This unofficial FAQ for the microsoft.public.money newsgroup was offered as a public service in hopes that newsgroup readers will quickly find answers to the most commonly asked questions in the newsgroup.
Of necessity, the scope of the FAQ is limited. Issues unique to non-US localized versions are generally not treated, nor are some Money features covered as well as others. In particular, I do not use any of the network bill pay and statement features and am relatively unfamiliar with features for stock options and have treated few related issues here out of ignorance. I haven't treated any issues peculiar to the Essential (hereafter MEss) and Home & Business versions since I've never used either for more than five minutes, don't follow postings about them, and cannot judge good FAQs and answers for them from bad ones. The M05 major rewrite (applicable to M05 through 7) added Essential modes (apparently Microsoft's Money team likes Essential stuff) and I'm not at all familiar with those, either.
Note also that this content has not been updated in many years and many, if not most, of the hyperlinks are probably invalid.
This page edited from the page from the original site, last generated there from the database Tuesday, 16 February 2016.
Q) Are there any recommendations for assuring short- and long-term "survivability" of my Money data?
A) There are a number of Q&A that deal with specific backup issues. (E.g., "You must help me! My only floppy backup has a data error reading. What do I do?", "Can a new version of Money open my old version data file/backup file/backup diskette(s)?", "I just reinstalled M98--it can't read my data backup floppies. Now what?", and "How do I backup to CD-RW? CD-R?") None of these treat the subject in a general way. So, here goes:
The following general practices always apply:
Always test backups to be sure they really are.
Never depend on just one backup or form of backup as your only backup.
Always have multiple generations of backup in case you backed up a problem and didn't know it.
Never trust any media to provide "archival storage". Cheap media are worse. Trying to save on backup media is not wise. Even if the media lasts, the devices that can read this media may not.
Storing a backup across multiple media (e.g., spanning multiple floppies) reduces the availability of a good copy.
Depending on what risk you are trying to protect against, an offsite backup storage location may be a good idea.
Within these, some specific advice for Money:
The Money backup routine is not foolproof. Backing up the data file outside of Money seems slightly more reliable.
Removing password protection before making your backup is probably a good idea. This is true for two reasons: 1) you may forget what your password was when you made the backup--particularly if you follow "best practices" about changing your password periodically--but see also "Help! I've lost my password. Now what do I do?" 2) there is no assurance that Microsoft will perpetually support a given online authentication format or stored credential data format. (This is applicable to those using Passport/WindowsLive ID/whatever they call it into the future.) If you don't remove the password before taking your backup copy, at least record what the password was at the time and store it with the backup. The importance of removing/tracking your password is in direct proportion to the length of time you contemplate your backup is protecting you into the future.
Keep track of what version of Money wrote the data file/backup you are storing. Money has generally been pretty good about opening/restoring files made with older versions--and doing the necessary upgrade, but there is no guarantee that this will always be so. Indeed, there have already been breaks where getting from Money version A to C requires an intermediate upgrade to the Money version B data format using Money version B. Money has never provided a file format for data or backups that an older version of Money could read, so if you save, say, a Money 2007 file format but at some point in the future only have a copy of Money 2006, you will be out of luck. This issue is also more important the longer you want a backup to be good for and the number of versions back the file was written with.
A corollary to the previous item is that you may want to consider keeping/or need to keep copies of the original application installation medium. (This means your Money application installation CD or a copy of the installation image if you bought online. Note that OEM versions tend to be tied to specific hardware. Because of this, saving, say, Money04 for Dell Model XYZ may prove useless at that point into the future when you need it and your Dell XYZ has long since been shredded into little nuggets and recycled.) Note that this also assumes that you will have a system that supports installing and running this application at whatever point into the future you need to look at your backup data. Depending on the time horizon you are considering, it's not all that hard to imagine that, say, WindowsDominator x128 MegaUltimate edition won't actually run Money97.
(Note that there are also caveats to even this last recommendation: 1) Money files won't cross localization/language barriers. If the file was written with M05 for UK, past performance indicates it is highly unlikely that M10 US will read it, no matter what. Present trends suggest that the future of Money holds fewer localized versions than they've had in the past so if you are using a non-US version you must take this into account. 2) Keeping the installation CD alone may prove insufficient. One case where this is true is M05: the first and only mega-service update broke file compatibility with the CD version of the application. This might not be so bad if you could just, say, go and download the update file and store it yourself and install it yourself. But you can't because Microsoft's service delivery strategy for Money precludes it--the only way to update Money is to use its Internet Updates feature. Worse still, their present policy of terminating Internet Update service and removing data associated with End-of-Life versions means that a file written with M05.1 will likely be so many useless semi-random numbers in 2010 if all you have is the M05 installation CD.)
Which brings us to the final recommendation: At some point, accessing the information in your data may prove more important than how you do it and not all of the information may be equally important. Given the last several considerations, it may be prudent to periodically save a subset of the information in your Money data file to independent, non-Money-specific file formats. There are quite a number of ways to tackle this including MoneyLink and QIF exports, none of which gets all of the information Money stores, but the best way seems to be using customized reports and then exporting these reports to some portable format like .CSV or XML. Here are some report recommendations along those lines:
"Account balances With details" customized:
Rows & Columns: select all except Abbreviation
Account: all including closed accounts"Investment transactions" customized:
Rows & Columns: Include fields all, Group by: none
Date range: all
Account: all including closed accounts
Investment: select all
Activity: select all
Details status: reconciled & unreconciled"Loan amortization" customized:
Rows & Columns: Include fields all except interest amount, paid from account, other fees amount, principal balance; Subototal by: none; Include transactions from: account register; Show splits; omit (or include, your choice) opening balance
Chart: View as report
Date range: all
Account: (one report/output file per Loan Account)"Scheduled bills" customized:
Rows & Columns: Include fields all; Include transactions: all; Show splits
Date range: all
Account: all including closed accounts
Payee: all; include transactions with no payeeCurrency-specific versions of "Account transactions" customized:
Rows & Columns: Include fields all; Subtotal by: none; Running balance: none; Show splits
Date range: all
Account: (one report/data file per each currency; select all accounts in that currency including closed accounts)
Category: all; Show sub categories; Include unassigned income; Include unassigned expense
Payee: all; include transactions with no payee
Details type: all; status: reconciled & unreconciled
(classifications): select all; show subclassificationsNote that even this will leave lots of information behind including, but not limited to, Account/Category/(classification)/Payee/Investment details, Budget and DRP details, bill information beyond the next item in a bill series like end date/number and any edited series members beyond the first one, paycheck tab assignments, tax year assignment, transaction flags, and "attached" files. If there is any of this that you really want to protect, you will have to identify other means of doing so. Granted these methods are much less than ideal. But they also might prove a whole lot better than nothing at some point in the future.
Q) Can I do this, that, or the other with Money? Can the latest version of Money do this, that, or the other?
A) Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes these posts are general enough to get good answers from people who have attempted what you want to do. Other times, the requirement is so specific that nobody knows or nobody really understands what you want to do. In these cases, the best thing to do is download the trial version that is available and find out for yourself.
Two caveats about the trial version:
1) Read and heed the messages it brings up about what it will do to upgrade your data file from the previous version, if you have one.
2) If you like the trial version you will need to buy the real licensed version online and install it. If you do this, please read and heed "Can I do this, that, or the other with Money? Can the latest version of Money do this, that, or the other?".
References:
Microsoft Money Trial (US version)
Q) Help! I've lost my password. Now what do I do?
A) Passwords are there for a reason. When you forget them, you've discovered the reason. It's to make it harder for people who don't know the password to get at your data. That is why you used a password in the first place, isn't it?
If you use Passport authentication to control access to your Money file, just use the Passport lost password tools at the Passport site. (This is probably the best reason for integration of Passport authentication with Money.)
If you just used a file password, there are services and a number of software tools that do password recovery.
See also "Why do I have to use Passport authentication with Money?" for more information on the good, bad, and ugly of Passport and file passwords as access authentication schemes for Money.
References:
Money password recovery
Passport lost password help
Q) How can I prevent getting duplicate entries of Transfer transactions when importing accounts via .QIF?
A) When importing multiple related accounts that have transfers amongst the accounts via .QIF, it is imperative to select and import all the exported account files at the same time. To do this, hold down the CTRL key and select each file to be imported.
Q) How do I categorize multiple items all deposited at once? What about several paychecks?
A) For things besides paychecks, the category part is easy. You use the split. But the tougher part is if you want to list all of the payees. A Money transaction allows one Payee, no matter how many splits. This makes it hard to list ten payees for ten checks in one split transaction.
Some choices:
1a) Ignore the payees and put all the deposited items in one split transaction.
1b) Put the payees in the memo(s) and make the Payee something like (various).2) "Deposit" all the checks in separate transactions to some Money account that is not the real-world Bank account. If you have a pocket change account, for instance, this is a good place to do it. Then do a single transfer of the total amount to the actual Money account where these are deposited.
3) Ignore the fact that you deposited them in one deposit and create multiple Money transactions. This makes it slightly more difficult to reconcile vs. the bank statement since you have to remember that all of these small deposits in Money add up to that large deposit on the statement.
Re. #1, since a Money Paycheck is a special type of split, if one of the items deposited is a paycheck and you do full accounting in a Paycheck transaction, adding other checks to this deposits probably causes more confusion than it is worth. But you could do it. Just add them to the after tax tab. You can combine multiple paychecks in one paycheck transaction, but there are various reasons you probably don’t want to do this: First, it will be hard to reconcile all of the paycheck information from your stubs with one paycheck transaction. Second, the Money Tax Estimator assigns meaning to the first entry on the wages tab--this is the amount from which the “Before Tax” amounts are deducted--and you should watch Tax Estimator very carefully to make sure its results are sane if you are trying to combine paychecks into one transaction.
#3 causes grief for those who download transaction data.
Q) How do I find out about the free credit reports/bill pay/financial consultation/tax filing?
[Relevant to Money2003 (v.11) and up]
A) Once you have purchased and installed an applicable version, go to the task based home page. (There's a link in the left column--below the "So and So's Money Home Page" tripe--of the view oriented "Main Home Page" home pages.)
Once there, select the "Tell me more" link in the Financial Services section at the top.
An alternate, probably easier, way is to go to Help|Financial Services.
M05 moved this kind of stuff all around. In M05 one way (there may be others) is [Windows menu:] Tools|Financial Services.
Q) How do I make Money work for other WinNT/Win2k/XP Pro users?
A) Money does not deal well with the NT multi-user security model. It has to be reinstalled for each account and each account has to run as a member of Administrators group. (Per Cal Learner, this latter limitation is removed in M02.) There is an MSKB entry on the subject. There are some partial workarounds and there was a registry hack that solved some of the issues for non-Administrator users. I won't quote the registry hack here--if you are good enough to be mucking in the registry, you can certainly find it in groups.google.com.
References:
groups.google.com
MSKB: Q273815 Money does not work and play well with NT/2K/XP security
Q) I just got married/divorced/re-married. How do I change the names that show up on the Money home page?
A) Go to Accounts & Bills|Account Setup|Update personal information. Granted, it does seem odd that setting up all of Money doesn't really seem like a subset of setting up an account, but this is where these settings are hidden. M05 eliminated the personalization from the home page and the path to enter the personal information. Good riddance!
Q) I setup a Passport for access to my file because I thought I needed to, now I realize Passport is evil. How do I get rid of it?
A) Depending on version, go to File|Password Manager or File|Login Lockbox and remove the Passport.
See "Why do I have to use Passport authentication with Money?" for more information on the good, bad, and ugly of Passport as an access authentication scheme for Money.
Q) I'm using Windows XP and want to have two users access the same Money file. What's the easiest way to do this?
A) Open "My Documents" under Windows Explorer. Find your Money file and drag it to "Shared Documents" under My Computer. Now all users can access the same money file in the "Shared Documents."
M05 refers to a feature they call "file sharing." It isn't. It's just a way of adding multiple Passports to allow access to the subset of data that is copied from the local file to MSN web servers and made available via the web interface.
Thanks to Chris for the original answer.
Q) Is there a way to mark several hundred old transactions as reconciled in one step?
A) There is no one step way to do this. The best way to do this is to set the view to show only unreconciled transactions sorted by date, select the earliest transaction you want to mark, hold down Ctrl+Shift. Hit M. You can hit M repeatedly or just hold it down to auto-repeat. Transactions will disappear--to reconciled status--pretty quickly, limited only by Money's performance on your computer.
Q) Money opens with my old email address. How do I tell it about my new one?
A) This indicates that your Money data file is set to authenticate access via Passport. So, what’s wrong here is that you need to update your Passport account and then update the Passport used with your Money data file.
First, login to your data file using the old email address. (If you've already changed the name at Passport and not in Money, you may have to login using the offline mode.)
If you go into File|Password Manager (File|Login Lockbox on versions before M04), on the File Password Settings tab, you should see Passport sign-in is enabled for… and Change… Click on Change…Select Disable Money's Passport features. Click on Next. Click on the Disable this Passport for use in Money check box. Click Finish. Click OK to have no passwords at all.
Exit Money.
Now, you have to change your Passport by browsing to the Passport web site. Select View or Edit your profile, sign in, under the old email address that is the Passport account name, click the link "I need to change this." Follow along from there.
Restart Money.
You should get this really annoying screen about setting up sign in security.
At this point, consider whether you need a Passport associated with your Money data file at all. See "Why do I have to use Passport authentication with Money?" for more information on why you might or might not want to do this. If you conclude you don’t need it, just say no to the sign in security screen. If you feel you must associate your file with a Passport, continue on.
Select Yes; Yes, I want to use a Passport; Use an existing Passport. Click Next. Enter the new email address/Passport sign-in name and its password. Click Next.
Q) What if I don't want to use Money with Passport authentication?
A) When you install Money or create a new data file in versions prior to M05, you can "just say no" when it asks you to sign up for Passport. If you do this the first several times you start the application or open the file, it will give up asking.
M05 stopped trying to nag you into adding Passport authentication to your file. If you are determined to Just Say No, you won't get nagged. On the other hand, if you are new to Money and setting up a file for the first time, the new process would make you believe that not authenticating access to your Money file with a Passport (or a file password at least) is unnatural and immoral. It's neither.
Here's how to avoid the Passport/file password "requirement" in M05:
After File|New:
- Page: Thank you for using… (click Next)
- Page: Help protect your online Privacy and Security. (It says this in BIG TYPE--and who could argue with that? If you don't use a Passport, your data will be public and unsecured it seems to imply.) Passport has all kinds of issues not the least of which is we ship your data off to our servers. (It says this in little type in a scroll box that doesn't mention the problems you can have accessing your own data if Microsoft has a problem with the Money Passport servers) (click Decline)
- Dialog Box: Are you sure you really want to do such a stupid thing (click Yes)
- Page: A file password is a good thing (BIG TYPE again) don't forget it (little type) (click the I don't want check box, then Next)
- Page: To setup accounts you'll need the name of your primary bank and your online sign-in information from your bank (here you can click Skip Account Setup unless you want more of the hand-holding) (By the way, this isn't true, either. You can just select "not in list" as the financial institution and nothing bad will happen and Money will be highly functional and will work the way some of us have happily used it for a decade.)If you already setup to use Passport authentication and have now changed your mind, see "I setup a Passport for access to my file because I thought I needed to, now I realize Passport is evil. How do I get rid of it?"
See "Why do I have to use Passport authentication with Money?" for more information on the good, bad, and ugly of Passport as an access authentication scheme for Money.
Q) What is the -s option? What is the Super Salvage utility?
A) These (and the File|Money File Repair menu choice added by M04) are the file repair tools.
See "I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?" for more information on these tools.
References:
MSKB: 182608 How to resolve file inconsistencies
Q) How can I note that, say, Automobile : Gasoline expenses applied to a specific car?
A) Sometimes Money users want to be able to differentiate like income or expenses between different objectives. Examples include determining how much is spent on which of your automobiles and what rental income is associated with which rental properties.
Some people think that expanding the categories list is the obvious way to do this. E.g., Automobile : '05 Accord Gasoline. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't scale well. Add another car? Double up the categories by adding Automobile : '06 SL550 Gasoline. Want to track insurance and taxes? Add Insurance : '05 Accord Auto and Taxes : '05 Accord Personal Property. It just gets worse…
Luckily, Money provides an alternate approach called "classification". A classification is a set of two-level tagging just like, but parallel to, Category, with its own name like "Class" or "Tax Applicability". Money allows two degrees of classification. Thus, a given expense can be Category Automobile : Gasoline, and Class My Autos : '05 Accord, and Tax Applicability Tax Year 2006 : Reimbursable Job Expense, all at the same time. This allows you to dice and slice the data readily into all Automobile : Gasoline expenses or all My Autos : '05 Accord expenses or any intersecting set (Automobile : Gasoline for just My Autos : '05 Accord). You can also do things like classify Insurance : Automobile or Taxes : License Plate Ad Valorem Tax to a My Autos : '06 SL550. Most Money reports allow the report to select specific classifications just like they allow selecting specific categories.
