing was asked to sell the product NOT to end user, but to ad-agents.
Btw, marketing is evil
Last time I checked, no banks "supported" either Quicken or Money. If you accidentally import the bank data twice, both packages will happily post it twice, and you'll spend an hour removing the double posts. That's not support.
Maybe that's why few people actually use personal finance managers. PFMs are designed by people who apparently have never used them.
Market positioning of "like Quicken without the file corruption" would've been da bomb.
"Trying to get non-existent transaction" errors creep into brand new files. Death by corruption is more than once a year so good luck doing taxes. Intuit's corruption recovery instructions when followed to the letter do not work. Coincidence? Intuit offers recovery services for corrupted files and charges for them. The charge is way more than the product retail price.
A solid foundation database with good testing and error recovery and first rate Quicken import could have been a market owner.
I am still using Managing Your Money from Andrew Tobias. It is DOS based, and I am planning on moving it over to DOSEMU. He sold the program to H & R Block, and then they dropped it.
The trouble is, that marketing departments are usualy so far removed from Customer Service departments that to a marketing person "User Feedback" sounds like some sort of exotic disease...
Marketing departments are more interested in _telling_ users what they want, than asking them.
Advanced users are users too!
As banks produce better and better online banking systems, is there still a place for Money / Quicken?
Yes. Online Banking only services a particular type of customer (the ones living from paycheck to paycheck, who only have a single bank account, no investments, a single mortgage). It doesn't take much to exceed what Online Banking is capable of.
I do all of my banking through Quicken (used to use CheckFree for bill payments). All but one of my monthly bills is entirely automatic and online (and I'm just being lazy about that one), which saves me from having to keep a bunch of stamps around and hand-write checks every month. If I had direct-deposit it would be perfect. The end-result is a very low-maintenance situtation with regards to getting my monthly bills paid on time.
Also, there's more to managing your money then knowing what you have today (which is about all that an online bank statement will show you). Tracking that data locally allows you to see (with pretty pictures!) what your finances looked like a year ago compared to now. But the biggest feature, since I have all of my payments automatically entered up to 30 days ahead, is that I tend to plan my cash flow 30-60 days in advance.
Much nicer then living paycheck to paycheck, a lot less stress too. My paychecks are only entered when I actually get paid, and as long as I have enough money in the bank to show a positive balance 30 days from now, I'm doing well enough.
As banks try to differentiate themselves in the online marketplace, you can bet they'll expand their offerings until they compete with the offerings from Intuit and Microsoft. Perhaps those firms should stop trying to sell millions of copies to customers and instead try and sell server based software to the banks to produce a customer interface, or are they already doing thatas well?
Most banks around here who are trying to differentiate themselves offer copies of Quicken with online banking.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
to track my financials. I can customize it to my needs. It's my check register and my forecasting tool. The top item on the first sheet is a projected graph of the next 6 month's income and expenses so I really know where I stand. I've got a sheet for my stocks and mutual funds and stocks, one for my credit cards, all tied to the main page. Yes, it's more work since I can't just download from my online banking, but it keeps me very aware of what's going on and I like that. Yes, I use OpenOffice.Org.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I currently keep my records in spreadsheets and on paper. I would use Gnucash, but its support for check printing leaves a bit to be desired (can only print one check at a time on a sheet of three).
Not entirely true: UBS in Switzerland uses a modified version of quicken 98 for its online banking (for those who need something more convenient than the web interface).
They kept doing the same thing as always. They are buying magazine reviews and declaring victory. Heck, they are even making web blogs like Apple Switchers. The usual BS, convince people it's true and they will spend their money, the fools think. More amazingly, but all in line with their new propaganda, the author claims competition hurt users! This article is an amazing admission of Microsoft greed.
