What can I say

[Dave]

Thanks to the posts here and my experience with MSMoney
2004 premiere - I am going back to Quicken. I should have
stayed with them anyways, what other company sends you a
brand new version 2005 for FREE! I saw nothing on MS sites
that even hinted you could get an upgrade. I just
recently purchased MS Money 2004 based on the press they
gave it. Even switched to a pocket pc from a palm to be
able to use ppc money. It too has problems. Stuck with
active sync I still do not have my old quicken accts into
the pocket pc. Me thinks MS has gotten tooo big for their
britches.

 

[Glenn]

I've had my copy of Money 2005 deluxe for about two weeks
and haven't opened it up yet. I'm taking mine back to
Best Buy for refund. I'm going to try Quicken 2005. At
least I can buy a book if I need it. You just can't say
the same for Money 2005.

 

[Guest]

Overnight I switched back to Quicken - no, and I mean no,
problems with setup and syncing. Looking back I neglected
to mention the unacceptable slowness within MSN Money and
MSN Bill Pay screens. Too bad Microsoft, so much has to
be done to bring Money up to par.

 

[Justin Thyme]

Boo hoo

Overnight I switched back to Quicken - no, and I mean no,
problems with setup and syncing. Looking back I neglected
to mention the unacceptable slowness within MSN Money and
MSN Bill Pay screens. Too bad Microsoft, so much has to
be done to bring Money up to par.

 

[Michael Abbaticchio[MVP]]

I follow the Quicken newsgroups too, and find it funny to see the same
people who annouced a departure here, only to announce one there the
following year and vise versa.

The products are so close to each other in features, that it is almost not
worth the trouble of data conversion and it's limitations. I remember how
it took me two nights of inputting and nearly a week of adjusting to convert
from Quicken to Money a few years back, and would not have bothered if I had
known how much of a PITA it was going to be. Not even going to mention all
the phone calls that had to be made to financial institutions that had to
adjust my account on their end to work with Money instead of Quicken. I
didn't even remeber most of the passwords cause they were inbedded in
Quicken password manager. Major hassle!

--

regards,
Michael Abbaticchio
MVP for Exchange Server
http://exchange.mvps.org

 

[Steve Hanson]

Michael Abbaticchio[MVP] wrote in

I follow the Quicken newsgroups too, and find it funny to see the same
people who annouced a departure here, only to announce one there the
following year and vise versa.

The products are so close to each other in features, that it is almost not
worth the trouble of data conversion and it's limitations. I remember how
it took me two nights of inputting and nearly a week of adjusting to convert
from Quicken to Money a few years back, and would not have bothered if I had
known how much of a PITA it was going to be. Not even going to mention all
the phone calls that had to be made to financial institutions that had to
adjust my account on their end to work with Money instead of Quicken. I
didn't even remeber most of the passwords cause they were inbedded in
Quicken password manager. Major hassle!

I just moved to Quicken today. It was a few hours effort but it
turned out to be far easier than dealing with Money 2005 in its
present state (where no amount of effort can be made to make it work
properly).

One way to keep people from switching is to say over and over again
how difficult it is. I would not be surprised if Microsoft started an
astroturf campaign to do just that. But the truth is it can be done
with a modicum of effort and I for one am happy that I have made the
switch. It was not a "major hassle"--take it from me. I also note
that your memories of what it was like "a few years ago" is hardly
useful. Both programs have changed in the meantime.

My guess is it will be at least two years until Money is back in
usable form based on the rewrite they have just done. I don't feel
like waiting that long and I encourage anyone thinking of switching to
download Quicken from Intuit's site. You can purchase online right
now and have 60 days to ask for your money back.

 

[Richard Bollar]

How did you get your Money data into Quicken? QIF, keypunch?

 

[Steve Hanson]

How did you get your Money data into Quicken? QIF, keypunch?

Intuit has a data converter that reads Money report xml data. They
have the steps on their website to generate account and investment
reports so that all the transaction data can be imported into Quicken.
Quicken doesn't use QIF for importing from Money.

The only things it doesn't handle well are transfers between accounts,
because it can't establish how the accounts link together, but it is a
simple matter to find/replace the category field to reclassify the
relevant transactions as transfers. Quicken's method of making
changes to large numbers of transactions is far, far superior to
anything in Money. People making the switch will appreciate that.

 

[Dick Watson]

I was hoping somebody would show up who'd played with this.

Does it handle loans?

Does it handle splits including the memo in the root of the split?

Does it handle classification?

What about closed accounts?

 

[Steve Hanson]

I was hoping somebody would show up who'd played with this.

Does it handle loans?

It does not handle loans.

Does it handle splits including the memo in the root of the split?

Yes--all my paycheck splits came over. I just checked some for root
memos and a few transactions had them (I don't normally put memos on
splits).