What are the downsides? It's more data to collect, but you needn't classify every transaction, just those you'd like to be able to select this way. The classification isn't supported by things like the "guessing" of categories by Payee name when downloading or hand entering transactions. You can't schedule classification of the elements of a Loan Payment, though you can edit a Loan Payment transaction--or fix it when you select Enter in Register--to include classification in the elements. (See "Why can't I schedule a Loan Payment with pre-assigned classification?" for more.) Classification isn't supported in Find and Replace. (Still. How hard could it be, Money team?) It make the two-line register view a three- or four-line proposition. You can't get classification data out to Excel via MoneyLink.
How to get started with Classification? It varies slightly by version and the Help pages should provide definitive advice. In general, find your way to a Categories & Payees screen. In the View section, you will see choices Classification 1 and Classification 2, assuming you haven't setup Classification already. Click on the first one and it will let you name and Enable the first classification set. Once enabled, each transaction entry form or register entry will let you enter the two levels of your classification 1 just as you do with Categories.
You might also want to use classification for things like Vacation : Hawaii 2004, Cell Phone : (888)555-1212, Computer : Desktop IV, Other : Daughter gets married, Property : 123 Republican Circle and so forth.
Q) How do I setup a money market account as a checking account?
A) If you aren't downloading the information from your investment company into Money, you can set it up and manage it as a checking account.
If you are downloading the information, Money will likely insist that the money market account is an investment in an investment account. This will make it harder to manage like a checking account. There is no good solution.
Q) I've entered charges in my credit card account, when I pay the bill aren't I spending twice? Is my card a category or account?
A) These, and many other fundamentally related questions, are frequently asked by people new to personal finance software and formalized accounting methods.
There are two ways to approach this whole issue. Let's describe the more useful, and generally preferred, way first: You setup Accounts, not Categories, for the tools you use to spend money. I.e., setup accounts for your checking account and your credit card account(s).
When you spend on the cards, you record transactions in the credit card account for WHY you spent the money. E.g., $50 to MCI WorldCom for category:subcategory "Utilities:Long Distance."
When you pay the credit card bills, you "Transfer" money from, say, your Checking Account to your Visa Account. Paying a bill like this is not an expense. It's just taking money you have and applying it to expenses (i.e., liabilities) you already incurred--hence the transfer. The special category "Credit Card Payment" is just a less confusing (but less insightful) way to say "Transfer" and it behaves exactly the same except you can't create a scheduled "Credit Card Payment" but you can create a scheduled "Transfer" and it works exactly the same. M05 came along and added a new Expense Category "Credit Card Payments/Transfer" just to mess with anybody who is just starting to understand this stuff. As Cal Learner--MVP recommended, the best thing to do is probably to delete this category. It just causes confusion.
The second way, if you are not ready to dive in just yet, is to categorize the entire payment to the credit card as "Miscellaneous" and not worry about what, in turn, the credit card charges were for. In this scenario you don't even have to setup the credit card as a separate Account. If you really want to use Money to understand where the money comes from and goes to, don't do it this way; it masks what you are really spending the money for.
Money provides an intermediate path that can be simple to start while you are getting up and running and can easily morph into the recommended method. When you create the account, tell it you want to "AutoBalance" the account. (This is the same as the radio buttons "Account tracking: I want to track individual charges/Just track the amount I owe" on the Account Details page.) When AutoBalance is enabled, a "Credit Card Payment:[credit card account]" or the more normative "Transfer:[credit card account]" will popup a dialog box to balance the account. It will also do automagically what was outlined above as a manual task: it will enter an account adjustment transaction to expense the entire balance as "Miscellaneous."
There is much more on this in Help, the Help videos, Audio Help, and the book that came with Money. Also look at the sample file. The key hurdles for many people to cross are that: 1) Accounts are HOW you spend/receive money and are where individual expense and income transactions are recorded. 2) Categories and Subcategories are WHY you spend/receive money and are recorded as transactions in accounts. 3) Transfer is how you move Money from one account (say a cash account of which checking is one type) to another (say a liability account of which credit card is one type).
Q) My Credit Card Payments don't show up in Spending Reports--how come?
A) See the answer to the question "I've entered charges in my credit card account, when I pay the bill aren't I spending twice? Is my card a category or account?"
Q) When should I create an Account instead of a Payee? Aren't Payees just Accounts? Or is my Payee really a Category?
A) An Account in Money allows recording of transactions with credits and debits to a balance carried forward. Accounts are places to group transactions that frequently reflect some of your real world accounts like checking, savings, and revolving credit card accounts.
Payees are people or institutions you interact with financially. The simplest example is the name you put in a Pay To on a check. That's always a payee. Your employer who pays you is technically a Payer, but Money always calls Payers Payees. A Payee in Money is a name with optional attributes like address information, phone numbers and account numbers. Payees are typically used to record information about people and businesses you regularly pay or receive money from. Examples might include a grocery store, a utility company, an ISP and so on.
Not all Payees you enter transactions for need to be Payees explicitly listed on the Payees page. (Accounts & Bills|Categories & Payees|Payees in M02.) See answer to question "Why do I have to create an entry in the Payees every time I spend money somewhere new?" for more information.
Sometimes you have accounts that are associated with a Payee and maybe this is also an Account in Money, but by no means always. The determining factor tends to be whether the account you have with a Payee involves its own transactions and a standing balance from month to month. Credit cards are almost always best treated as Money Accounts. Accounts like the account your plumber has for you and the accounts you have with your utility companies rarely need their own Money Accounts.
The name of a Payee and an Account in Money are occasionally the same.
Categories are ways to assign income and expense to, for lack of a better word, reasons for the income or expense. Categories could include Wage & Salary:Bonus, Food:Groceries, Utilities:Garbage Pickup.
Examples:
I charge $55.00 for Category "Food:Groceries" to my Discover credit card account. I enter a transaction for $55.00 for Food:Groceries in my Money "Discover" Account, which is a Money Account of type "Credit Card." I pay the Payee "Discover" $1,234.56 for the Food:Groceries, among other things, by entering another, separate, transaction in my "Checking" Account in Money using the Special Category "Transfer:Discover" which moves money from one Account to the other.
I pay my Payee "Xcel Energy" for $123.45 of Category "Utilities:Gas" and $65.43 of Category "Utilities Electricity" by entering a split transaction in my Money "Checking" Account. I include my account number for my Xcel Energy account (which is not a Money Account) in the Memo field of the check.
Q) Why don't my car Loan Payments show up as an expense in monthly expense reports?
A) The short answer is that the loan payments really aren't expenses--only the interest portion is an expense. The expense happened when you bought the car. The expense continues to happen as you pay the interest each month for the money you are still borrowing to pay for the car.
If you really want the payment to look like an expense every month, then do not setup a loan account in Money and use an expense category like Automobile:Payments. You may have to create this category.
Money (per standard accounting and personal finance management practice) tries to manage cash flow (like the principal component of your loan payments) as a separate issue from income and expense (like buying the car and paying rent on the money you borrowed to buy the car). It takes some getting used to but it is a much better approach to managing your money since it recognizes expenses when they occur and doesn't let simple cash flow mask where you are really spending money.
See also the answer to "My Credit Card Payments don't show up in Spending Reports--how come?"
Q) Can a new version of Money open my old version data file/backup file/backup diskette(s)?
A) The newest version of Money is designed to open and upgrade older version Money data files, backup files, and backup diskettes for all older versions of Money, with caveats as noted below.
1) Upgrades are not supported across different localizations of Money. E.g., M99 for UK will not upgrade to M04 US. For more information, see "Why do I get the 'incompatible versions' message when upgrading my data file?".
2) Beginning with M03, a significant number of users have had problems with the upgrade process. For more information, see "I thought Money files were supposed to be upward compatible. How come Money[new] crashes when upgrading my Money[old] data file?".
3) Be sure you have a good backup file/set of backup diskettes. For more information, see "You must help me! My only floppy backup has a data error reading. What do I do?".
Q) Can I access my file on my desktop over my home network from my laptop?
A) It works fine IF you assure that only one machine has the file open at a time. This includes subtle things like MoneySide and MoneyExpress. My only file corruption in the last three of four years came from inadvertently opening Money and working in the data file on the WiFi laptop when the desktop machine also had the file open. Whatever else, have a backup strategy.
Setting up a network and opening/accessing file shares is beyond the scope of this newsgroup. You might want to consult one of the operating system specific newsgroups if that is the kind of help you are looking for.
M05 refers to a feature they call "file sharing". It isn't. It's just a way of adding multiple Passports to allow access to the subset of data that is copied from the local file to MSN web servers and made available via the web interface
Q) How do I backup to CD-RW? CD-R?
A) First, remember that a CD-R, CD-RW, or any of the various forms of writable DVD is not a general purpose random access storage device and needs software to begin to pretend to be.
(Such software is referred to as "packet writing" software and includes things like DirectCD or Drag-to-Disc from Easy Media (Coaster) Creator by Roxio and InCD from Nero. That having been said, the poor reliability many people experience with packet writing software in general and DirectCD in specific suggests it is a very poor choice for backing up critical data like your Money file. At less than a dime per media in quantities of 100, burning a CD-R with a copy of your Money data file seems like a better choice.)
Like any file, your .MNY data file can be stored on writable optical media the same way you put other files on them. For instance, if you use WinXP, you can backup to the hard disk mirror created by WinXP and then burn a CD after you've exited Money. If you like Nero, go ahead and burn a CD with your Money data file and don't drag Money into the problem at all. Etc.
Second, don't expect the "backup to floppy" choice to offer up your writeable CD. Is the writeable CD a floppy? No, it is not. Why would Money think it is? Newer versions (M04?) say "Removable." But they still don't recognize devices that do not have normal FAT/NTFS file systems--i.e., CD/DVD writeable.
When a WinXP follow-on product supports the Mt. Rainier technology, and when you have hardware that also supports Mt. Rainier, then maybe Money will be a little savvier about writable CDs.
Read the referenced MSKB for information about using the backup methods in Money to backup to writeable CDs.
M06 updated the backup tools--the first time in many versions that backup functionality has been improved--and provided direct access to writable optical devices that the operating system knows how to deal with. Perhaps this was because they broke the floppy disk backups so severely in M05?
Reference courtesy of Glyn Simpson, Microsoft MVP - Money
References:
MSKB: Q265130 backup to writeable CDs
Q) How do I move accounts from one Money file to another?
A) The only way to do this is File|Export and Import via QIF files. Beware that duplicate account names ("Checking") in the exporting and importing account will cause problems and one or the other account should be renamed before you do the export/import. Also beware that transfers between accounts to be moved will necessitate importing all interlinked QIF files simultaneously. Finally, QIF export/import will NOT move things like bills associated with the account or account detail information.
Because of all of these limitations, make sure to work in copies of the target file before you get this all tuned to produce acceptable results.
Q) How do I start over with a new data file?
A) There are two ways to do this. File|New… is an old favorite. You can also delete, rename, or move your data file so that Money cannot find it when you start Money--Money will then offer to create a new file. Answer derived from one posted by Cal Learner, MVP.
A) You don't. The only ways to undo the effects of archiving are to go to the archive file and enter/import newer transactions or to export the transactions from the archive file and import them into your current file. Both involve going through the .QIF export/import process. Neither is trouble-free. See the MSKB for Microsoft's approach.
Archiving will shrink your file size somewhat. There have been some reports that archiving helps performance problems. That's about all it does. On the down side, in addition to not providing any way to put the archived data back in the ongoing data file, archiving will not remove old investment account activity and related transfer transactions. In some versions, archiving seems to have many problems adjusting the account beginning balance for removed transactions.
For these reasons, many of us do not recommend archiving and do not do it ourselves. If you start recording all kinds of interesting memo data (like serial numbers for your toys, warranty lengths, the genus and species of plants you bought for your garden and so on) you, too, will not want to archive.
If you archived recently enough, you can use the archive file you created in place of the file that Archive removed transactions from. It has all of the transactions in your entire Money file as of the date you archived, not just ones before the archive date. This is another result of the rather odd design for archiving.
References:
MSKB: 133485 How to un-archive
Q) I just archived. But there are many transactions left from before the archive date. Why?
A) The more you know about archiving; the less likely you are to do it. All pain. Precious little gain. I do not recommend archiving. YMMV.
First, there is little reason to archive--as you've found out, by design the impact is limited--and some reasons not to--primarily that you can't go back at all easily once you've archived and your archive file will overlap the file you use going forward since it's just a backup prior to removing transactions. If, like many of us, you record all manner of useful data like the serial numbers of your toys and when you bought a battery for the car last, taking this data out of your main data file is not something you'll want to do.
Second, archiving does not remove all transactions. Transactions related to investment buys/sells and, hence, capital gains, for instance, are not archived.
Third, there is little evidence that archiving has a significant impact on performance, especially given the limitations on what data it actually removes.
Fourth, hard disks are selling for less then $0.75/GB and the smallest 2.5" laptop drives being manufactured today are typically 10GB in size. Very few people have data files bigger than, say, 50 MB. That makes 200 extremely large Money data files you can store on the smallest hard disk being manufactured today. (Capacities and costs as of 11/24/2004. The trend of larger disks costing less money will no doubt continue. This answer may or may not be updated accordingly.)
There are a number of MSKB articles on the subject of limitations of archiving. On-line help even describes it pretty well. Also, see the question "How do I un-archive?"
References:
MSKB: 191537 How archiving really works II
MSKB: 306825 How archiving really works III
MSKB: 77462 How archiving really works
Q) I just bought a new computer with the current Money pre-installed. How do I transfer my data from the old version/old machine?
A) Go find your Money data file and copy it to the new machine. Your file will be named *.mny, so if you do not know where it is, you can search for it. Likewise, going into File|Open should enable you to see where the current file is located.
The best ways to move the file are to burn a CD, use something like a network or laplink, use some diskette copy or backup/restore routine that can span multiple diskettes, or consider this an excuse to buy one of those neato new USB memory keys. Second best is to use the Money backup to floppy capability to backup on the old version/old machine and restore on the new version/new machine. BUT BE SURE NOT TO TRASH THE OLD COPY 'TIL YOU HAVE THE NEW COPY RUNNING! Sometimes data errors and so forth occur--you'd be surprised how many people get here when their ONLY backup copy is trashed and want to know how to recover.
When you first open the data file from the old version, Money will rename your existing file and create a new file from the data in the old one except upgraded to the current file format.
When you start the new version of Money on the new machine, be sure to tell it to skip Passport. If you find you need it later, you can go add it.
If you use Money backup/restore, you might just want to first go open the sample data file, so it will skip lots of non-pertinent steps like the interview. Then you can restore the old copy from floppies using the Money File|Restore menu choice.
Also, be sure to copy your Tools|Options settings by hand since many of them are NOT stored in the data file. You will also have to redo printer setups.
This discussion assumes that the old system and new system both use the same region settings and both old and new versions of Money are the same localization (e.g., Money US or Money UK.) If either of these assumptions is violated, it may not be possible to do what you want.
Q) I just reinstalled M98--it can't read my data backup floppies. Now what?
[Relevant to Money98 (v.6)]
A) Money98 originally didn't know how to do a multi-diskette backup. (This was bizarre since M98 was the first version where data file size grew by an order of magnitude.) If you made a Money98 diskette-spanning backup using Money98, you must have installed the patch that provided this functionality and now the patch is lost. (The outcry over the lack of spanning backup and the suddenly huge data files--small by the standards of current versions--led to release of the patch.) You will need to get it and reinstall it to read your diskette-spanning backup. Once installed, you will need to look not under the File menu but under Tools|Multi-disk backup. You can also see the MSKB item for more information.
Possibly a better course would be to consider migrating to a newer version of Money. The never version will know how to read the format written by the M98 diskette-spanning backup patch.
Thanks to Bonnie Synhorst for this answer; the MSKB link was provided by Kimberly Renna-Griego, MVP.
References:
Money98 diskette-spanning backup patch (get file mdbr1.exe)
MSKB: Q179397 M98 Diskette-spanning backup/restore
Q) What is this .LRD file with the same name as my Money data file? Should I worry about it?
A) It's a record-locking file used for internal purposes by the database engine Money uses. It opens when you open a Money file and disappears when you close it normally. You may see one left around if Money "abnormally ends" or ABENDs. (That's IBM talk for "crashes.") It means nothing to the user. You can safely ignore it.
It will also be there when Money Express is open in the background.
If you sign-in to Money with "Use Money's online features that require .NET Passport," then 2 or 3 (depending upon version) Money background processes are spawned. These background processes, mis.exe, misuser.exe (Money 2003-4 only) and mnyschdl.exe, are spawned and continue to run even after closing your Money file and exiting Money itself (msmoney.exe), whether or not Money Express is enabled. If you have enabled Background Banking as well, one or more of these background processes will be periodically locking your primary Money file. The list changes slightly for M05, but the basic issue is still the same: depending on what you enable in Money, your Money data file may still be in use, and the .LRD file still relevant, when you are not actually using Money.
Additional information about situations that will create the lock file borrowed from an answer by Brent Neville who has also provided updates.
Q) What should I do to close the year in my data file? Should I archive?
A) Lots of people want to do something to "close" out a year's worth of data in Money. There isn't really any need to do anything. Money will happily carry on from here. Any need to look at data by year is best accomplished with customized reports. But you may also want to make a "snapshot" of the data to file with your taxes or similar records for the year. Lots of people think, reasonably enough, that Money's Archive or Backup functions are somehow useful for this. Perhaps not.
