I am thinking of purchasing either of these to track my personal and small business finances. I am just looking for input from the FQF Community. Are there any pro's or con's that you'd like to share. Thanks in advance.
The only reason I use MS Money is that I have been able to find free versions of it bundled with various new computer systems. So I'm pretty much stuck with it now since I know have over 8 years of data in it and I'm sure migrating to Quicken would be a pain in the neck. It sucks now though because the online services will stop working after a few years unless you get a new version. Hopefully someone in my family will get a new bundled version by then.
The only Quicken version I've ever used was for the Mac, and I found that it failed to do a lot of things that MS Money could (like breaking down certain splits and loan transactions). I've been told though that for more power users, Quicken is still the best since it feeds into Quickbooks, which is still the industry standard.
barefool
Senior Member - 1K
posted: Feb. 27, 2008 @ 12:54p
There's little difference between the two. They each design their products so that you are forced to upgrade every few years.
One alternative is Moneydance that looks and acts very similar to each. It will import Quicken files that you download from your banks. It's $30 bucks new. You get free upgrades for several years, after which, you can upgrade for 1/2 price. Of course, you never HAVE to upgrade.
There's a free trial on the website.
markshiffer
Member
posted: Feb. 27, 2008 @ 2:26p
I have used Quicken for the past 10 years, and like the Money guy earlier, you kind of get stuck with it as converting your files over to other system is impractical. That being said, last year I became a beta tester for Intuit and I now receive Quicken for free, so I don't have to worry about the upgrade issue. I like Quicken and its features, but cannot compare them to Money for you since I have not used it.
A couple of things that I don't like about Quicken are: lack of truly customizable reporting options, financial quotes occasional don't download, with 10 years of data the program has become a bit slow (you can archive out previous years but I don't like to do that as in hinders analysis).
Some things I like: industry acceptance and compatibility (most every financial institution caters to Quicken for downloads), upgrades are seamless, plenty of canned reporting analysis for your basic stuff, budgeting features are nice and got nicer with 2008.
I had been using Money 2004 for a long time when they essentially forced me to upgrade to the "newer" version (Microsoft Money Plus) by suddenly disabling internet updates on my older version. (I couldn't update my accounts any more -- it would bring up an error that online updates were no longer "supported" by my version and I needed to upgrade to continue to receive them). The newer version is virtually indecipherable from the old version other than 1 or 2 very minor interface updates, and an expanded list of banks supported for online banking. But the newer version has some quirks that really bug me. Updating accounts online now takes anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, where it used to take < 30 seconds. I would estimate that one or more accounts fail in updating 50% of the time. Other annoying things like my 401(k) transactions have failed to download twice now, so I have had to manually update all of the 401(k) purchase transactions for those specific paychecks, but then Money doesn't know that it missed the download, so the next paycheck it tries to match to all of the purchases that I manually entered.
I don't have a very complex file - 5 or 6 credit cards, 7 or 8 bank accounts, mortgage, house, car, 401(k), ameritrade, etc. Nothing that unusual. But after the unpleasant taste in my mouth from them forcing me to upgrade to an inferior version, I looked into buying Quicken. From the Quicken web site, it appeared that the process of converting from a MS Money file to a Quicken file was a pretty detailed task, and lots of stuff wouldn't be carried over and would have to be manually updated in the new Quicken file.
Bottom line - once you pick one and use it for a few years, you will pretty much be stuck with it unless you want to either start over, or spend a lot of time converting your data.
I've been a MS Money user for years, and I have a friend who has been a Quicken user for years. We just had this discussion the other day.
They're both filled with infuriatingly stupid bugs that show that each company just doesn't give a shit. Every year, we hope against hope that the bugs will be fixed, yet they never fix anything. Every year, rather than upgrading our respective product, we go online and look into the other product, only to discover that it's just as shitty. Every year, we basically give up and just upgrade. This year is the first exception for me where I have foregone upgrading, since I went online and looked at the reviews, which basically all just said it has no improvements, yet somehow manages to be even slower and crappier than the year before.
I have no idea how these two programs have managed to survive this long without either dying or competing.
barefool said: There's little difference between the two. They each design their products so that you are forced to upgrade every few years.
One alternative is Moneydance that looks and acts very similar to each. It will import Quicken files that you download from your banks. It's $30 bucks new. You get free upgrades for several years, after which, you can upgrade for 1/2 price. Of course, you never HAVE to upgrade.
There's a free trial on the website. I have been using Moneydance for 3 days. It took 3 days to figure out how to import my Quicken investment accounts and modify the transactions (screwed up short sales in my ameritrade account).
The HUGE benefit to the program is that its easy to download from any institution, even the funky ones like my turbochecking account that only allow QIF which Quicken no longer supports (because they wish to charge banks for downloading and can't do so for QIF files). Basically if you can download, you can use moneydance.
The downsides to the program are several. Its a pain to import your investment accounts so they are accurate. Its doable, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out where the duplicates are, etc. (Once that is done, its easy enough to keep updated by downloading from your broker) Also, its reporting functions are not so robust. You can't really modify reports as you can in Quicken, so that they pull from only specified accounts. Plus, the capital gains report doesn't work properly, always listing your sales from beginning of time to date, despite putting in date restrictions. Finally, there is no "one step" update. You have to download each account separately. This is a bummer, not only because its tedious but you have to sign on with your password and do 3 separate downloads if you have 3 accounts with Chase. And, as far as I can tell, there is no password vault. (However, your password management software is all you really need, as you sign on the web, click download and it automatically feeds into moneydance).
That said, I am going to purchase it. I like to use the software at work and at home. I have a mac at home and the data is interchangeable between mac and pc, and they let you use as many computers as you like on the same license so long as its for one person/couple.
choe said: yodlee ftwI use Yodlee as well as weening off of Quicken to migrate to Moneydance. I think Yodlee is very powerful and recommend it very highly. However, what I like about a computer based personal finance program is that it lets me reconcile what I have with what the bank says I have. With Yodlee, you are always told exactly what your bank says you have, but you can't plan very well by scheduling payments and seeing whether you will have enough to pay that next bill. Not sure why it says running balance is "n/a" when you schedule transactions manually.
Nothing beats yodlee for aggregation and seeing what it is exactly that you have though! Heck, maybe if I used it more I'd appreciate its power more....
Other thing I like about having data on my computer is that if Yodlee decides to cancel service I'd have to export everything to an excel file and don't really know how useful that would be.
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