Does it handle classification?

Yes. It preserves all the categories (if that's what you mean)
including their nesting, although I ended up redoing my categories to
take advantage of the deeper nesting that Quicken supports.

What about closed accounts?

No problems, all accounts open and closed can be imported.

One issue I did run into is that if a memo or other field has the Euro
character, Quicken will choke on the account and say it's not valid.
To work around that you can just search and replace the Euro character
in the XML file to be imported. I didn't notice any other
character-related issues, although it's safest to stick with the ASCII
charset.

Similarly, you shouldn't use categories with a "/" character. They
will import fine but some internal routines in Quicken act a little
screwy with slashes present in category names.

My accounts are now 100% transferred over from the work I did Sunday.
Like I said, it's a few hours' work, but then so was Money 2005. At
least with Quicken the work paid off. And damn is that program fast
compared to Money. It is ugly but it works well.

 

[Dick Watson]

Some comments/questions.

Classification is the Money mechanism for additional vectors like
Category:Subcategory but in addition to it. (E.g., Automobile:Gasoline is
cat:subcat and Automobile:CR-V is class:subclass. Both are applied to one
transaction/split.) Quicken used to have one by default called Class. Money
allows two with user defined names.

I'll go look at the Quicken instructions and some of the generated XML re.
the root split memos. I'm not aware of a report that easily permits access
to the memos in the splits and the memos in the root. MoneyLink certainly
doesn't that I can find.

Not handling Loan accounts is a problem, but no worse than QIF.

How much data did you have/move? I've got ten years and 35,000+ transaction
elements.

Is movement of payee info (addresses, etc.) and account numbers and so forth
supported?

 

[Steve Hanson]

Some comments/questions.

Classification is the Money mechanism for additional vectors like
Category:Subcategory but in addition to it. (E.g., Automobile:Gasoline is
cat:subcat and Automobile:CR-V is class:subclass. Both are applied to one
transaction/split.) Quicken used to have one by default called Class. Money
allows two with user defined names.

I never really used classifications. Quicken can assign tax
information for each category and you can add categories to groups
(similar to Money's classes). This stuff does not get imported.
Quicken starts with three groups, Income, Discretionary, and Mandatory
Expenses. My guess is you would end up redoing your classes. You
cannot have subgroups.

I'll go look at the Quicken instructions and some of the generated XML re.
the root split memos. I'm not aware of a report that easily permits access
to the memos in the splits and the memos in the root. MoneyLink certainly
doesn't that I can find.

Money can export the memo field in transaction reports, in fact if you
follow Quicken's instructions it will do so (all my memo fields
transferred over). By the way you will have to download Quicken's
data converter from Intuit's web site. It's free.

Not handling Loan accounts is a problem, but no worse than QIF.

How much data did you have/move? I've got ten years and 35,000+ transaction
elements.

I had data from 1993 on. I don't know how many individual
transactions I had but it was quite a few.

Is movement of payee info (addresses, etc.) and account numbers and so forth
supported?

No, just the account transactions. You will have to reenter all your
account numbers, credit limits, interest rates, and so on.

 

[Dick Watson]

I must correct myself. The report they tell you to use does show all of the
memos. So, I'm assuming they will both make it into the XML. I'd know for
sure, but my machine is off in la-la land trying to do this. Money's
accumulated 59+ minutes of CPU time, pretty much all in hourglass, and is
bobbing around 188,000 KB of memory used trying to do this with no end in
sight.

I don't have a Quicken installed, so I haven't messed with downloading their
importer, yet.

 

[Steve Hanson]

I must correct myself. The report they tell you to use does show all of the
memos. So, I'm assuming they will both make it into the XML. I'd know for
sure, but my machine is off in la-la land trying to do this. Money's
accumulated 59+ minutes of CPU time, pretty much all in hourglass, and is
bobbing around 188,000 KB of memory used trying to do this with no end in
sight.

I don't have a Quicken installed, so I haven't messed with downloading their
importer, yet.

Yes, it takes awhile--I checked and you probably have four times as
much data as I did, at least. Money ate up tons of memory on my box
doing the report, but fortunately I have an Athlon64 and the wait
wasn't too bad. Choosing to work offline might help, as I observe
that Money 2005 is at its all time slowest when it is trying to do
anything online.

By the way, Quicken can generate a similar exportable transaction
report in about a tenth the time. No surprise there. Really, how
many years have Money users put up with piss-poor performance of the
underlying database engine (be it Jet or whatever)? It's been
sluggish for at least the past three or four versions. You'd think
Microsoft could be bothered, but they can't. Pathetic. Quicken
skates circles around Money in terms of speed.

Years ago Microsoft tried to buy Intuit. I'm damn glad now that they
weren't allowed to. As it is Microsoft still treats Money like it has
a monopoly and no reason to improve the program.