Understand that:
A Backup is supposed to be a file that enables you to Restore a file exactly as your data file was at the point in time where the backup was performed. Money's backup cannot always achieve this.
An Archive is a copy of your entire data file at a given point in time but just before the archiving function destructively and irreversibly removes a bunch of data from, and modifies other data in, the main data file you intend to use going forward. I do not recommend archiving. All pain. No gain.
If you want to have a high-probability-of-recoverability of your Money data as far into the future as my crystal ball can see, there are two things I recommend:
1) Make a copy (not a Money File|Backup, just a Windows Explorer File Copy) of the .MNY file as it now exists, and burn it onto a CD-R or two. Use the quality media for this. (The $0.02 per disc white label media may be great for your MP3s, but this is serious data we are talking about here.) Turn off all of the esoteric burning format options. (The system that you need to read this on may not have been invented yet so it is best to stay mainstream.) Test the CD-R(s) in at least one, if not several, other machines to make sure you can read the file back correctly. (The burner that burned the CD may be the only drive in the world that can actually read it.) Label the CD-R(s) with the exact version of Money that wrote the file, as displayed in Help|About. (This will be something like 14.0.115.1105.) File at least one of the CD-Rs in your safe deposit box or other off-site location. This will be usable as long as you can run the noted Money version or a future Money version that supports that file format. Money File|Backup should provide a 100% path back to the original data file. For all too many people it does not seem to do this.
2) Create two favorite reports. One is Account Transactions for all accounts and the other is Investment Transactions for all accounts including closed accounts. Customize them to the date range for all of the year you want to capture and set all of the flags for every column to appear. Clear any other customization that filters out data. Spot check the resulting reports to confirm that you haven't accidentally left anything out. Then do one or more of the following: a) print to paper, b) print to .PDF or Microsoft Office Imaging files, c) "Export to Excel" .CSV (comma separated value) format files. (.CSV files can be read by Excel but they can also be read with Notepad or any other text editor and are easy for even savvy 12 year olds to write programs to parse back into more usable forms.) If you make the files, follow guidance above for what to do with them. If you print the reports, save a copy with, say, your tax returns and associated data. These will be usable for access to the data--but not by Money--in the event some point in the future arrives and there is no Money version that can read the data file from #1. It will not get all of the data (quotes, payee addresses, loan terms, account details like account numbers, comments, and credit limit are all lost this way) but it's about as good as Money will let you get.
Q) When I archive, Money complains that my floppy disk is full. How can this possibly be?
A) The archive file is a copy of your entire data file made before any transactions are removed. Archiving knows nothing about compressing data files nor does it know about spanning multiple floppies with large files. (Just because Money backup to floppy knows how to do both of these things, don't think that archive does. It doesn't.) Given these facts and the fact that virtually every data file created by Money is larger than 1.44MB, it should be obvious that unless you have that rare data file that will fit on a floppy, the message you are getting is just Money telling you a fact of life.
Q) Where is Money hiding my data from me? In the registry? In the ether?
A) This question comes up over and over again in many disguised forms. Examples include "How do I just start completely over?," "I want to move my data to a new computer but can’t figure out where it is on the old one, what do I do?," and the ever popular "How do I backup my Money data to a CD-R instead of a floppy?"
Money is a file-oriented program. It stores your data in .MNY data files just like Word uses .DOC files, Excel uses .XLS files, Notepad uses .TXT files, and Access uses .MDB files. These files are all just data files that can be moved, copied, deleted, renamed, shared over the network, or burned to CDs, no matter what application originally created them. Perhaps part of the problem here is that Money users generally use the same single data file for months or years at a time--and Money always opens the last file they used--so they may not even remember that their data is in a file named what they told Money to name it and stored where they told Money to store it. Take note: there is a File|Open choice in Money, just like in Word. Money also has a File|New choice, just like Word.
There are some additional considerations:
1) While Money stores all of your account and transaction data in the data file you designated when you first setup the file, it stores your Tools|Options settings in the registry. The Tools|Options settings are the only thing that you ever put into Money that is not stored in a .MNY data file. This can be an issue when you reload your system or move your data file to a new system but the Tools|Options settings get lost. Particularly painful is when printer alignment settings for printing checks get lost. Write them down before replacing your system or reinstalling the application.
2) It is generally considered a "best practice" to store your .MNY files in the My Documents folder tree, not somewhere in the Program Files folder tree. All of the reasons for this are beyond the scope of the FAQ, but think of it this way: it's like throwing your coat in the back seat of the car vs. under the hood. The back seat is your space--under the hood isn't. This advice is particularly import for Windows Vista users since, for standard user accounts, Vista will "pretend" to update files stored in Program Files but will promptly revert them to their original contents when you exit Money.
3) Money can have your file open for access--and so can MoneyExpress and MoneySide. You should always avoid doing anything to the data file (like copying it to a CD-R as a backup or opening it over the network or from a different user profile) when the file is already opened since this can cause data file corruption problems. An .LRD file in the same folder with the same name is usually an indication that something has the data file open.
4) Starting the Money application directly--as opposed to opening a .MNY file from the Windows file explorer--results in Money trying to open the last .MNY file you used from the exact same location. If, say, you've moved your data file, this will result in a "file not found" type of error. This message does not mean that Money lost your data--it means that you've hidden your data from Money. Go find your data file using the Windows file explorer and r-click Open it or double click on it. After doing this, Money will now know where your file is located.
5) Because your Money file is just a file, you can burn it to CD or whatever else you want to do with it, just like any other data file. Money really doesn't care. Likewise, whatever you do with the file is at your risk, not Money's.
6) If you don't remember where you told Money to put your file or what you told Money to name it, here are some ways to find out:
- Search your system's disks for files of type Microsoft Money File (files using the extension .MNY).
- The Money title bar shows the name of your file, as in "MyDataFileNameIsHere – Microsoft Money" when you are using Money.
- The Most Recently Used choices numbered 1 through 4 at the bottom of Money's file menu are the four most recently opened Money data files
- If, with your file open, you go to Money's File|Open dialog it will show you the directory (folder, if you prefer) where your data file is located as this is the place it will start looking. If there is any doubt where this is, pull down the little arrow next to the "Look In" pull-down.7) Because your Money data file is your data file, you are responsible for protecting it as you would any other file with important data in it: this means backing it up, keeping copies before reloading your machine, and so on.
8) Money File|Backup creates files that are not identical copies of the original file. For reasons unknown, occasionally this difference is relevant. If you really have to be sure you have your data--like when migrating to a new system or reformatting your present hard disk--it's a very good idea to have both the Money backup .MBF file and the real .MNY data file both copied onto, say, a writable CD or, better, several writable CDs, which you have tested in alternate machines from the one that wrote the CD, before destroying the original. The best method, if possible, is to get the new installation working before destroying the original.
Q) I imported a statement to the wrong account. Now Money wants to keep repeating this mistake. How do I undo this?
A) The basic approach is to delete the financial institution associated with the account and then specify the financial institution for the account a second time. For more details, there are several MSKB items that may help. The links are courtesy of Mark and Cal Learner--MVP.
References:
MSKB: 327241 Statement imported to wrong account
MSKB: 822390 OFX statements downloaded to wrong account
Q) If downloaded data is so much trouble, why even use Money? Or, why use Money if you have type in all of the transaction data?
A) Many recent posters in the newsgroup seem to view downloading transaction data as the only value-add Money provides or as fundamental to any use of the product. This is unfortunate. Perhaps they don't understand that transaction data actually can be entered by hand?
IF all you use Money for is to keep a register, THEN it seems true that downloading data will save a lot of labor--assuming it goes trouble free and the downloading never fails and your payees always match and so on. But if all you use Money for is to keep a register that matches, by definition, the data you download from your bank--or your bank's website if Yodlee is involved, what's the point? Why not just log into your bank's web site, look at the data, and press on? What value did Money really add?
IF, on the other hand, you use Money to manage a budget, forecast cash flow, track asset value, manage investments, track asset values, track property/job/vehicle/vacation/etc. costs, estimate taxes and so forth, THEN a) the quality and consistency of transaction data matters and dependence on downloaded data may not be entirely compatible with this objective, and b) the amount of time and effort spent doing manual transaction entry is a small fraction of total time spent using Money at worst and is no more and maybe less than the time spent keeping the download thing working and making up for all of the things it can't do at best or screws up at worst. Examples of things the best downloaded data just can't do are split a paycheck deposit into its constituent parts, classify transactions for vehicle or property or similar, or enter the splits for things like an expense at the grocery being part Food:Groceries, part Miscellaneous:Supplies, and part Transfer:Pocket Change. As for the "at worst" side of transaction download, just read the newsgroup for a week. Many weeks more than half the posts or more have something to do with problems with downloaded transaction data. Imagine if half of the posts in the Word newsgroup had to do with typing text into the thing.
Some posters even say thing like "[if you don't download data,] what's the purpose of using Money instead of, say, Excel? [Excel] actually may be a [better] solution considering all the Money limitations with transaction reconciliation, online updates, and so on." This suggests in some circular way that downloaded transaction data is the singular way to make Money work and the limitations with downloaded transaction data reduce Money to the level of Excel in terms of solving the problems at hand. It's like saying if the heated seat in the car isn't working well, just walk instead.
The problems with downloaded transaction data are just that. There is NO function in Money (e.g., manage a budget, forecast cash flow, track asset value, manage investments, track asset values, track property/job/vehicle/vacation/etc costs, estimate taxes) that is one iota easier, or better, or more capable, or enabled uniquely by downloaded transaction data except for downloading transaction data itself. In fact, all of those other functions are TRANSPARENT to how the transaction data actually gets there. Worse, many of them are only as good as the data they process. If you enter the data, you get it right; if you let your bank and Yodlee manage this data, you get what you get.
Maybe what we really need is two Money product lines: Money View, an AOL-like web-only service. Make it just M05 Essential *. The user of this product just wants a passive approach that provides value by aggregating data ala Yodlee, delivering relevant info--aka targeted ads, and sparing effort and typing. The second, Money Management, is the traditional Money product where the users are actually expecting to put some effort into the whole thing and wants to use the data to perform analysis and planning and so forth. Sadly, the first user seems to be the Money "target market."
Q) Money says my PIN for getting my account activity must be six digits. It’s four and works fine on their web site. What gives?
A) The Money online statement PIN/password for a given bank is frequently different than the ATM PIN/web site password for the exact same bank. Money is likely just quoting/enforcing the restrictions that the bank has told it to in the online protocols. Contact the bank's customer service to find out for sure.
Q) My bank offers several formats of file for download and import. Which should I pick?
A) First, your two choices are QIF and OFX. Everything else requires some amount of conversion to one of these before Money will import it. See "How do I import from Excel (or .CSV or etc.)?" for more information on importing other formats.
If both QIF and OFX are offered, OFX is preferable. This is because OFX includes unique identifiers assigned by the bank to the account and the transactions. Money uses the unique identifiers in two ways that make OFX import better than QIF. First, once Money has associated the account identifier with a specific Account in Money, it will always import future files to the correct account. QIF asks every time and is very problematic if you accidentally give it the wrong answer. Second, Money stores the transaction identifiers with the imported transactions. Because it does this, future imports of a file that has the same transactions won't duplicate the transactions. Importing QIF files that overlap requires Money and the user to attempt to identify any transactions that appear to be duplicates. This isn't always as easy as it seems and is prone to error and requires extra user effort. QIF is the last choice of import format for these reasons.
Question nominated to the FAQ by Mark Horn; answer derived from postings by Mark Horn and Chris Cowles.
Q) When I download account data, my scheduled transfer from Checking to [Visa] gets duplicated in the respective accounts. Why?
A) The secret is to make sure the first one you download is set as a Transfer:[name of second acct] and the second one you download is flagged as a match for the other half of the transfer created out of the first one downloaded.
Now that you've got them, you probably have to do something like void the second one downloaded and not turned into a transfer.
I say "probably" because I really don't know--I skip all of this downloaded transaction data stuff and all of these headaches that come as part of the set.
Cal Learner--MVP, who does download transactions, offered up this:
There is more than one good way to download your credit card data and have also the payment downloaded from a checking account. Here are three ways I like:
1. When you process the first transaction of the credit card payment, set the category as a Transfer to the other (credit card or bank account), or use the equivalent SPECIAL "Credit Card Payment" category. When you process the second transaction, Money should match it. Be careful to not just Accept if Money did not find the match on its own for some reason. Click Change and match it to the transfer you already made if Money did not match it for you. I would consider this the classic of the ways I like. Note that for this you would not use the Money 2005 EXPENSE category "Credit Card Payments/Transfer". Instead you should consider deleting that EXPENSE "Credit Card Payments/Transfer" to avoid confusion. See also "We had Transfer and Credit Card Payment in M04. What's with Credit Card Payments/Transfer added in M05?"
2. In method 2, don't handle credit card payments as transfers or the pre-defined "Credit Card Payment". Instead create one category of "CC payment" or some such. If you define the category as an expense category, expect a warning when you use it to represent the payment within the credit card account -- if you have the warning enabled. Just click Yes in response to the warning. The category should net at zero in reports across accounts, and you can still customize to ignore the category if you like. (This is Bonnie Synhorst's favorite method.) For this method you could use the M05 "Credit Card Payments/Transfer".
3. Create a suspense account. I have one I call In Transit, and I called it a "cash or other" account. Change each of the downloaded transactions into transfer to/from that account. That account will normally have a zero balance except while funds are in transit. Make your credit card payments as transfers to and from that account.
Q) When I download data from my bank, Money grabs the file. How do I make it stop?
A) As many applications do, Money tells Windows to associate certain file types with Money and assign certain things to do when files of that type are downloaded or opened. If you have Quicken installed, it tries to do the exact same thing. Barring your intervention, the last application installed will win this battle. You can use this fact to all Quicken to get the files by simply reinstalling it.
But you can also take matters into your own hands. If you want to see or change file associations yourself, you can
Start|Settings|Control Panel|Folder Options|File Types
Select OFX-- Open Financial Exchange File or QIF or whatever.
Click Advanced. Check Confirm Open After Download unless you would not like the pop-up box. That pop-up box may be of use in that it lets you save the file to the disk and open it with either or both programs later.
See that the "Actions" box contains "Open" in bold. If it is not bold, you can select Open as the default action by clicking the Set Default button.
Click Edit.
When you click edit, the application used to perform action for Money would be similar to the following line:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Money\System\mnyimprt.exe" %1
with both the quotes and the %1 after the quote. The path will differ based on your installation. Modify it for your setup. There would be a similar string if Quicken is handling that file type.
Answer courtesy of Cal Learner--MVP
Q) Why are my credit card charges showing as credits not debits?
A) There is more than one possibility here.
If downloaded transaction data is involved, there could be a problem in the download file.
Another thing that sometimes happens is that a user entered an account beginning balance as a negative number. So Money thinks the account has a credit balance (the bank owes you) rather than a debit balance (you owe the bank). Entering purchases makes this negative "you owe" balance decline since the bank now "owes you" less money. Unless the bank owed you when you setup the account, the account beginning balance should be a positive number.
Finally, some people just get confused by how liability accounts, of which Credit Card is one example, are depicted in Money. In the account register for a Credit Card account, the amount you owe is positive. At the bottom of the register it normally says something like "You owe: $123.45". If it said "You owe: ($123.45)", you would be running a credit balance.
Note that in the numbers on the Account List and Favorite Account balances on the home page and so on, the amount you owe is shown as negative, and a credit balance would be shown as positive. In the account register, things are the other way around.
Answer derived from one provided by Cal Learner--MVP.
Q) How can I transfer money (to / from) the loan I (made / borrowed)?
A) Money doesn't provide any way in the Loan Account Setup genie to account for money transferred into a loan you are making or from a loan you are taking. Since one typically is funding a loan from another account when you are lending money or transferring the money into some account or transaction (a car purchase, say), this seems a fairly fundamental omission.
If you can live with this, the easiest thing to do is just enter an expense or income transaction with some unique category ("Other Income : Loan Proceeds Received") or no category at all. You can enter a memo in this transaction making clear what you were doing and why and referencing the Loan Accounts involved.
An alternate way to account for the principal received follows a more elaborate technique outlined by Chris Cowles: setup a loan account with no balance but using the appropriate information for all else and letting Money calculate the ($0) payment. Then you enter a "Principal Transfer" of the balance in the loan account register to the settlement account. (You will have to type "principal transfer" as the drop-/pull-downs will not offer it.) Tomorrow (or roll the clock forward by a day for a moment--Money refuses to let you do this any other way), you can go to the loan Details and select Change Loan Terms and go in and set the balance. This will cause the account details to show the amount as $0, but the balance will be correct after the transfer. The interest charged may be off by a day's worth; I have not checked this.
Q) How do I 'mark' money in an account for future use so I don't spend it now?
A) Lots of people want to do this with some mechanism like the accounts-within-an-account "subaccounts" mechanism that Quicken provides. Money provides no similar mechanism. Money, instead, provides tools to manage budget--what you plan to spend when for what--separately from cash flow--managing the amount of cash available to execute the budget. Many of us prefer the latter approach since it leaves behavior modification--not spending money just because you have a positive balance--up to us rather than resorting to subterfuge to "fake ourselves out" by "cookie jar accounting." YMMV.