They realize that purchases like money are all review driven and have bought those reviews. They are using Wintel rags and every other outlet they have to try to convince reviewer at the Wall Street Journal that M$ Money is the best. Note that later he brags about having "won" more of those reviews and how Ituit realized, "Quicken's raison d'etre is to drive TurboTax sales" and that they don't have a place in personal finacne. Gee, thanks for the news everyone's more mature since the losing money on stocks in the late 90's and realizes they can't fight Microsoft. I don't buy it.
I don't buy one of the central points of the blog, that "competition" made things bad for everyone. He claims that feature creep made it difficult for people to do basic things with their programs. Nonsense, poor design makes it difficult for people to do things with your program. I've been using GNUcash for a while now. I'm not bothered by features I don't know how to use yet, but I'm very happy to have a simple, accurate and free PFM. Competition and freedom have made things very good for me.
If you took this article at face value, you would imagine the M$ Money is something worthwhile. How can it be, when it's tied to a platform that's just gone through another round of security problems? Trust is an important consideration when you start dealing with money, and trust is something Microsoft has squandered. I'm not interested in some twenty something's goals of making lots of money for Microsoft, so that he can spank Intuit with thousand dollar bills. I'm interested in making sure my bank and people I deal with don't make mistakes with my money and free software does that. Why would anyone spend money to trust themselves to some web driven nightmare that's been able to tell just how long the user has been on the program, send adverts at the user and all of that other BS?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I remember the difference between that early Excel and Lotus, too. Lotus had more checklist features for a long time, but Excel -- it was just plain beautiful and fun to use. Once you used it, you couldn't go back to Lotus, even if it had some bullshit statistical function that Excel didn't have (yet).
Depends if you need those features or not. Spreadsheets today and 15 years ago started to get used by people who never would have used the paper versions. Further they got used by people who didn't know much math. In the early-mid 1980s that wasn't the case at all. I saw lots of people using things like matrix features of Lotus, non linear curve fitting, statistical tests which reflected the actual data... 20 years ago. Books like "Lotus 1-2-3 for engineers" or "Integrating SAS with Lotus" were popular.
What Microsoft deserves credit for was cutting the cost of high end spread sheets by 90-95% over a period of a few years and thus turning it from a high end feature to something everyone had. Of course the product aiming for the people not willing to buy Lotus would in general need to be easier to use and less feature rich.
Christ, what an annoying document format.
Every fourth phrase in bold. I baulked after the second paragraph. I just couldn't continue.
--
Callas
Yep, the fancy features don't get in the way of the ones you want first. GNU cash has very sophisticated accounting, but I'm easily able to use it to just balance my check book. Other stuff, like being able to deal with Yen, stocks, taxes and the very powerful reports are all there but not obtrusive. When I use GNUcash, I'm not bowled over by feeling of gee wiz bang, and doubts about trusting my money to the program.
Kmoney, I'm sure is another excellent program. Everything else KDE rocks and everytime I do a review of a KDE thingy, I end up hooked. GNUcash is good enough that I have not made the effort, yet.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Neither Quicken nor Money understands the information that they're downloading.
So, they go by the date of your last download. But you can override the date (in case you've deleted entries that you should not have).
So, they download everything for that date range, even if the information is ALREADY there.
I can understand doing it that way for the download, but they should also do some basic checks to see if duplicate entries exist. They don't.
In more technical terms, they are "brittle". As long as you don't make an error, they are fine. But people make mistakes.
If the banks TRULY supported those apps, they would be keyed on unique transaction numbers. The app could query the Bank's server for a list of transaction numbers associated with that account and then compare that list with the list it already had and just download any changes.
I'm not sure how long banks keep their transaction records, but if the apps were really supported, it would be possible to download all your data instead of picking a date and starting from there.
With the current level of "support", all you get is an automated method of receiving your monthly statement. You could get the same functionality by typing in your statement yourself.
Microsoft money and Quicken both suck because it means I have to like do things and keep track of things. Seriously, it looks like too much work.
