FINANCIAL. Review on Microsoft Money 2000 Financial Suite

In many couples there is one person who is more in charge of the money – well in our house it’s me. I confess to being the sad sort of person who loves to plan ahead with bills and savings (unfortunately there are always more of the former than the latter). For a long time I’ve kept records of the household finances on nifty spreadsheets of my own devising, but I’d heard how easy it was to keep track of everything with Microsoft Money, and so last year I asked for a copy of the software for my birthday (I said I was sad!).

The release I got was Microsoft Money 2000 – the software is updated every year. My version requires Windows 95, 98 or NT operating system and a PC with a minimum of a Pentium 90 processor – but check these are up to date if you want to buy.

There are several versions of Money 2000 – Standard, Financial Suite, and Personal & Business. I chose the middle version, the Financial Suite, because it had extra features that I thought would be useful such as planning for long term events and “Creating a complete integrated financial plan”. The last one includes the facility to track VAT, create invoices etc. and is intended for small businesses.

Getting started

I couldn’t wait to get the box open and start playing with my shiny new software! The first thing I found, though, was that you have to spend ages setting up all your accounts to begin with and entering opening balances. If you only have, say, a couple of bank accounts and a building society account, this would be fine, but then you probably wouldn’t need the software. Our situation is a bit more complicated, and I found it quite a slog to set everything up in the right categories. But you must be sure to start everything from the right point because otherwise it’s hard to get your accounts to reconcile later!

Managing your current account

When your current account is set up on MM, you need to spend a few minutes, say, once a week entering all your transactions. Then, when your statement comes, Money will help you reconcile to your own records. I must say, this facility works very well and is much quicker and simpler than doing the sums manually. You tick off each item on Money from the statement, enter things like interest or charges which aren’t in your cheque book, and Money will tell you whether there is any difference and prompt you to find it.

Special features

Money has the feature that you can set up regular payments and deposits to each of your account, either monthly, weekly, four weekly or whatever. These will then automatically appear in your records each time. The software will use this information to give you a forecast of how the balance will move on the account over one to twelve months, either as a list or as a graph. This is not too useful for your current account because it only knows about your salary going in and any regular payments going out, but not day to day spends on bills or curries, so you look as if you’re going to get incredibly rich! However, it is good for savings accounts or things like our joint account where I can estimate all the payments out of the account over the next twelve months. The only complaint I have against this feature is that it doesn’t have the option to show a running balance like a bank statement, so it isn’t clear that a certain bill will take me overdrawn. In this respect I prefer my humble spreadsheet where I can more easily see the effect of each transaction.

Another feature that I really liked at first is the way you can link together your different accounts. So, for instance, if you transfer some money every month from your current account to your savings, Money will automatically show both sides of the transaction. However, this is hard to get to work properly. If you forget to set up any of these accounts at the beginning, it’s really hard to get everything to work together later! For instance, I pay money into an investment trust. I wanted to show this payment as a transfer rather than paying a bill, but when I tried to put the existing balance on the system Money thought it also had to show the money coming out of my current account and I suddenly went horribly overdrawn! Microsoft always tends to be too clever for its own good! No doubt a more skilled user could overcome this, but I’m afraid I failed and I didn’t find the rather vague instruction manual much use.

The last point I would make is that I’ve recently moved our joint account to smile and also set up a linked savings account and ISA. Of course everything is run on-line and I can check my statement at any time. This means that I don’t need to use Money to balance my cheque book. More on the joys of banking with smile another time!

In summary, then, I’ve found Money kind of fun to play with, good for balancing my accounts, but the advanced features I thought would make it easy for me to see the “big picture” have honestly proven too much hassle to set up. I’m afraid I’ve gone back to good old Microsoft Excel!