When a poster said that he was looking for a "cookie jar" mechanism since lack of one meant the money "has to show in the checking account because it is there, but I don't want to think the money is mine by seeing it in the balance," David Brownridge put it very well:
"The way I deal with that is to leave the money in the cheque acct, and in Bills & Deposits create a Bill (with frequency Only Once) and the appropriate future date. Until that "bill" is paid the money will show in the balance of the account; but if you look at the forecast for the account you'll see where it gets withdrawn.
"The important point is that in terms of 'think what money is mine' I never just look at the balances in the accounts list; rather I check out the cashflow forecasts."
Q) How do I budget an expected wage increase without changing my scheduled paycheck?
A) Go into the Budget Planner, Edit the budget, go to the category in question, Edit the "Other income for [category in question]" line and tell Budget Planner about the amounts it isn't figuring out from history/scheduled transactions. Here you'd just want to add the difference amounts since the basic amount should get picked up from your scheduled paycheck transaction.
Q) How do I create different payee information for two accounts with the same payee?
A) You can create two different versions of the same Payee by putting qualifiers after the name in curly braces. E.g., "Mondo Bank {his}" and "Mondo Bank {hers}". The information in the braces and the braces themselves will not print on checks or matter much of anywhere else except where it counts--you can enter transactions to the same payee and have different underlying Payee information in Money.
You can also use curly braces around information in memo fields if you don't want certain information in your memo to print on your checks. Cool, eh?
Q) How do I handle employer reimbursable expenses?
A) There are a few ways to treat employer reimbursables. Some people prefer creating a cash account (entitled "Reimbursed Expenses" or similar). Treat expenses to be reimbursed as transfers in from the account used to pay for the expense, and treat reimbursements as transfers from this account to the account destined to receive the reimbursement.
Another way would be to use an expense category (entitled "Job-Related Expenses:Reimbursable" or similar). Treat expenses to be reimbursed as debits against the category, and treat reimbursements as credits against the category. Depending on your Tools|Options setting, Money may complain about using an expense category for what is an income transaction, You can tell Money this is what you intend. In addition, if your taxing authority allows for the deduction/treatment of unreimbursed employee expenses (as in the United States), be sure to associate the expense category to the proper tax form/line. This way, any monies not reimbursed will appear as an outstanding balance in tax-related reports/calculations.
Thanks to Derrick Cole for this answer.
Q) How do I treat my income tax refund/bill for the prior year?
A) There are several different ways to treat this.
Probably the "best" way to handle this with the least side effects is one suggested by Chris Cowles: If you don't already have one, create a "bank" account (it doesn't have to be associated with any bank) for money owed to you. Flag it as a 'budget' account on the details page. Record a transaction increasing (or decreasing) the balance on that account, categorized to your income tax expense category, dated 12/31/[tax year in question]. That adjusts your income tax expenses to reflect reality. When you get the refund, record the deposit as a transfer to checking from the asset account. Alternately, when you pay the bill, record this as a transfer from checking to the asset account, payable to the taxman or woman, as you prefer. Either way, this transaction is budget-neutral.
You can also use/create categories for this that are flagged to not be included in tax reporting (federal prior year due or refunded) or are flagged to be included (state prior year due or refunded). These would be categories like Taxes:Federal Income Tax (prior year) or Taxes:State Income Tax (prior year). This has the downside of artificially reducing or increasing your tax expenses in the tax year in question. This can have budget planner complications.
Q) How do I treat taxable fringe benefits (imputed income)?
A) Imputed income is the tax accountants' term for income (typically in the form of an employer paid benefit) that the tax law says you owe tax on even though you never got any money. (This stuff gets reported in box 12 of form W-2. The cost of life insurance over $50k is reported as code C.)
Here's how I handle this income in Money--it seems to work and doesn't bollocks up the tax estimator:
On the wages tab of my paycheck:
Wages & Salary:Imputed Income $x (I created this category)
On the deductions after taxes tab:
Insurance:Life $x
Q) How do other users account for ATM withdrawals?
A) Many users setup a dedicated cash account, I call mine "Pocket Change". Transfer the money to the cash account, enter cash transactions in the cash account, and balance it occasionally against the amount of cash you have on hand, entering either an adjustment income (Other Income:Found Money) or expense (Miscellaneous:[unassigned]) transaction to get back in sync vs. the amount of money in your pocket. You don't have to record everything. Just record the things you remember or care about or have receipts for or whatever. If the amount you are writing off seems to be getting out of hand, you can track more closely. If it's getting to be a pain, track less closely and write off more.
If this is too much of a hassle or if your cash spending is sufficiently small/rare as to not be worth worrying about, you can just use splits to account for it. Say you get $50 from the ATM, spend $40 of tickets to the ball game and pocket the $10 to spend over the next week or two. You can split a withdrawal of $50 into $40 for Leisure:Sporting Events and $10 for Miscellaneous:[unassigned].
Q) I don't want to send the whole amount of my phone bill this month, but how do I categorize the whole expense?
A) (This question suggests a new FAQ section: Credit Counseling.)
Assuming that an Account for this payee is not appropriate (see "When should I create an Account instead of a Payee? Aren't Payees just Accounts? Or is my Payee really a Category?"), one way to treat this is to enter a split transaction with the total amount of what you are going to pay them and splits with the entire expense categorized and then some negative number against some Income category like "Other Income:Screw 'em, they'll get it later" or similar for the amount you aren't paying. When they catch up with you and you pay them this amount, do another split in the total amount you are going to pay them and the splits are the expense of the amount you are paying them that hasn't been expensed before, and the next split entry is a positive amount against the Income category "Other Income:Screw 'em, they'll get it later" in the amount you are going to cough up. Money will complain that you are entering an expense against an income category--tell it to get over it. Once they get all their money from you, the total income against "Other Income:Screw 'em, they'll get it later" will fall to $0.
If you need to do this with several payees simultaneously and want to keep track of the separate unpaid balances due, probably the only good choice is to temporarily create liability accounts for each unpaid balance. The basic steps here would be to create the liability account(s), record the expenses and the addition to the liability in a split transaction when you pay the partial amount, and then pay down the liability with transfers. Example transactions with a newly created liability account--created with $0 starting balance--named "Unpaid Phone Co Balance":
First transaction total $10 (paid amount), split #1: $45 Utilities:Telephone, split #2: ($35) Transfer:Unpaid Phone Co Balance
Nth transaction (paying it off): total $65 (paid amount, split #1: $45 Utilities Telephone, split #2 $20 Transfer:Unpaid Phone Co Balance
When you get the liability account balance back down to $0, you can just close the liability account.
Q) I entered a transaction for something I bought. Now I returned the thing for credit. How do I enter that?
A) This question also comes up in other contexts like "I bought lunch for a friend on my credit card last week; he paid me in cash today. How do I deal with that?" The concern in these cases is generally that the amount of spending in the original category may get distorted for reporting and budget purposes.
The best way to treat this is to put in another transaction against the same expense category you used originally but make it a deposit or a credit amount, as appropriate to the account type. Depending on the setting of Tools|Options|Categories|Require the correct type of category for each transaction, Money may issue a warning about using an expense category for an income. You can tell it that you know what you are doing and it will let you do it. (This setting is at Tools|Settings in M05.)
Some reports, e.g., Spending by Category, may require customization to include both debits and credits against the expense category for this to show up.
Thanks to John Buschman for pointing out that this FAQ should be in the UFAQ.
Q) I get a pay advance on the 15th and a full paycheck less the advance at the end of the month. How do I track this in Money?
A) The best bet here is to use a paycheck on the 15th that just has one entry on the after tax tab of "negative" after tax expenses in the amount of the check, expensed against some category like Other Income:Advance Pay. Then, on the alternate paycheck, after taxes tab, have an exactly equal but positive amount against the same category. Thus, these two net to $0. Money tracks everything else off the entries on the end-of-month complete stub. The after tax tab is to keep Money Tax Estimator happy. When entering an expense against an income item, Money may complain depending on your Tools|Options settings. Tell it to get over it.
An alternate method that should work, pointed out by Artie, is to put the advance in as a positive Wage & Salary:Gross Pay (or similar) on the Wages tab and then reduce the amount of the same category on the final paycheck transaction by the advance amount. This may be the best approach depending on how the stubs depict all of this and how much math/lookup you want to do by hand. You have to be very careful what you do with the first entry on the Wages tab of a paycheck as it holds special significance to Tax Estimator. However you set it up; if you use Tex Estimator, check to make sure that the results you are getting are sane.
Q) I paid the phone bill, but my roommate owes me half of it. How do I track that in Money?
A) There are two basic approaches to this. Which you pick depends on how frequent this requirement is and how carefully you want to track this obligation--i.e., is the roommate really all that trustworthy.
The first approach: Pay the Utilities:Phone bill. Then record some Utilities:Phone income when your roommate reimburses his share. Depending on your settings, Money will whine about an income categorized as an expense. Tell it that this is really what you want to do.
The second approach: Create a cash account to track your roommate's balance. Pay the Utilities:Phone bill. Add a second transaction for the same category depositing half the amount into your roommate's balance account. (This is a receivable--an asset--so it is a deposit here. Using the same category effectively reduces your spending in this category.) When your roommate pays her share, transfer the amount from the roommate's balance account to whatever account you deposit it in. Whatever the positive balance of that account is what she still owes you.
Q) I'm distributing my 401(k)/withdrawing from my IRA--how do I categorize the transfer as income?
A) The question frames the issue. This transfer from a tax-deferred Investment account to a Cash Account is not Income in the accounting sense. It's already your money. You didn't get richer by moving it from the tax-deferred account to the cash account. Thus, in the accounting sense favored by Money, Transfer is correct and categorizing it as Income isn't correct. But the problem is that the IRS treats money coming out of the tax-deferred accounts as taxable earned income. (Even that is a muddled picture. If the principal includes after-tax contributions, then not all of the distribution/withdrawal is treated for tax purposes as taxable earned income.)
While the Tax Estimator in Money is smart enough to ignore various earnings in the accounts set as tax-deferred, it isn't smart enough to deal with distributions/withdrawals from these accounts. (The before/after tax contributions problem may be one of the reasons they've elected to "not go there.")
So how do you get Tax Estimator and the tax reporting to deal with your distribution/withdrawal?
There are a number of possible ways, each of them imperfect. Possibilities include:
You can use some tool besides Money to manage the tax estimating. Excel is frequently a handy tool to have around to solve things Money can't.
You can enter the income in Tax Estimator by hand. You can do this buy going into Tax Estimator, on the Income page. click on the Wages income link, and then use the option to add additional income that's not in your Money file.
If you do not have an Investment Cash Account associated with the Investment Account that you are selling down, your choice is probably limited to the "two transaction" method posted by Cal Learner--MVP. This is doing the Sell transaction with no Transfer To account for the proceeds in one transaction and doing an Income transaction, for the same amount, in the cash account receiving the funds. One downside to this is that the transactions are not joined in any logical way in Money, only in your head.
You can use the "unassigned split" option posted by Michael Gordon. Here you to have the Transfer from the Investment Cash Account be part of a split with a similar amount categorized as some Income Category that is set to work and play well with the Tax Estimator, etc. The split is unbalanced--the elements don't add up to the transaction net--to keep from "creating" money. Say the transferred amount is $2,000; the split would have the $2,000 transfer and $2,000 of income--adding up to $4,000, not the $2,000 desired total for the transaction. You'd tell Money you know there is unassigned income in the split and you really want to do it that way when it complains.
If the unassigned split offends your sense of precision, a variant of this is to add a separate expense to balance the transaction against some made-up expense category, say Miscellaneous : Tax-Deferred Income Offset.
Jeff M suggested an interesting alternative to these last two: use a Paycheck transaction. In this case, you'd probably have to enter the Paycheck in the account that you are transferring the money to. (The umpmfaq has not tested this to see which works best with Tax Estimator.) The Paycheck would have some income on the wages tab, the after-tax tab would have a Transfer from--in a negative amount--the Investment Cash Account. You could either save the transaction with unassigned income or have the bogus offsetting expense category. This method might also prove valuable for 401(k) distributions, since these distributions are typically required to have taxes withheld. This tax withholding could be entered directly in the Paycheck transaction. Likewise, using a Paycheck would provide a ready model for separating the before taxed income portion of a distribution and the after-tax, i.e., already taxed, portion.
Q) I've been lazy and haven't balanced in months. How do I catch up?
A) If you wish to start fresh and declare an account balanced, you can mark all entries balanced. Select the register view to show only unreconciled transactions, sort by date, and go to the oldest transaction. Hold down Cntl+Shift+M and let auto-repeat work through the transactions until none are left showing. Then balance, making the starting and ending balance match the known balance. Choose the balance date to be the day after your last transaction. This is not the normal procedure; it just starts you with an amnesty for former balancing.
Thereafter, follow the normal procedure. Look at the balancing movie clip from your Money disk.
Answer courtesy of Cal Learner--MVP.
Q) Money won't let me make a Loan Payment from my Paycheck. Why not? What do I do?
A) A paycheck is a specialized instance of the generalized form of split transaction. A loan payment is a specialized instance of the generalized form of split transaction. In Money, a transaction that is a split of another transaction cannot itself be split. Thus, a loan payment cannot be made from a paycheck.
The general way to accomplish this is in two transactions via a holding account. E.g., transfer the payment amount to the associated Asset Account in the Paycheck and then schedule the Loan Payment to be made from the Asset Account. Yes, it creates a bunch of silly looking paired +x Transfer, -x Loan Payment Transactions in the Asset Account. But there is no other way to record it in Money.
There is an MSKB article with more detail on doing this; the reference is courtesy of Kimberly Renna, Microsoft MVP - Consumer Products.
References:
MSKB: Q148280 Loan payments from paycheck
Q) My wife and I have two accounts at the same bank with different passwords. How do I enter two passwords in Money?
A) This answer used to point to an MSKB item that has since been "disappeared" from the Microsoft Support site. (Thanks to Jon Anderson for pointing this out.) The old method was to define a new FI with a slightly different name ("First Galactic Bank of the Milky Way {his}" and "First Galactic Bank of the Milky Way {hers}") so that you can still have one user name/password associated with each FI. Now that Money tries to make you use FIs they define, so that the whole Yodlee thing will work, this probably doesn't work. What does work is still an open question. If anybody figures it out, let me know and I'll update this answer.
Q) Why don't my transfers to savings show up under some category in my budget?
A) Transfers do not have an income or expense category because they are net worth neutral. Expenses make you poorer, Income makes you richer; Transfers do neither.
For this reason, Transfers between accounts that are included in the Budget Planner (see the account details for information) will NOT show up in your budget. Only by excluding the savings account from the Budget Planner will you see the scheduled transfer (and then only grouped under the "Transfers out of budget accounts" Budget Group.
Answer derived from one provided by Derrick Cole
Q) How can I adjust the asset allocation of my investments?
A) Money has only limited asset allocation capability and some features just plain don't work. (This much improved in Money 2007 so if this is important to you, then consider upgrading.) First, we'll review available Investment Types and Asset Classes, and then we'll look at what you can and cannot with asset allocation in various versions of Money.
Investment Type
When you first tell Money about an investment, you must assign it to one of these Investment Types:
1. Bond
2. CD or US Savings Bond
3. Equity or Index Option
4. Money Market
5. Mutual Fund
6. Stock
7. Employee Stock OptionThis is a pretty comprehensive list, but if you have investments types that are not here, then the Money reports that use these types won't be very useful to you. You cannot create your own Investment Types.
Asset Class
In order to get an asset allocation report in Money, each investment must be assigned to an Asset Class. The available Asset Classes are:
1. Money-Market/Cash
2. Bond
3. Small-Cap
4. Mid-Cap
5. Large-Cap
6. OtherAgain, this is a pretty good list, but if you have an investment that doesn't fit into one of these classes, you are out of luck. You can't create your own Asset Class, and every investment has to fit into a single Asset Class. Things like lifecycle funds obviously don't fit well in this scheme.
Assigning Asset Classes
Money assigns Asset Classes for everything except Stocks and Mutual Funds when the investment is created. For example, Money always assigns the "Bond" Asset Class to the "Bond" Investment Type. For stocks and mutual funds, however, there are several possible Asset Classes, so you or Money need to make a choice. Here's how it works.
Stock Asset Classes
For stocks that are listed and have a symbol, Money will automatically assign an Asset Class every time you do an online update of investment prices. You can go into the Investment Details screen and change the Asset Class, but Money will change it back at the next online update. If the stock is not listed, then online updates have no effect, and money will use whatever Asset Class you put in the Investment Details screen.
Mutual Fund Asset Classes
This is where things get weird. For mutual funds that have investments that fit into a single Asset Class, things work pretty much as you would expect. However, for mutual funds that have investments in multiple Asset Classes, things don't work at all.