Here's what I've done instead. I have automatic paycheck deposits, all my bills on automatic payment and I use an ATM card for cash. Property taxes I pay online and my IRS return takes like 5 minutes to do because I don't own or buy jack. I never worry about checks because I don't write any. I should have my house payed off in a few years and I'm under 30 years old. I don't make much, but since I don't have shopping sickness I've always got cash.
Once the house is payed I'm going to get a part time telecommuting job, make a recurring grocery list which will be delivered to me in the mail once a month, and just never leave the house except to maybe go have a beer. There is a bar down the street that gives flight miles for your tab, so if I get drunk enough I can get a free cruise or a vacation or something and meet tropical chicks and party. Who needs financial software? Just don't blow your money on stupid stuff or get married or have kids or anything that takes all your money away. Its worked for me.
I actually run Virtual PC under OS X purely to get Quicken. I know there's a Quicken for OS X, but it's not up to the Windows version and doesn't come in a UK localised flavour. Result: emulation of Quicken under Windows.
I do look at the Crossover Office site from time to time, but they never list Quicken as being a Gold supported app. I have fairly complex personal accounts, and I also run my own business so the cost of keeping a Windows box around plus Quicken is drastically outweighed by the advantages I get from having it.
I also look at the open source side of things from time to time - sorry, not close yet. I'm sure it will get better, but I'm unlikely to revisit for a few years. Reporting is lacking in the oss competitors, and again I run into the no localised UK version problem. UK localisation is important - nothing to do with spelling 'favourites' correctly, but rather to do with keeping all the tax-line items up to date according to the latest UK law.
I'd actually love to go open source on this one - being locked into a platform is not something I enjoy, and I'm totally locked into this one. However, the plaform isn't Windows per se, it's Quicken.
Cheers,
Ian
Frankly, I've switched to Money for one reason... it is possible to disable all advertising. I have not found an official way to do that in Intuit products, short of deleting the file that contains the ads... and that only kills 90% of them.
Inertia is all that stops me now from moving to a different (probably open-source) check register program. I've got Money 2000 tweaked the way I want it. But, if it decides to show me an ad again... BAM! To the moon! B-)
they used feedback... the thing is they used it horribly wrong it seems. instead of tweaking to get the users to do their thing with minimal hassle they added hassle, maybe clippy was born under same reasoning..
***
"I sat through meetings where we were asked to research ways in which to increase the amount of time that users spent in Money. Increase the amount of time! Users always ask for the exact opposite. Users want a Navy Seal relationship with Money -- get in quietly, do the job quickly, leave no comrade behind, maybe smoke a little afterwards. We got busy making Money into a needy girlfriend. "Let's make it so fun and engaging people won't want to leave!" Users would rather be scheduled for a root canal than to spend another minute trying to balance a checkbook."***
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
has any one here used peach tree??? sorry to say you cannot beat a REAL accounting software that is like 20yrs of experiance. i even have a copy for an old peach(tm) computer system. that is a long history of good(tm) accounting development.
i think my current version is 2002, it does more than i need, but i can ignore what i do not want to use. and if i ever need it, i have it waiting.
down side is i must run it on windoze. some time when i am brave i will do a test via wine, but not today.
aww the constitution
That's another problem I have with these programs.
"Since I enter my paycheck information (to get taxes and other deductions included), Money does recognize (it guesses and it is sometimes wrong) the duplicate entry as well as other duplicates from personal entry and then gives you the opportunity to 'accept' the bank's information (single value) or keep yours (detailed)."
It sounds like you enter all your payments and deposits by hand, the same as I do. And from your statement, it sounds like you enter more information than the bank supplies (again, just like I do).
So all you get from the "support" at the bank is the chance to fix the mistakes that makes when it downloads the data from the bank and guesses wrong.
This does not make me happy. That's why I usually just use a spreadsheet for my finances. Here's a quick example.
Washington Mutual checking account
Quicken 2003
If I get cash from an ATM that charges a fee, I cannot associate that fee with that withdrawl in Quicken. And on my bank statement, all those fees are rolled together and listed at the end.