Mutual Funds with a Single Asset Class
For mutual funds that are listed and you have entered a symbol, Money will automatically assign an Asset Class the first time you do an online update of investment prices. This Asset Class cannot be changed and the only way to see it is to run an asset allocation report and see where the investment shows up. Note that you cannot see this Asset Class in the investment details screen. (See below.) You can beat Money to the punch by assigning an Asset Class manually before doing an online update.
If the mutual fund is not listed or if you want to assign an Asset Class manually, then you can do so. Unlike stocks, you do not do this in the Investment Details screen. Instead, what you need to do is go to Investing | Asset Allocation and click thru the "Learn about Asset Allocation" to see the portfolio's asset allocation. The new investment will be highlighted as one without an Asset Class. If you click on it, you will be able to assign any of the allowed Asset Classes for mutual funds.
You can also use the manual process to assign an Asset Class to a listed mutual fund. To do this, you must do the manual assignment before you do an online update. Once you have assigned the Asset Class manually, it will not subsequently change when you "Update Prices Online". And, as noted above, you can't view it or change it manually either. This is different from stocks, where any manual changes will be overridden by the next Online Update.
Mutual Funds with More than One Asset Class
If you have any mutual funds that have investments in more that one Asset Class, the asset allocation features and reports will not be useful. Money will either assign a single Asset Class at the first online update or will force you to assign a single Asset Class manually. This is not immediately obvious, because the Investment Details screen for mutual funds appears to allow you to assign a mutual fund investment to a percentage over the following Asset Classes:
1. Cash
2. Bond
3. Small-Cap
4. Mid-Cap
5. Large-Cap
6. OtherThis would seem to be just what is needed for "blended" or "target date" ("lifecycle") mutual funds. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. You can enter the data but:
- Money doesn't use this information in the asset allocation screens or in any reports
- You can only view the data in the data entry screen
- When you update prices online, Money will change the values you entered to other values. Frequently, these other values will bear no relation to reality and will not even add up to 100%.As noted above, Money 2007 fixed this problem. It does allow mutual funds to be split using the Investment Details screen and the asset allocation report works properly.
Answer provided by Bill Becker. Bill also graciously provided a document with some supplemental information.
References:
umpmfaq.info: Asset Allocation
Q) How come Money whines about a symbol used on a deleted investment? Why are deleted investments not really?
A) Create a dividend in some investment account for the security in question. This will resurrect the "deleted" investment. Then you can go into its details and delete the symbol. Then you can delete the dividend transaction. Then you can go in and "delete" the investment again, if this is your wish. Nobody here knows exactly why Money remembers "deleted" investments.
Q) How come my bond fund investment is off by a factor of 100?
A) Bond funds are not bonds. They are mutual funds. Bonds in real life and in Money are priced as a percentage of total face (par) value, as they are in quotes from brokers. The price of a bond bought at a 10% discount from face value would be 90.0. Prices over 100 would be bonds bought at a premium. Mutual funds, like bond funds, are priced in Money by the price per share. (Thanks to Cal Learner -- MVP for an important rewrite to this question.) See also "I bought a $1,000 bond for $850--Money tells me it cost $85. What gives?" for the corollary question about the pricing of real bond investments.
Q) How do I download/import historical quotes?
A) Money won't download any quotes besides current. There is no easy way to import historic quotes, either.
Q) How do I fix bad investment names in the Buy Investment/CD pull-down?
A) The entries in the pull-downs come straight from the table of investments you have created in Money. Go to Portfolio|Work With Investments|Choose a specific investment and select investments to rename, etc, on their individual detail pages. Go to Portfolio|Work With Investments|Delete an investment to delete investments. You cannot delete any investments you have any transactions for, so you may also have to do some account register maintenance.
Cal Learner suggested another technique to delete an investment that avoids some problems others have experienced if a symbol ever needs to be reused. Go to the investment details page. Clear the field for symbol. If no transactions have been entered for this investment, there will be a delete choice listed under common tasks. Click it.
Q) How do I handle a mutual fund merger?
A) There are two methods that work. You can pick one depending on whether you previously held both of the funds involved in the merger or not.
The technique suggested by Cal Learner for the case where you didn't hold both funds previously:
- enter a split for the share ratio involved (you can use the NAVs at the exchange times 100)
- go into the Investment Details and change the name and symbol
- record the event in the investment comments.If you previously held both funds, there is no solution without side effects. Kevin suggested what is probably the least bad solution:
- sell the retired fund for your exact cost basis
- buy the correct number of shares in the surviving fund for the total amount of the old cost basis. Let Money figure the share price.The side effect of this is that it will create a one-time unrealized capital gain to match the entire gain you were carrying for the retired fund on the date you set for the transaction. This will likely cause inaccurate performance reporting and may propagate to things like long-term/short term capital gains reporting.
Q) How do I rename an Investment Cash Account?
A) Go to the Investment Account Settings (or Details in versions prior to M05). There's a text box there for Cash Portion Account Name. You can change it there directly (M05?, M06) or by clicking on the Rename… button (M05?, M04 and previous back to ???). It seems obvious that an Investment Cash Account should have an Account Settings (Details) Page of its own like all other accounts. It doesn't.
Q) How do I setup a 401(k) loan?
A) There's no magic method (i.e., no "401k loan wizard.") Here's how I do it:
1) In 401k investment account, sell investments as required by the plan mechanics to 401k cash account to make funds available.
2) In 401k cash account, "buy" a new "loan" money market investment in amount of loan amount.
3) Create a new "loan" account with amount and terms of 401k loan.
4) Schedule a periodic loan payment from 401k cash account to pay off the loan. This is like any other loan in Money.
5) Revise periodic scheduled paycheck deposit to add an after-tax split item to transfer the loan repayment payment amount to 401k cash account.
6) Revise periodic scheduled investment from 401k cash account to 401k investment account/investment options as required by the plan mechanics to reinvest the loan payment amount.
7) At each loan payment to the 401k cash account also enter an interest paid from the "loan" investment in the 401k investment account to the 401k cash account and a "sell" of "loan" from the loan investment in the 401k investment account to the 401k cash account. This is the worst thing since there is no way to automate it and you have to get the principal and interest appropriate to each period from either the "loan" account payment entries or a separate amortization table. (Mine's in Excel.)The loan balance amortizes from the modified paycheck transfer via the 401k cash loan payment account. The holdings in the money market "loan" investment decline and earn interest via the manually entered interest and sell transactions. The funds get reinvested via the revised periodic investment transaction.
It's just a lot of work and a lot of transaction entries.
There are "lighter" schemes depending on how much detail you go into tracking your 401k investments. The scheme outlined above is the manic geek case for personal accounting anal-retentives. One light weight scheme is listed in the MSKB.
Thanks to Richard M. Bollar - MVP Microsoft Money for this method.
References:
MSKB: 223174 401(k) loans the MSKB way
Q) How do I track savings bonds in Money? Tracking them as a CD doesn't seem to provide a way to track their value.
A) Money doesn't handle savings bonds particularly well. They suggest entering them as CDs and this seems like the least bad way to do so.
Many of us use the Savings Bond Wizard to know the current value of our bonds. You can transfer, by hand, interest information from the Savings Bond Wizard to Money but you will have to enter it as reinvested interest, which has other side effects including creating taxable investment income. This may be what you want--depending on your tax plans for the bond interest. If you elect to defer paying interest until maturity, you should set the tax deferred setting for the investment account holding the bond investment.
In order to keep track of individual bonds, you should create separate investments for each series/denomination/issue date of bond you hold. (E.g., "$100 EE 2002-03" could be an investment name.) Then enter the purchase price for the total number of like bonds you bought as a Buy Investment. (Say you buy 5 $100 bonds--investment name, say, "US $100 EE Bond - 2005-08"--at their $50 purchase price, you enter 250 as both quantity and value.) You might also consider storing the serial number(s) in the memo field of the buy transaction.
Thanks to Michael Gordon for an important correction to this answer.
References:
Savings Bond Wizard
Q) How do you change a mutual fund investment to money market investment?
A) It is not trivial, but not as hard as it first appears. A few minutes should do it.
In the details, remove the existing symbol, and rename the existing "mutual fund" to something you will never use. Let's suppose you choose zzzz.
Create a new money fund with the correct name and symbol.
Go back to investment zzzz and choose View: Investment Details.
Change each transaction to the fund using the drop-down list. You may have a problem if you have sells intermingled with buys--it may try to sell more shares than you have at some point. If so, at some date before the first transaction, enter a LARGE buy--larger than your maximum share holdings of this investment at any point--with no source for the investment funds. This will assure that you always have enough shares to cover all sells. Don't move the large buy transaction. Just delete it when you are done.
In any case, keep going until there are no more zzzz transactions remaining except for the large buy to assure sufficient shares for any sell. Once all of the real transactions are changed to the new investment, you can delete the temporary buy and "delete" investment zzzz. Answer derived from one originally posted by Cal Learner--MVP.
Q) I bought a $1,000 bond for $850--Money tells me it cost $85. What gives?
A) Bonds are not priced by the amount of the bond. They are priced as a percentage of total face (par) value, as they are in quotes from brokers. The price of a bond bought at a 10% discount from face value would be 90.0. Prices over 100 would be bonds bought at a premium. A bond, of any value, bought for a price of 88.5 was "bought at a discount" and cost 88.5% of its face value. A bond bought at a price of 105 was "bought at a premium" and cost 105% of its face value.
There is a reference in the MSKB that describes this correctly except that the sentence that starts "If the current value of the bond exceeds the par value ..." is wrong. The example that follows that sentence is correct.
The Bond Market Association has a really good site explaining bond investing. Clicking glossary in the left hand column, then looking up "price" gives a good description of how this works as well.
Thanks for this answer go to Cal Learner -- MVP.
See also "How come my bond fund investment is off by a factor of 100?" for the corollary question about the pricing of bond mutual fund investments.
References:
Bond Market Association's page on bond investing
MSKB: 121903 How bond investments are priced in Money
Q) I don't hold investments anymore but they still show on the investments page. Why?
A) To prevent an investment from appearing on the Money Home page, go to the "Details" page of the investment and use "Delete this Investment". Don't be alarmed; this only deletes the specified investment from the list of investments. Any transactions for the specified investment will remain in the closed account(s). Later, if you attempt to use this investment again, Money will simply ask if you wish to add the investment back to the list of investments.
Answer provided by Brent Neville.
Q) I hold the same investment in two accounts. But when I try to enter the same symbol again Money complains. Why?
A) You only define an Investment once. The symbol is an attribute of the Investment, not the Account holding of the Investment. When you want to Buy the same Investment for another Investment Account, choose the Investment from the drop-down list instead of trying to define the Investment again. An "Investment" is just a name and a symbol and some price history. The Investment Account keeps track of holdings of a given Investment. Answer derived from one by Doug Wilson.
Q) My 401(k) cash account is going negative. How do I enter employer contributions?
A) There are several ways to accomplish this. Which one you should choose depends on whether you want to track the cash in association with your paycheck or not. Probably the easiest way is to schedule a deposit to your 401(k) contributions/cash account in the Bills & Deposits section, the amount and date of which correspond to the match. Use an income category setup to be excluded from tax reports like "Gross Pay:Employer Matching," so these funds aren't factored in to tax reports and Tax Planner calculations.
The disadvantage to this method is that it decouples the match money from your paychecks, which, depending on your plan, may cause problems for things like matching money associated with overtime income.
The more elaborate way that gets the contributions tied to your paycheck--assuming that your plan matches on a pay period basis--but doesn't hose up the Tax Planner--is to enter an income entry on the After Taxes tab (use a negative number--trust me on this) against the "Gross Pay:Employer Matching" or similar, tax-neutral, category. Then do a Transfer of the same amount to the 401(k) contributions account on the next line of the split.
Thanks for Derrick Cole for contributions to this answer.
Q) How do I record additional principal paid with my house payment?
A) Add an extra entry in the details of the Loan Payments and/or scheduled Loan Payments. This extra entry should be the amount of extra principal you want to pay. Use category Principal Transfer for this entry; the loan account for the payment will be the recipient of this transfer.
Q) How should I handle my mortgage escrow account?
A) Let's assume you already have a loan account and scheduled payment setup for the mortgage. If you haven't already setup the loan, you can setup the account described below and then specify the transfer as an "Other Fees" item to the create loan wizard.
Next, setup a cash account for the escrow. You can call it Escrow (Mortgage).
In your Loan Payment scheduled transaction, add a split element for Transfer:Escrow for the total amount of escrow collected with each payment. Enter transactions to pay the taxes (category Taxes:Property Tax or similar) and insurance (category Insurance:Homeowner's or similar) from the Money escrow account, as your mortgage processor actually does, when they tell you what the amounts paid are.
You can balance the escrow account to the statements of escrow activity.
Microsoft has added an MSKB item to answer the same question. The link was posted in the newsgroup by Himanshu Gohel.
References:
MSKB: 899623 escrow account How-To
Q) I just made an extra principal payment to a loan. Why can't I just use Transfer to show this in Money?
A) It seems like many versions ago you could. Then we could use just a Principal Transfer. Somewhere along the way even this became too simple. The way to do it now is to use the Special Category named 'Loan Payment'. Money (at least recent versions) will then ask if you want to include both principal and interest. You have to say yes, even if that's not what you want to do. The next panel will ask you to pick a loan or enter a new loan account name. Pick the name of the loan you want to transfer principal to. Then you can go into the split where you will find a Principal Transfer, an interest expense item and possibly other items depending on how you defined your loan payment; you can delete every element but the Principal Transfer. Note that Money may be a little testy about changing your amount to the appropriate amount for the next regular payment, your memo to the account number, and your payee to the pre-defined payee. You can fix all of this to the way you want it if you are persistent. You can add or change other elements of the payment for things like service charges or whatever. But if you need to do this, now's the time to do so as noted next.
If you reduce the Loan Payment to just the one Principal Transfer element, when you enter it in the register, it will be displayed in the future as just a Principal Transfer and it cannot be split back into a Loan Payment. Seems like a long way to go to get to the Principal Transfer you wanted when you started.
Thanks to Chris Cowles for recommending this Q/A and providing a draft.
Q) I just refinanced my mortgage; how do I enter all of this into Money?
A) In some versions, there's a wizard of limited utility, you can navigate to it by going to your current loan page, click Analyze Loan|Consider Refinancing. This takes you to a page called Loan Worksheet. You can go through the steps, or, if you have already decided on if/where to refinance, skip to Comparison and at the bottom of the worksheet click on Refinance a Loan button. Thanks to Aloke Prasad for these steps. Somewhere along the way they removed even this wizard. Can't say exactly where, but it's missing from M07.
The wizard doesn't attempt to deal with all of the things like closing costs and escrow exchanges; one that did would be hard to devise given the number of different ways this could go down and the number of different ways this could be recorded in Money. This basic outline applies no matter whether you are ending in cash in or cash out--enter the splits off of the settlement sheet and all should work out.
To do this by hand, remember: the split is your friend. You can enter the whole thing in two transactions that mirror the information provided on the settlement sheet at your closing.
For an example (and there are certainly other ways it could be done) here are related transactions from the last time I refinanced. These are in MoneyLink format. It may be easier to read if you get the whole thing into Excel as .CSV.
Acct,Payee,Reconciled,Amt,Cat:SubCat,Comment
1st transaction:
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,xxx,000.00,Other Income:Loan Principal Received,total refi {categorized as other income since M99 would not allow direct transfer from here to old loan payoff}
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(300.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,administration fee to mortgage broker
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(362.50),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,escrow waiver fee to new payee
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(zzz.94),Interest Expense:Mortgage Interest,prepaid interest on new loan
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(150.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,settlement fee to title company
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(430.00),Insurance:Title,title company
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(20.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,tax certificates to title company
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(30.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,express mail charges for payoff
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(50.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,"endorsement/100 & 8.1" to title company
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(61.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,recording fees
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(6.00),Miscellaneous:Service Charges/Fees,"assignment fee"
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(aaa.96),Interest Expense:Mortgage Interest,interest portion of payoff
"[temp account, pick one]",[new payee],R,(yyy,694.64),Transfer:[money market account],{this was a cash out balance}2nd transaction (a Loan Payment with one split element):
"[temp account, pick one]",[old payee],R,(yyy,190.96),Principal Transfer:[old mortgage loan account],payoff amount of old loanNote that only one new account, the new loan, was setup and that some of the categories may not be standard. For the temp account, I used my pocket change account, but see below for more information.
Note also that I had no escrow for insurance/taxes on either side of this deal. If you have an existing escrow account setup and plan on setting up a new one for the new mortgage, you can do the same basic thing: transfer the existing escrow balance into the first transaction and/or transfer funds as required from the first transaction to the new account.
It doesn't matter which account you put the transaction in, but if you are writing a check at closing or getting a payout, you may want to include this in that account just to make things clearer. The sum of the first transaction and the second transaction should be zero unless you want to have the non-zero net of the two transactions represent cash in or out at closing.
The only reason this needs to be done as two transactions is that the payoff principal payment to the old loan becomes a principal transfer in that account which Money treats like a split--and a split cannot be part of another split.
Similarly, bear in mind that the only way to transfer principal to a loan account, at least in recent versions of Money, is to start with a Loan Payment and use the Principal Transfer portion of the split it proposes. You can delete the interest expense component if you want, but the Principal Transfer component of a Loan Payment is treated as sacred by Money.
You original loan may show some minor debit or credit balance after the payoff transfer due to differences in how Money and the lender have computed interest over time. (Mine was $0.43.) You can just write this difference off with an Account Adjustment income or expense transaction entered at the end of the old loan before you close the account.
Money provides no direct way to account for loan proceeds received. So, I just entered this by hand as noted. The category had to be created and was defined to not show up on tax reports. If you are an accounting maven and are concerned that this really isn't accounting income, then you can leave the category unassigned. Alternately, see "How can I transfer money (to / from) the loan I (made / borrowed)?" for the workaround.
Q) I just took out an interest only mortgage; how do I setup such a loan in Money?
A) Set it up like any other mortgage loan except set a balloon payment equal to the borrowed amount. If you know the payment amount, leave the interest rate blank and Money will calculate it for you. It may differ slightly from the quoted rate for lots of reasons that aren't worth losing sleep over. If it differs by a lot, more investigation is probably in order. Answer derived from one provided by Cal Learner -- MVP.
"ltrox43" pointed out that there is now an MSKB item on this subject. They take a lot more words to say what's above.
References:
MSKB: 893719 interest only mortgage
Q) We just sold our house--how do we account for this in Money?
A) See the answer to "I just refinanced my mortgage; how do I enter all of this into Money?" for the basic technique. In the case of a sale, just add into the transaction a transfer in of the balance of your asset account, if any, and a split element to account for the "gain" income, if any, required to get to the right payout value.
Q) We just wrote an earnest money check to buy a house. How do we deal with all of this in Money?
A) Buying and owning a house creates the most complex set of Money transactions and accounts of any activity most of us engage in. But it's really fairly simple and easily managed by breaking down the activities. Many of these activities are treated in other places in the FAQ. This answer will refer to those and provide an overview to the whole process.
Buying a house involves transactions before purchase, transactions when the purchase closes, new liability for paying the mortgage--unless you paid cash for the entire purchase, a new asset added to your net worth, new bills to pay every month, and quite likely a new account holding some of your money in escrow for your mortgagor to pay some recurring expenses like insurance and property taxes.
The first thing to deal with is the earnest money deposit and any pre-purchase expenses. The pre-purchase expenses (a property inspection or a credit report or similar) are just expenses you can account for like any other expense. Some category like Miscellaneous:Fees and Service Charges might be appropriate. The earnest money deposit is another matter. You can think of this as contributing to your equity in the house, and eventually you should do this, but that's something you may want to defer since things may happen between now and closing and maybe now is not the best time to set all of that up. So, the best bet now is to expense it against some category like Miscellaneous:Deposit, Credit to Follow. (You may need to create a category like this.) When you enter the transactions for the closing, you can put in a split element to reverse the amount of this transaction against this category (use a negative number against the original category, Miscellaneous:Deposit, Credit to Follow if you are following the example,) then add this amount to the amount you transfer to the Asset account.
When you close the purchase, you will receive a settlement sheet itemizes all of the debits and credits on your half of the transaction. Debits include things like your payment to purchase the house and various buyer-paid fees. Your credits include things like the proceeds of the loan you accepted and the earnest money deposit. With several exceptions, this activity is similar to and can be handled the same way as a mortgage refinance. See "I just refinanced my mortgage; how do I enter all of this into Money?" for more information. Since buying a house typically doesn't involve an existing loan payoff on your behalf, you should be able to enter the closing transaction in Money with one Money transaction. The splits of this transaction should total the amount of money you take to the closing.
As the refinance FAQ notes, follow the settlement sheet, and remember the split is your friend. The exceptions to the refinance FAQ are handling the earnest money deposit, adding the asset to your net worth, and handling setup of escrow accounts. Treating the earnest money deposit was covered above. Treatment of the asset and escrow accounts is covered below.
Mortgage loan accounts are easily created in Money. Setup a new loan account (you can specify Loan or Mortgage as the kind of account) and follow the prompts of the create loan wizard. Several notes are in order. First, there is no good way to "transfer" the proceeds of the loan from the loan account to the closing transaction. As noted above, techniques and a workaround can be found in the refinance answer. Second, the loan wizard may not like the exact principal, interest rate, payment, and term you enter. You can leave the interest rate blank and it will compute the appropriate interest rate for you. Note that the "additional fees" the Loan Account setup wizard mentions may well be transfers to an escrow account that are treated below.
Buying the house adds to your net worth, even if most of this addition is offset by the liability for the mortgage. A Money Asset Account provides a way to account for this. It also provides a handy way to keep track of the cost basis of the investment. Cost basis is something you may eventually need to know for tax purposes. An Asset Account is not required, but for these reasons, creating one is recommended.
When you create a mortgage loan, Money prompts you to create an Asset Account or associate this loan with an existing asset account. You can set an Asset Account up now or set it up separately later. If you set it up separately later, Money will ask if you want to associate any loan accounts with this asset account. You should specify the Money Loan Account you created for the mortgage. The dialog for setting up an Asset Account asks for initial value of the asset. We recommend $0. We'll establish its value in the next several steps.
One of the "buying a house" exceptions cited above to the refinance FAQ is the problem of accounting for the net worth impact of the new asset. Here it is: you transfer the entire purchase price from the closing transaction to the Asset Account with a split element, category Transfer:[name of asset acct], in the closing transaction. This will be essential to making that transaction balance.
Once this is done, you can account for additions to your cost basis (like adding a swimming pool, but not like painting the place) by transferring the increase in cost basis to the asset account rather than expensing it outright. So, while you might call painting the house Housing:Maintenance, you can call building the pool Transfer:[name of asset account]. You invested and made the house worth more: this is how you can track it.
Many mortgage lenders require you to pre-pay expenses like insurance and property taxes with your monthly payments and then they pay the bills on your behalf. This arrangement is called an escrow account. "How should I handle my mortgage escrow account?" discusses escrow accounts. Your escrow account may need some transfer from the closing transactions for money retained at closing to build up the initial balance of the escrow account if this is a buyer expense. On the other hand, you may want to create the escrow account with a starting balance if there is seller money transferred to your escrow account to cover their portion of, say, taxes paid in arrears. Your settlement sheet should explain all of this; if it's not clear, by all means ask the mortgage company representative who presides over the closing to explain it to you.
One final thought: if you anticipate owning multiple houses or just want to better understand why expenses occur, it may make sense to consider using what Money calls Classification. Classification provides up to two additional two-level attributes that can be assigned to transactions similar to Category. For instance, you could define the first classification as Class with Classes and Subclasses like Property:123 Elm St. Then you can use Class in addition to Category to aggregate transactions for reporting and the like. As an example, Taxes:Property Tax and Insurance:Homeowner’s expenses could both also be associated with Property:123 Elm St. Read more about classification in on-line help to learn more.
Q) How can I make this infernal MoneySide thing go away?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10), Money2003 (v.11)]
A) Click Help in MoneySide, then Settings. Under "Open MoneySide" select "Never" and then "Done."
Answer provided by Bryan Escher.
Once you've gotten rid of MoneySide you will probably notice that Money has also dropped an icon onto your IE toolbar. To remove it, select View|Toolbar|Customize. Select MoneySide on the column on the right. Click Remove.
This thing was so popular that when they eliminated it from M04 many months went by before there was a single mention in the newsgroup that it had disappeared.
Q) How do I stop Money from talking to me?
A) R-click on the speaker icon in the upper right corner of the Money home page and select Turn all Audio Help off. Perhaps because they got too many support calls asking just this question, Microsoft removed the audio help from M05.
A) Tools|Options|General|Turn off sponsorship and shopping links is as good as it gets. MSN ads will still be all over the thing. This also will not prevent Microsoft from sending you ads in the form of Money Updates, though they have only done this occasionally. M05 moved this to [Windows menu:] Tools|Settings|Program Settings|General|Display|Turn off sponsorship and shopping links. They also made added a much more pervasive and difficult to avoid coupling of Money the application to MSN Money the web-based advertising delivery engine. "Most users prefer" it this way, apparently.
Q) I keep changing my Tools|Options settings but they keep changing back. Why?
A) A number of unconfirmed reports indicate that there are problems with changing Tools|Options settings when Money Express is active and having the changes be retained the next time Money is restarted. If you use Money Express (Money in the System Tray at startup/login) and find that Tools|Options settings are not being retained from one use of Money to the next, try this:
- Exit Money Express
- Make your Tools|Options settings change in Money
- Exit Money
- Restart Money Express (logout then login/reboot)
- Restart Money and see if your Tools|Options settings change has been retainedSince M05 eliminated Money Express--perhaps because eliminating it was easier than fixing this problem among others--this answer is probably not relevant if you are having this problem in M05.
Q) I made the cash flow forecast and upcoming bills disappear from my register. How do I get them back?
A) Try the settings in Tools|Options|Feedback|Personalized Feedback in the Account Register and Portfolio|Options… M05 removed these settings and the feedback pane. See "What happened to the register view spending thermometers and forecast cash flow in M05?"
Q) What is the icon in my SysTray? How do I turn it off? How do I get it back?
A) The icon in the System Tray is the Money Express icon, and is turned on by default with a new Money installation. It has several functions when enabled. It notifies you of upcoming bills and deposits, allows for quick transaction entry without opening Money, and provides easy configuration of events and alerts.
If you don't want to use it, you can turn it off using one of two methods. If Money is open, click on Tools, Options, Bills and Deposits tab. Uncheck the Use Money Express option. If Money is not open and you want this feature disabled, right mouse click on the icon in the System Tray, choose Exit Money Express, and then click the No option so that Money Express is disabled and will no longer run on your system.
If you decide after turning it off that you want to use it again, simply open Money and go to Tools, Options, Bills and Deposits tab. Check the Use Money Express option and click OK. Your Money Express icon will return.
M05 eliminated this problem by eliminating the feature. See "What happened to Money Express in M05?"
Answer courtesy of Kimberly Renna-Griego.
Q) Why do I have to create an entry in the Payees every time I spend money somewhere new?
A) You don't. Set Tools|Options|Editing|Confirm new payees and, every time you enter a Payee you've never entered before, Money will ask you if you want to add the Payees to the explicit Payees list or not. M05 moved this to [Windows menu:] Tools|Settings|Account settings (global)|Transaction confirmation options|Confirm new payees. This was to make it easier to get to.
Q) How do I get Money to print my name and address and the MICR information on my checks?
A) You don't. There are many sources for pre-printed checks that supply the format expected by Money. On this stock, Money will print payee, payee address, date, amount, memo, and accounting information on the stub. It will not print your name and address, the bank's name and address, or the MICR stripe across the bottom. There are also 3rd party solutions, including VersaCheck and IDAutomation Check Printing Software for printing the "pre-printed" information on blank check stock. (Thanks to Cal Learner for the link to IDAutomation.) Also, see the answer to "Back to the check stock question: Isn't it obvious that Money should print the MICR data?"
References:
IDAutomation
VersaCheck
Q) How do I get rid of all of these Monthly Reports? They must be why my file is so big.
A) You don't and they aren't. The list of reports is generated when you enter the Monthly Reports screen based on the first transaction date in your file. The reports are generated dynamically from your data. There is no evidence that the list of available Monthly Reports adds any size to Money data files. M05 reduces the list to a year--probably solely to avoid this question on the support lines--worse, they eliminated any possibility of looking at periods older than that. Not that the old reports were terribly useful, but it cost nothing to keep them and the Microsoft development team went out of their way to eliminate them. Go figure.
Q) When I print several sheets of checks the check numbers get reversed. Why?
A) Check the printer driver settings for a setting to reverse the page order. (For instance, for an Epson inkjet on WinXP, this is located at printer properties|General|Printing Preferences…|Layout|Page Order.) Many of the print drivers have this now so that pages coming out face up come out correctly collated by printing the last page first. Alternately, print one sheet or partial sheet of checks at a time.
Q) Why can't Money do a Print Preview? What can I do to get around this?
A) This seems like an obvious feature for the Money team to add, but they never have. The workaround a number of users use to save time and consumables is to use one of the many freeware/shareware PDF-generating printer drivers. Money prints to this "printer" just like to a real printer, but instead of printing, they create .PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) files that can be viewed with the Adobe (Acrobat) Reader. Search google.com for "PDF (freeware OR shareware)" for lots of possible tools.
Q) Why doesn't Money have something like the Reconciliation Report in Quicken?
A) Cal Learner pointed out an item in the MSKB that treats this.
References:
MSKB: 176329 "reconciliation report"
Q) Are there any other voodoo tricks that might solve my problem?
A) Voodoo describes seemingly quirky methods that work in strange and unexplainable ways. A number of voodoo incantations for different symptoms follow.
All kinds of odd problems in M03 and M04 have been reported fixed by running the command "regsvr32 msxml3.dll" from the Start|Run box. Nobody seems to know how registrations for this DLL get trashed, but when they do, bad things happen.
A chestnut that works occasionally in recent versions of Money is going into Internet Explorer Internet Options (from IE Tools or from the desktop Internet Options or from the Internet Options control panel) and deleting all temporary Internet files.
"vsv" was having Passport "sign-in unsuccessful" errors but found these were resolved by going to "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\" and deleting the Money folder with all its subfolders. The msxml3 fix, above, has also been reported to fix Passport login problems.
Tommy Becker lobbied for inclusion of another classic piece of voodoo in the FAQ by and it certainly seems to fit nicely in this answer and nowhere else. Tommy was having problems with different account balances in different account views, as was a predecessor, "bcmbde," who couldn't get account balances to agree between the register and account list. In both cases several account transactions had somehow gotten lost in the bowels of Money. They found this method, originally contributed by Mark, and updated by Cal Learner and Tommy Becker, helpful:
1. Make a copy of your Money data file.
2. Open that copy.
3. Delete ALL transactions in the problem account
4. Export that account as a QIF file
5. Examine the QIF file in Notepad.
6. If it is not empty and shows one or more transactions, then those are likely the culprits.
7. Note the details of those transactions
8. Open up your original file
9. Import the QIF file
10. This should reveal the hidden transactions. So you can now do with them as you wish (Delete, modify, etc).To delete transactions in step 3, Clear the Tools|Options|Editing Confirmation Options boxes. Sort the cash transactions register by increasing date. Select the bottom transaction and click these keys in rotation: Delete, Enter, <cursorUpArrow>. Listen for the audible sound. If the audible sound changes, look at the screen.
It is possible that some shorter method exists. For example, rather than deleting all of the transactions just delete the last few months. Then look at the QIF file for newer entries.
If you have an idea what problem transactions you are going after, you may find it easier to delete all of the other transactions in the .QIF file since it can just be done in Notepad or WordPad much easier than deleting potentially thousands of transactions in Money.
I haven't tried this, but it seems that this would have the potential to cause real problems with unbalanced transfers. YMMV. Such is the joy of voodoo.
Q) How come my account keeps having the starting balance not match the statement?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10)]
A) One possible source of this issue is if you use or ever did use M02 to add a transaction that is marked as reconciled in a register to Bills and Deposits. M02 retains that reconciled status in the scheduled item in error. When you enter one of these transactions from the scheduled items to the register, it enters "pre-reconciled." (If you look closely when entering it into the register, you will also see that it shows as reconciled. This is the only obvious clue that this is what is happening.) Since starting balance for balancing is computed by adding up all of the reconciled transactions, this will screw up starting balance--and it should also get in the way when you go to balance since the statement will show this transaction and the cleared/uncleared items in the Money account will not.
M03 and higher are fixed to not create bad scheduled items like M02, but they won't find them and eliminate them either. The only way to fix a scheduled item that is marked as reconciled is to delete it and reschedule it from an item that is not marked cleared/reconciled.
Q) I can't download quotes since installing M03. What do I do?
[Relevant to Money2003 (v.11)]
A) There are quite a number of "fixes" for this that alone, or in unidentified combinations, seem to fix this for most people--some of these may just be unrelated incidental serendipity:
1) Uninstall/reinstall Money 2003.
1a) Getting Money Updates and nothing else immediately upon reinstallation before trying to get quotes.
2) Go to the MSN Investor page and download/verify installation of the Deluxe Portfolio Manager.
3) Go to the MoneyCentral page and download/verify installation of the MSN Money Deluxe package.
4) Download the Investor 1.2 .CAB file, extract inv12.ocx, replace the version in your Microsoft Money\System directory with the version in the .CAB file and run "regsvr32 inv12.ocx" from the correct directory.
5) Verify that firewalls are not blocking Money -> moneycentral.msn.com. There are way too many variations here to even hint at a procedure.
6) Opening IE security to allow moneycentral.msn.com to store cookies, etc. Do this in IE, Tools|Internet Options|Privacy|Web Sites Edit, Allow moneycentral.msn.com.
7) Assure the following registry hives and keys are present (these are also reported to work for Money UK by Glyn Simpson, MVP):
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Investor][HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Investor\StockQuotes]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Investor\StockQuotes\QuoteServerURL]
"URL"="http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/Scripts/invisapi.dll"[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Investor\News]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Investor\News\NewsServerURL]
"URL"="http://moneycentral.msn.com/Scripts/neisapi.dll"If you aren't used to mucking in the registry, don't go there. Mucking in the registry incorrectly can result in your computer turning into your doorstop and nobody will be able to help you and I will not accept any responsibility. There is a .REG file with these keys that can be merged with the registry by R-Click|Merge attached to a newsgroup thread on the subject. See groups.google.com.