Now, in my spreadsheet, I can put a column for "ATM fee".
I don't have to tell you about the problem of downloading the monthly statement and then trying to manually break a single $50 fee into how-many-ever individual withdrawls.
But if I'm trying to reconcile my spreadsheet with the montly statement, a simple equation totals all the fee entries (including "ATM fee") for that month so I can match it against their figure.
It seems that I'm doing more work when I should be doing less work.
Instead of Quicken or Money handling my information, I end up using the spreadsheet for all my transactions and then just totaling various items and entering the totals into Quicken for tax purposes.
That is too much like what the accounting department at work does. And they have full time staff to do that.
I want something that takes less than 10 minutes a week, yet gives me all the information I already keep. Right now I spend about 15 minutes a week on this. All the receipts go in a box until the weekend.
In my personal philosophy, there is a special corner in hell reserved for anyone even remotely involved with marketing.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
I simply can't afford a finance package that doesn't give me accurate numbers. This kind of thing is the same reason I left my last finance package (Budget for Mac). To me, accuracy and stability are the absolute minimums for any finance package. Without them, I can't even consider any other features.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Show me the monkey! Show me the monkey!
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Seriously? That seems like a huge downfall but I've seen post after post here implying that MS Money is indeed a better product. In fact to test out your theory I downloaded the MS Money demo from MS's website. It's only 17MB. Definitely sounds like a small shell to MSN financial services. I also am not in love with the idea of putting my entire life online in some MSN site. A standalone app never outlives its usefulness if its well designed. Being at the whim of some web designer who is free to change the interface whenever they feel like it sounds like crap.
People familiar with both of these products are probably tired of being asked, but does anyone have any comment about this or what someone just getting started with this kind of software is better off with. Is Quicken an actual standalone product unlike Money? Is Money really that much better? Thanks.
I have been a Quicken user for longer than most people around here have been out of diapers. I started back with Quicken 3.0 for DOS.
Ever since I discovered Linux, I have wanted a replacement that I could live with. I tried lots of stuff running Quicken with Crossover, GNUCash, etc..
But Moneydance wins. It looks a little primiative but it really really is nicely done. It runs on any platform Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Solaris, HPUX etc.. It has a great development company. Email them and they will email you back in a day or less with detailed technical information. Try that with Quicken and Microsoft.
There is also a very active and helpful online community for support.
It supports most all online banks systems because it totally emulates quicken to the banks. It even has integrated online bill pay that works great with my BancOne account.
Try it... for $29.99 its one the best peices of software out there. If your not against paying for anything its great.
There is also a free 30 trial that will import all your data from your old program.
http://www.moneydance.com
Among the many reasons, these are the most common that I can conclude:
All the Canadian banks, there are five, and most credit unions have comprehensive on-line banking. On-line access usually includes telephone banking, so you can pay bills, transfer money and check you balance from either the phone or Internet. No need to use a computer program to find out what your balance is, just call or click to the Internet.
Cheques are not popular in Canada and usually not accepted for anything other than rent and bills, if at all, due to the advent of direct deposit/withdrawal and the Interac system (pay by bank card). My monthly bank plan includes unlimited Interac purchases along with telephone and Internet banking and I haven't paid a bill by cheque or balanced a cheque book in almost a decade thanks to electronic banking.
The last person to use Money that I can recall is my mother, and she gave up after the Royal Bank improved their on-line offering and everyone stopped taking cheques because of Interac. Without the need to balance a cheque book and instant access to her account balances, she really doesn't need a program to track her spending. I created an Excel spreadsheet for her recently and that's as much as she needs.
This is absolutely correct and is exactly what the grand-parent is looking for. Mod Parent Up.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
M
WTF?? So, if I buy the new version, I now have to fucking pay a subscription fee to do exactly what my current version does for free? They just gauranteed that I will never buy a newer version of Quicken, and at the first chance, I will switch over to a competitive product!