8) You might want to review the MSKB on removing/reinstalling MSN Investor controls.
9) Try, try, try again. The quote server may be down or busy.
10) Try going into Portfolio|Update prices|Pick quotes to download and methodically eliminating investments to see if one (or more) have symbols that are causing problems.
11) Try opening ports 1052 and/or 1053 through firewalls, routers, or NAT devices or just disable them entirely. Microsoft has acknowledged, without any apparent remorse or shame, that quotes download has bad karma with firewalls. (MSKB item first spotted by Jerry.)
12) Sprinkle eye of newt over computer. No, seriously, some of this may do nothing, but lots of people have had lots of different things work. YMMV. Maybe someday before M04 comes out, Microsoft will issue some less involved and more foolproof remediation for this issue.References:
groups.google.com quotes hosts .REG file
investor.cab controls download
MSKB: 312818 Quotes download is not firewall-friendly
MSKB: Q176841 Remove/Reinstall MSN Investor controls
MSN Deluxe Portfolio Manager control
MSN Money Deluxe Control
Q) I just installed M06, it refuses to upgrade my M98 [or 99 or ???] version file. Why? What do I do?
[Relevant to Money2006 (v.15) and up]
A) M06 and beyond lack certain capabilities required to read M98/99 files. There is a workaround detailed in the MSKB that involves an intermediate upgrade to M05.
References:
MSKB: 913108 How to get from M98 to M > M04
Q) I just reinstalled Money/moved my file to a new machine. Now Money wants a password to open my file. I've never used one. Why?
A) The most typical case here is that the Money file was being used by/was backed up by a newer version than you are now trying to open/restore it with.
To find out, try downloading and installing the latest version Money Trial version and use it to open your file. If successful, it may leave behind a copy of the pre-upgrade file, renamed to have an extension of the form .MNn where Nn is the Money version of the pre-upgrade file--N6=M98, N7=M99, N8=M2K, N9=M01, 10=M02, 11=M03. If, for the M04 Trial version, it doesn't leave one behind, then the version that created the file in question is M04. Once you’ve resolved what version the file in question came from, you can uninstall the trial version, re-install the correct version, rename the .MNn file to .MNY, and open it with the correct version.
Another alternative, suggested by Cal Learner--MVP, may be appropriate for people who don't keep their hard disk pruned or didn't just reformat. Search your disk for files having an extension of the form .MNn, as defined above. If you find any, the highest Nn number is likely the Money version you upgraded your data file from most recently. Your .MNY file is likely to be only readable by a higher version of Money.
Money files are not backward compatible to older versions of the application--this message is Money's dumb way of trying to say so.
Q) I thought Money files were supposed to be upward compatible. How come Money[new] crashes when upgrading my Money[old] data file?
[Relevant to Money2003 (v.11) and up]
A) Most users find the file upgrade process painless. Beginning with M03, a significant number of users don't. For these users, a range of outcomes from Money just crashing to misleading error messages about the file being read-only to missing data in the upgrade file result instead. The exact reasons for this are unclear, but it would appear that the upgrade code has become much less tolerant to "damaged" files. (Here a "damaged" file means a file that has somehow become inconsistent with itself or not conforming to the "normal" structure. Here "somehow" generally seems to be by Money itself, though things like End Task when the CPU shows 100% use by Money and the application is reported as not responding "just because" Money is slow and non-responsive may also be factors.)
The workarounds identified include:
- Many users have found success by running the msmoney -s repair technique on the original data file from the original version then upgrading the repaired file. For people who have nothing left of the original version besides a set of backup floppies, this is not an option.
- Using the salv.exe repair tool from the newer version or from Microsoft Support on the data file before upgrading then upgrading the repaired file. As above, this method does not work with .MBF files or with .MBF files spread across multiple floppy disks.
(For more information of the repair tools and file corruption in general, see "I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?")
- Some users have found/and or been advised by Microsoft Support that an intermediate upgrade through, say, M02, first solved the problem. Of course, finding a CD of M02 can be difficult. In particular, for upgrade to M06, see also
"I just installed M06, it refuses to upgrade my M98 [or 99 or ???] version file. Why? What do I do?"- Some users have ended up resorting to QIF Export/Import to get the data out of the old version and into the new version as a better choice than losing all of their data completely. This is a last resort.
- Some files that could not upgrade in M03 can upgrade in M04.
Note that several of these methods do not apply if all you have is backup floppies or files. This is one reason that we always recommend upgrading by moving the entire original .MNY data file rather than going through the backup/restore process.
Finally, note that it is probably a good idea to confirm your installation of the new version of Money is good before going down any of these paths. To do this, open the Sample data file located in the Program Files\Microsoft Money directory, or try to create a new file.
Q) Money appears to hang when I enter transactions. Why?
A) Many reports of "hanging" on entry have turned out to be reports of poor performance. Money may spend minutes doing whatever it does after entering a transaction. If you have waited a LONG time--this may be five minutes or more depending on your environment--and Money is not doing anything and is not using CPU (this is easy to tell on WinNT, 2000, and on XP) then you have a different problem. See "Why is Money so slow?" for more information on performance problems.
Q) Money crashes when I first start the application or open my regular data file. How come? What next?
A) The first thing to try here is to open a different file than your regular file or the most recently opened file that Money will try to open by default if you don't tell it otherwise. Do this by using the Windows File Explorer to navigate to a different .MNY file (if you have one) or just navigate to the Sample.MNY file in the Program Files\Microsoft Money directory (or wherever you installed it). Double-click or r-click Open the alternate data file. If Money doesn't crash, you probably need to read "I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?"
If Money does crash, you might try the all purpose voodoo at "Are there any other voodoo tricks that might solve my problem?" or you might try reinstalling the application. You might also want to start thinking about what has changed on your system since the last time Money worked.
Q) The font size in Money is too small for me to read. How can I enlarge it?
A) Money doesn't provide very good accessibility support. Cal Learner provided the basics of the following answer to this specific accessibility issue:
Three ways are available:
1. Buy a bigger monitor and run it at the same resolution. I know you are going to find that a stupid suggestion, but think about it. You deserve it. But do you have the space for a 21-inch CRT monitor, or the money for a 19-inch LCD?
2. Switch to a lower resolution if using a CRT monitor. I.e., if using 1280 x 1024, switch to 1024 x 768. This is generally the least satisfactory option and is a particularly poor compromise with fixed resolution displays, i.e., LCDs. (Some LCDs won't even play along and will just show a smaller image of the exact same pixel size.)
3. On a blank spot on the desktop, right-click and choose Properties|Settings|Advanced; there change the DPI setting to a higher number. This will have some downside too. You will have to experiment, and change back if you find the downside outweighs the upside.
Q) Why do I get the 'incompatible versions' message when upgrading my data file?
A) This problem arises from trying to convert a file from one localized version (say Money UK) to another (say Money US).
The workaround it to export accounts using QIF and re-import them. The fix is to obtain a newer localized version for the same country as your original data file.
Answer courtesy of Glyn Simpson, Microsoft MVP - Money, and Cal Learner -- MVP.
References:
MSKB: 178830 Export/Import "repair" and conversion
MSKB: Q197668 incompatible versions
MSKB: Q304254 incompatible versions
[Relevant to Money2001 (v.9) and up]
A) There have been a number of design changes in Money over the years and many of them have had negative impacts on performance. M98 changed from a purpose-built database and user interface to IE rendering the UI and Jet as the underlying database. These changes freed the development team to add features galore but they had negative impact on performance and file size.
Money 2001 and up have a number of features that run continuously and seem to affect performance. Debt Reduction Planner and Budgeting seem to be offenders. One way to improve performance in these versions is to turn off the personalized register feedback. (This is at Tools|Options|Feedback|Personalized Feedback Options|Do not display personalized feedback.) Money 2005 eliminated the register feedback. It's not clear whether this was to free up screen real estate for all of the new UI clutter M05 added or so users who didn't figure out to turn it off didn't have to suffer its performance impacts.
Poor performance in Money 2001 and up does not seem to affect everyone and, in the worst cases, is clearly not a problem with resources. People have tried any number of things:
1) salvaging the file; see the MSKB for details
2) deleting loan accounts (but then what's the point of using Money?)
3) [more work needed here]There may be several components to this issue including slow performance as a consequence of design choice (i.e., they didn't design it to be faster.) There have been discussions that some of this issue is attributed to some lurking bug.
The good news on this front is that M03 appears to be no slower in any case than M02. Many users perceive it to be slightly faster in general and a lot faster in certain areas like entering the Budget Planner. A few users report perceiving it to be much faster overall. YMMV.
The FAQ used to say that "it is not clear that Microsoft views this as a bug or an issue or a problem worth fixing." They complained and said they "do take performance problems very seriously [and] devote time and energy to improving performance." It is unclear whether they take performance more or less seriously than, say, adding features like Frequent Flier Mileage tracking or X-ing out parts of account numbers on the account list page. Clearly performance is a much harder problem to solve; and the results from the time and energy they spend on performance are here for us all to judge.
M07 added an interesting new "Repair Tool" that has done amazing things for performance on some files that were slow, or even glacial under M06. For details, see "Can you tell me more about the remarkable new Nuke-the-Bills miracle repair method?" for details.
References:
MSKB: 182608 How to resolve file inconsistencies
Q) Can you tell me more about the remarkable new Nuke-the-Bills miracle repair method?
[Relevant to Money2007 (v.16) and up]
A) Money 2007 introduced a new File|Repair option, File|Repair Money File|Remove all Bills data. (Insiders have been referring to this as the Bills Be Gone method. That seems too polite for the impact it has; Nuke-the-Bills is our favorite term here at the umpmfaq.) This option has enabled dramatic improvements in performance and significant reductions in files size for some users. At least one user, the author, had serious "stability issues" (i.e., it crashed a lot) under M06 that have not been seen in M07; this may be related to fixes in M07 or it may be related to "corruption" in the file cleaned up by Nuke-the-Bills.
(Addition of this feature was, apparently, a pathetic admission that the developers of Money can't design the product such that it can keep the scheduled bills data sane all by itself. There have been reports in the newsgroup that the underlying issue is that every time a bill is created or edited a new database schema is created and unbounded accumulation of these schemas is what results in observed performance and stability problems. It is difficult to understand why the design must be this way or why accumulation of these schemas can’t be done in a way less debilitating to performance. Though we frequently edit bills, the total number of bill variations that remain relevant at any point in time does not grow continually for most users. So if the number of these underlying structures does grow continually, this seems like more of an internal garbage collection kind of problem than something that needs to be there for functions and features that are exposed to the user. But it is what it is and Microsoft seems unwilling or unable to fix it by anything better than Nuke-The-Bills.)
We do not know what, exactly, this does internally. At least one user tested whether the same effect could be achieved just be deleting, one-by-one, the scheduled bills from the Money user interface. That did not have the same effects, so we can reasonably conclude that Nuke-the-Bills deletes all manner of stuff that we just cannot see from the Money user interface. We also know, now that we’ve lived for a while with files that have had the bills nuked, that whatever nuking does is not permanent. Sooner or later you will be faced with deteriorating performance again and this whole ugly process will need to be re-done. We could have hoped that Microsoft would re-design whatever internals can't seem to keep the bills data sane by themselves before we got to this point, but that no longer seems possible.
So, if you are experiencing performance or stability "issues" this may be a "silver bullet". But it's not for everybody and it's not something you should undertake lightly.
Why not?
You will have to re-enter ALL of your scheduled bills data. You will have to go in and fix your Advanced Budget. Lifetime Planner, which may depend on Advanced Budget if you set it up to do so, will likely be wrong until you get your Advanced Budget sorted out. Further, Lifetime Planner will need to have income re-associated with scheduled paychecks if you had it use them to define your income. All the historic entries on your Bill Calendar will be lost as well. Finally, you will have to delete all scheduled Apays and re-create them.
Still psyched?
Make a copy of your Money data file. Be sure it's a good copy. You might even want to save an additional copy (or copies) to a CD or flash drive, just in case.
When you select the menu option, Money will display a dialog box explaining the process. It recommends printing a Scheduled Bills report as the path to recover your bills after they are nuked. This is better than no advice at all, but beware that many details associated with scheduled bills are not displayed in this report. Examples of things you will need to re-create that are not included in the report are settings for things like estimate varies, number remaining, and paycheck tab assignment. Any "Buy Investment/CD" transaction does not print out the investment involved. Also, any edited occurrences beyond the next are not reported and, if the next occurrence has been edited, the basic series information is not reported.
The best "better" choice is to have two computers, networked and capable of running Remote Desktop, one with the original file and the other with the file being repaired. Then you can have one file open in a remote desktop window and the other file open on the local desktop and can copy all your bills data from the pre-repair file to the repaired file, one bill at a time. The reason for using Remote Desktop is that Money will not allow two instances to run simultaneously on a given machine. (Or at least for a given user; not sure I've ever tested the different simultaneous users case. Even if it worked, there's probably no way to copy from one user and past to another and the time it takes to "switch user" would prove prohibitive) You could probably have the second Money instance running in a VM. If you know of these things, you will understand; if not, it's probably not a good solution for you anyway.
You might also want to Export the "pre-nuke" Scheduled bills report to a file, .CSV or otherwise. You could then edit this file with Notepad or WordPad or even Excel to add the bills definition information the report doesn't otherwise print. After nuking the bills, you can then use this file as a reference to re-creating your bills. You can even copy/paste things like memos and payee names from the capture file back to the Money new scheduled item creation dialog.
Another way to aid the process is to systematically enter all your bills in registers before nuking them. You might want to put in a special memo or some such. After nuking the bills, you can then go through the registers and select the "bills" entries and r-click, Add to bills. After you've defined the new bill, you can delete the temporarily entered register transaction.
When you think you are done, you might want to consider cross-checking the before and after cash flow forecasts and scheduled bills reports to make sure you haven't missed anything.
Disclaimer: Because of the amount of work, the unknown prospect that it will prove worthwhile for any given file, the fact that it will deteriorate to where you started at some point in the future, and the serious prospect that, with less than very careful preparation and process, you could really make a mess of your data, the umpmfaq does not recommend Nuke-the-Bills. Any choice to go down this path is purely your own
Q) I see checks to be printed. Money says there aren't any. What gives?
A) Money keeps an internal counter of checks to be printed that can get out of synchronization with reality in the registers. Most people have resolved this by either the msmoney -s or salv.exe data file repair tools.
References:
MSKB: 182608 How to resolve file inconsistencies
Q) I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?
A) "Corruption" of user data files is a popular topic of the newsgroup. Sooner or later, it seems, every Money user will experience this. But there has been lots of confusion over what is and isn't corruption, and there have been attempts to blame non-specific "corruption" for lots of things that probably aren't "corruption" induced. Many problems blamed on corruption are not corruption related at all and some that are may not be able to be solved with the available file repair procedures and will require different techniques to fix if they are even fixable. For the readers who haven't experienced corruption yet and are getting bored and are about to skip the rest of this answer, remember this one thing: the one sure way out of these problems is having backups that really are and that have, in turn, their own backups. Further, if you are still reading, remember that a corrupt file can generate a corrupt backup--so be sure and have multiple generations of backups available.
In general, "corruption" refers to problems in the logical integrity of the data file. Corruption does not mean the operating system reports data errors reading your file. Though that is a form of corruption, it's not what we are talking about here. The corruption we are talking about are cases where the data in your file is read and written acceptably by the operating system but doesn't make sense or isn't consistent to Money itself. In general, a Money file that produces unexpected results or improper behavior of the application which a) cannot be reproduced with a new Money file or the sample file, and b) can be reproduced on different systems using the same Money file, is likely corrupted.
With this in mind, your troubleshooting process should follow something like this when you are facing possible file corruption.
1. Create a new file or open the Sample Money file.
2. Try to reproduce the issue.
3. If you can reproduce the issue, the problem is most likely not corruption. It could be your Money installation, IE installation, or an OS/system problem. So start with the easiest of these: Remove and re-install the Money application to a new folder. Next, repair/remove/reinstall Internet Explorer. (This will not be so easy on many of the newer operating systems--and it's generally less likely to be an issue on the newer ones.) Always test after every step.
4. If at all possible, test your Money file on a different system with the same version and localization of Money installed.
5. If you cannot reproduce the issue in a new file, and especially if the problem moved with your data file to a different system, you may be looking at a corruption issue. Here are some indications and errors that suggest possible corruption problems:"Money cannot create a temporary file in C:\Windows\Temp"
"Money cannot locate '<file path and name>' or cannot open it, possibly because it is a read-only file. You can change the read-only attribute in the Windows Explorer. If you have chosen the correct file and it cannot be accessed, you will need to open your most recent backup file."
"<Path>/<file name> is corrupted or is not a Money data file. Make sure you are opening a file with an .MNY extension. If you have chosen the correct file and it could not be accessed, you will need to open your most recent backup file to access your data."