Maybe Intuit just hired a bunch of ex-Money middle management. Because they sure are smrt.
I use Quicken Deluxe on my desktop and Pocket Quicken on my Palm OS Treo 600. Having a portable version of Quicken enables me to enter in new transactions much more reliably than waiting at the end of the day when I get home. The two programs sync perfectly.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
On behalf of everyone who is being held hostage by Intuit's mafia subscription scheme, I am pleading with developers out there to come up with some sort of alternative. MS Money doesn't seem like an acceptable alternative. We need some ethical, unmaniacal finance software. Please please PLEASE! I'm sick of having to pay a few hundred dollars a year to get tax tables for my accounting system that should be freely available. I'm sick of being forced to upgrade my software to keep it running. I'm sick of Quicken collecting private information on my company and my clients. I don't need to route every facet of my financial dealings through some new "feature" that Quicken has foisted upon us. It has to stop - we need alternatives!!
Neither could handle account transfers properly. It'd recognize that the transactions that were transfers, and then create a matching transfer for each one. So it'd acted like I was transfering twice as much money from savings to checking. Then it'd treat them like normal transactions. My biggest "expense" was my checking account and my savings account was my biggest source of "income".
And it was a constant pain to get it to show the information I wanted in the way I wanted it.
I tried both Money and Quicken a couple times each and came away frustrated by what utter shit they were.
For the past couple years, I've used an Excel spreadsheet with a VB macro I wrote that parses OFX files for the transactions. Both my bank and Amex have unique transaction ids so it only pulls new transactions. Then I just to go into the spreadsheet and enter what category the transactions are in.
I have other sheets that detail my budget for each category, how many more paychecks I have left this year, and how far ahead or behind of my savings goals I am. I can pivottable my transactions to see how I'm spending my money each month. I have graphs showing how much money I have.
I have complete control over my financial information and how I see it.
sorry guys, tried moving over to OSS and wasn't satisfied with current state
May I ask which programs you tried & what faults you found with them? GNUCash is really quite good, as are some of the simpler alternatives.
This guy must be, like, a genius or something.
Well today in the US this is an issue.
But if interest rates weren't so low you could get a decent rate from a money market account. Some banks call these high yield savings or something. Even at 2% this is a few bucks a month for nothing (you do have an emergency fund right?)
If you had RTFA you would have seen that it was entitled "Show me the Money".
Overrated, maybe. Offtopic, ehhhh. But whatever...
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Get out of debt. We use Money99. You enter your credit card info for all your cards, interest rate, mininum payments, balance Then you tell it how much you can afford per month. It calculates the fastest way to get out of debt by telling you which cards to pay off first while still paying minimum amounts on the other cards. It schedules all your payments for as long as it will take and adjusts the plan for windfalls and new debt. Fantastic, the only real way to get out of debt. Controled planned payments in quick manner.
So the whole world has to suffer with the garbage this monopoly creates and overcharges for.
...then, I found Moneydance. It has a few quirks, but it's "pure Java," so it'll run on anything with a JVM - Linux, OSX, even Windows (but use Sun's JVM, not that MS mutant :). I pretty sure I've seen *BSD'ers post in the forums...
:)
Downloads transactions, on-line bill pay, stock price updates - the works! Even a free trial
Lives at moneydance.com
I'd be surprised.
Banking software in 1944?
When COBOL wasn't even the proverbial gleam in Grace Hopper's eye?
On what platform? Hollerith cards?
By what definition of "software"?
Um, not if we'd been talking about software that was OSS (as in "non-commercial").
And that's the real gist of what the poster "TheRealMindChild" was talking about, when saying "C'mon, all of us in the business know how these things work."
Which is why I'll never again work for a commercial software vendor (as least, not as a developer) -- and, for that matter, probably never again for *any* organization where the very nature of the enterprise means that there's a development imperative more important than "get it right" and "release when it's ready".
like adding a flight simulator or car game ?
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Shame the same can't be said about a life or a girlfriend.