If you attempt to convert a Money data file from an earlier version, and you receive the following error message:
"There has been an error reading or writing to the disk."If you attempt to create a new file, you receive several error messages, beginning with the following error message:
"The new file '<Path>/<file name>' cannot be created. Please make sure that the new file name does not contain any of the following characters: \/:*?"<>|. Also, make sure the new file is being created on a disk that is not write-protected and has sufficient room to store the new file." (This one is normally not file corruption, though.)When you click OK, you may receive the following message:
"Not enough memory is available. If you have several applications open at the same time, you might need to close one of them before starting Money." (This also is normally not corruption.)When trying to enter or delete a transaction or go into a particular area of Money, you receive the error (quite common--these are the "trinity" of corruption indicators):
"This operation cannot be performed."
"This transaction cannot be entered."
"This transaction cannot be deleted."Checks are available to print but there are no "Print checks" prompts. This is common enough that it has its own FAQ and an MSKB reference to boot. See the question "I see checks to be printed. Money says there aren't any. What gives?"
Very whacko balances (the trillion dollar balance syndrome).
Balances disagree from one place to another in the app. These are frequently pilot error and there was a bug that produced this, depending on reconciled/unreconciled register view, back in M01, which was fixed with a patch. But some of these cases have turned out to be corruption.
Cash flow fails to display in M02. This one also has its own FAQ entry. See "How come my cash flow forecast refuses to display?"
Other indications of corruption have included sudden radical degradation in performance, transactions that refuse to be edited or marked as reconciled/cleared (usually you’ll get the "operation cannot be performed" message), and application crashes at repeatable places and/or when doing repeatable things with the data. Reports that refuse to display and/or crash the application can be caused by corruption or can be caused by problems with, say, printer or video drivers. Recreating your favorite report from the basic report and/or playing around with the customization settings to see if there are some data sets that work and others that cause the problem should isolate problems with reports.
Cases that involve the application crashing upon starting may come down to a problem with the application itself or with the most recently opened data file--which is exactly the file Money will try to open if you just start the application rather than opening a specific Money data file. See "Money crashes when I first start the application or open my regular data file. How come? What next?"
Finally, there are many things that are not corruption but are occasionally blamed on corruption. Some examples follow. Reports that don't show what you want may very well be customized incorrectly. Register views that are not in the order you want may be sorted by something you don't recognize. When Money is generally slow, it is likely just Money being generally slow. When Budget Planner produces results you don’t understand, it’s likely just Budget Planner’s way of reminding us that some future version of Money will be able to claim improved budgeting among its features. Problems importing statements or with the statement data itself are in all likelihood problems with the data the bank provided. If you have any doubts about what is normal--if undesirable--behavior and what may be "corruption," the newsgroup is probably a better place to start than the repair tools.
So, if you are to the point where you've determined that your file is likely corrupted and are ready to journey down the road of file repair, here are your options and some recommendations for how to go about the process, sorted by order of complexity and potential loss of data:
- There are two file repair tools provided by Microsoft for Money.
- Sometimes you can unwind what you were doing back to when you first saw the problem and identify an associated transaction or scheduled bill that created the problem and exhibits the signs of corruption. From here you can proceed to:
- Binary search identification and elimination
- Revert to a backup
- Other voodoo
- Export/Import (the "start almost over" method)Details on the repair tools:
File Salvage (the "msmoney -s" startup parameter or, beginning in M04, File|Repair Money File|Quick File Repair (or Standard File Repair???)): This repair utility checks the data integrity to make sure the data is self-consistent. It does not check that the data is correct; it only checks that the validation rules that are supposed to be applied on data entry are indeed being applied.
Super Salvage (salv.exe): This repair will work with any version of Money but will NOT work on backup files. It does low level checking for file integrity. It checks the format and stability of the file itself. It does NO data checking. Salv provides 2 different levels of checking; each just goes deeper in its checking than the previous. (Some older versions supported three levels of checking but level 3 has been removed, apparently because it caused more harm than good for many users.)
Guidelines for use of the repair tools:
msmoney -s (or File|Repair Money File|Quick File Repair (or Standard File Repair???) in recent versions)
When running Money 99 and above, always run File Salvage first. This usually works if you go to Start, Run and type "msmoney -s" without quotes. Be sure that the data file opens displaying the message "Repairing file…working" or the repair is not being performed. For more information on running this utility, see item # 182608 in the MSKB.
salv.exe
This tool works on versions 98 and later. Although it is available on the Money CDs in the PSS folder in versions 2001 and later, you can download it (and should to be sure that you are running the latest and greatest version of the utility). See item # 274584 in the MSKB to download the current version and get more information.
General information on file repair tool processes:
A good course of action to use when encountering a file corruption issue and attempting repair with these tools is to:
0. Make copies of your file before you start mucking around. If any of this makes your situation worse, you can always start over on one of the copies. This is general good practice when things get sporty with any data file. Work on the copies. If you solve your problem in a copy, delete the original and rename the copy.
1. Stop the background Money tools so that they are not accessing your file. These tools are Background Banking, MoneySide and MoneyExpress.
2. Run the file salvage (-s)
3. Check the file to verify that the issue is still present
4. Run a Level 1 of salv.exe
5. Check the new, salvaged file
6. Run a Level 2 of salv.exe on the new file from step 3
7. Check the new, salvaged file
8. If the salv.exe is unsuccessful at any point, run the file salvage (-s) again on the last new successfully salvaged file from steps 3, 5, or 7
9. Archive the file to remove old transactions (not recommended) or just archive without removing transactions.If using versions of Money prior to 99, press CTRL + ALT + DEL and select Task Manager (NT, Win2K, WinXP) or bring up the Close Program box directly (WinMe and prior versions of "dirty Windows"). Highlight Microsoft Money and click End Task to terminate the application and close your data file. When you reopen the file, Money should tell you that the file was not closed properly and that it needs to be repaired.
One important piece of advice regarding the file repair tools: don't assume they actually repaired anything, no matter what messages they spit out. It is very important in this context to find repeatable ways to manifest a symptom of corruption so that you can test that you actually fixed something that mattered before declaring victory and moving on, potentially to wind up back in the same place in a matter of days or weeks. One poster to the newsgroup, Bob Arge, struggled for over a year with what seemed to be a number of separate and serial corruption incidents. When Bob finally gave up and moved his data to Quicken, he had a problem with account imbalances. To make a very long story short, a transfer from one account to another from almost two years back was somehow lost in the Money ozone--there, but not showing up in the registers. This kind of thing is a classic corruption symptom. All of Bob's effort and repeated use of the repair tools never actually solved the root corruption problem, apparently. What seemed like a series of isolated corruption episodes was probably just one that never actually got rooted out of the file.
Details on binary search identification and elimination:
Frequently, you can localize a problem because it only shows up on a specific transaction, or a specific report or similar. Since many corruption problems seem to be focused on a specific transaction or bill or similar, narrowing your problem down to the specific item causing the problem can make it possible to fix your problem without resorting to the repair tools--or if they fail--or the more destructive methods.
There is no fixed procedure here. The general method is to try binary methods to narrow down the focus of the problem and then delete, edit, or otherwise eliminate the problem item and then you can re-create it.
For example, a problem report may work if you customize it to report either the first half of the date range or the last. The half that doesn't work can again be divided in halves, repetitively, until you narrow your problem down to, say, one day's worth of transactions. For bills, you can delete (but please read and heed step 0 under the repair tools for guidance to work in copies of your data file) bills until the problem goes away.
For more general problems that may be located somewhere in your account registers, the basic approach (this is NOT a procedure) is to make a copy of your data file, and, in the copy, progressively delete things (accounts, scheduled items, whatever) until happiness is restored. When you delete the nth account (or whatever) and the operation in question starts working, go back to the original file, make another copy, go into the copy, and repeat just that last deletion. If the problem operation still presents itself, go into yet another copy and try further narrowing. If, say, deleting one account restores happiness then go at transactions in the account--delete, say, one month's worth at a time or one half or the other. (The reason the latter approach is called binary search is that when you get to the point where there are lots of cases--like transactions to delete--it is frequently faster to delete half at once and then, assuming your problem went away, you delete half of the same half in the next copy of the original. This kind of search will rapidly narrow down to a specific transaction—for example, 10,000 transactions reduce to 1 in 14 tries.) Of course, there are cases where two or more problem transactions (or accounts or bills or whatever) are in play--this makes it harder, but the same general principles apply.
(One slight digression into Money technique is in order here: if you have to delete transactions in an investment account you will frequently find yourself in the situation where Money says you can't delete a buy because it will cause a negative share balance. Add an Add Share transaction, older than any other transaction in the account in question, for some outrageously large number of shares in the investment in question. You can delete it later.)
When you narrow it down to a specific focus, you go back to the original data file and try to figure out what to do about it. Can the transaction be edited? Deleted and replaced? Change the payee, amount, split, account, etc? Can it be moved to a temporary account and then delete the temporary account?
This can be very tedious but frequently can narrow down a problem to one transaction or entry. Sometimes this one problem item cannot be deleted by itself. Then you end up doing things like creating a temporary account, moving every transaction but the problem one, deleting the problem transaction account, renaming, etc., the temporary account to the old account's name, and then re-enter the now missing problem transaction.
Details on restoring a backup:
If none of this has worked, hopefully you have a recent backup. (After this experience you probably will the next time it happens.) Be sure and restore your data file to a different name or location so as to preserve your original file--if there are problems with your backup you may end up back there. It is possible that you "backed up" this problem. In these cases, you may restore it as well. Hopefully you have kept multiple versions of backup.
Other voodoo:
Sometimes there are multiple reports of odd voodoo that fixes a string of seemingly unrelated issues. These items are captured at "Are there any other voodoo tricks that might solve my problem?"
Details on export/import:
If all of this has failed you, the only choice left, and it is generally quite a poor choice, is to try to preserve as much data as you can using QIF export and then to start over in a new data file, restoring the exported data. MSKB article # 1778830 addresses this approach.
Unless you have 5 accounts or less, you should work really hard to resolve the issue without getting to export/import. This should be your last resort and should only be your resort if you have exhausted every possibility that the problem is not really corruption, not only because of the amount of effort involved in the export/import process, but also because if the problem is not corruption and you go through the whole process, it'll be extremely frustrating to find out that the issue is still there. Export/import also only brings over the information in transactions. This means that your bills, budget, planner, etc., are gone and must be recreated. Loan accounts cannot be exported either. The good news on this is that, if your corruption was in one of these areas, it is left behind once you are in the new file.
If you only have a couple of accounts, by all means go the export/import route rather than spending hours trying to dink around with repair (unless, of course, you have a lot of data in the bills/budget/planner or loan accounts that have transactions unaccompanied by Loan Payments in the accounts being export/imported).
Now that we've discussed corruption to excess, some other information is in order.
What causes corruption? Certainly none of us in the "outside world" are sure what causes corruption. But it tends to happen at rates and in places that tend to suggest that it's not because of cosmic rays. And it happens to people who do not kill Money from task manager every time they see the hourglass and 100% CPU. My suggestion/suspicion is that there truly are lurking defects in the Money code that get hit under the right circumstances and leave the database in these unstable states. Even the MSKB item for the "damaged scheduled item" in M02 makes it sound like demonic possession or some other force beyond the developer's control--but of course they fixed that one in M03, so there must have been a real root cause in the code. I wish I felt that these cases were a priority for identification and elimination and did not feel as though Microsoft considers the -s and salv and the QIF export/import cycle as all they need to do--or maybe even more than we deserve--on these issues.
For some other users, corruption happens in places none of the rest of us has ever seen problems and it happens repeatedly. In these cases, an environmental root cause seems much more likely than a problem that has a defect in Money as root cause. Or there may be some user habit that Money just doesn't like. For instance, some users apparently panic every time they see the hourglass for more than a second or two or see 100% CPU usage by Money, like that's a bad thing by definition, and terminate the application. These cases are much harder for the newsgroup to help with. The environmental causes are even less well understood. The causes likely include DLL conflicts, driver problems, video settings, BIOS settings/problems, IE installation problems, and so forth. Finding these types of problems can certainly be very difficult, but if you are having recurring corruption problems you should pursue these issues rather than just depending on the repair tools to save your data. They may not always be able to do so.
Is Money unusually prone to corrupting its own data files? (Compared to what?) Maybe. Who knows? Are later versions more prone to corrupting their own data files than earlier versions? Generally, versions from M98 forward seem worse than prior versions and versions since M98 seem to be improving, based solely on postings in the newsgroup. But then each version also seems to introduce a new problem like the "damaged scheduled items" in M02. Money may well be unusually prone to environmental problems. It is a poster child for bleeding edge Microsoft development techniques like COM, DHTML, XML, and so on. Remember also that the workhorse tools in the whole house of cards are not even developed by the Money group: MSISAM and IE. Money just bolts some business logic and a UI on top of all of this. For this reason, it is likely very exposed to all of the issues with object contamination by other applications and DLL conflicts and so on. Even flushing Internet temporary items from the IE cache has made strange Money problems disappear. Go figure. It is amazing that, after all these years, Money still detects these problems (that's where messages like "operation cannot be performed" are coming from) but does nothing to resolve them. You'd think that the Money designers would have figured out how to put code at the places where these messages are generated to do something more helpful than just tell us what Money cannot do, leaving us to figure out what it all means and what to do about it.
What should a user do about corruption problems going forward? Well, recommendation #1 would be to make sure you have a backup strategy that assures you have multiple generations of backup, are not depending on any one type of backup media, and that your backups really are. Restoring from your last weekly backup and re-entering three or four days of transactions is probably easier than most any technique for repair described here.
Finally, some users who have been here, done this, decide to start regularly using the repair tools as a prophylactic against future file corruption. There is no evidence that this is an effective strategy. Worse, there is significant anecdotal evidence that the repair tools can emit meaningless messages about problems in your data file when there are absolutely no other indications of any problem. Given how little we know about these tools and how little is documented and how little we know about what they are designed to do/fix and how rigorously they are tested and so on (why I refer to them as voodoo tools), this fixation may be misplaced. Some people have reported more problems after using these tools than before. There is no reason to believe these tools are tested anywhere near as rigorously as the application is. Using them "just in case" seems like a profoundly bad idea.
Thanks to Bonnie Synhorst for contributing the bulk of the answer here and the inspiration for getting it in the FAQ. The good parts are hers--the bad parts I probably edited in. The first person opinions are definitely mine.
References:
MSKB: 178830 Export/Import "repair" and conversion
MSKB: 182608 How to resolve file inconsistencies
Q) Money says 'This operation cannot be completed.' What's up with that?
A) Money may also say "This operation cannot be performed." These messages are most likely related to internal database problems and/or problems related to specific scheduled transactions. For the former, your best bet is to pursue the Money data file repair tools msmoney -s or salv.exe. (Also, see the question "What is the -s option? What is the Super Salvage utility?") Read more about these tools in the MSKB. Be sure you have backups that really are before going down this path and/or work on a copy of your file. In the latter case, try deleting and re-entering the scheduled transaction.
Thanks to Derrick Cole for this answer.
See also "I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?"
References:
MSKB: 182608 How to resolve file inconsistencies
Q) Money says 'This transaction cannot be entered.' What's up with that?
A) Try the steps outlined in the MSKB identified by Cal Learner--MVP.
See also "I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?"
References:
MSKB: Q288385 Transaction cannot be entered
Q) After I added MSN Bill Pay to online services, Money 2002 stops downloading direct bank statements. Why?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10)]
A) Go to Online Services setup and click the Modify Services link for the bank. Click "No, I wish to discontinue using online services for [bank]". Then setup online services for the affected bank again.
Q/A courtesy of Doug Semler.
Q) How come my cash flow forecast refuses to display?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10)]
A) Usually one or more scheduled bills/deposits are, for reasons unknown, causing this problem. The offending bill/deposit can be identified by trial and error as follows:
1) make a copy of your Money data file
2) open the copy
3) delete scheduled bills/deposits one-by-one until cash flow happiness returns; the last one deleted is your suspect, though there may be more than one causing the problem
4) re-open your primary file and edit or delete/replace the problem transactionThis has returned cash flow planner to its usual less-than-perfect self for many of us.
Some users have reported that just editing every scheduled transaction memo--not necessarily changing anything, just "touching" them--has restored cash flow.
Microsoft has also admitted this can happen, of course without so much as hinting that a problem in their code could be causing it. See the MSKB item for the odd ways they propose you resolve this issue. MSKB link courtesy of Laurence.
References:
MSKB: Q312814 "damaged" scheduled item
Q) Money Help keeps whining about script errors, unable to load topic, or similar nonsense. Why? What can I do about it?
A) Nobody really knows what causes this. Most people have been able to resolve this issue by going into IE Internet Options (from IE Tools or from the desktop Internet Options or from the Internet Options control panel) and deleting all temporary internet files. Go figure. MSKB link courtesy of Mark.
References:
MSKB: 812755 On-line help breaks for mysterious reasons
Q) My scheduled bill (deposit, transfer, etc.) just morphed from a normal split into a Paycheck. What's up with that?
[Relevant to Money2003 (v.11) and up]
A) Who knows? This is a little present the Money developers left behind. If you Cancel the first time you see this, it might be right the next time you edit the series or a specified occurrence. If not, you will have no choice but to delete the item and recreate it. Maybe this "feature" will be "improved" in the next version?
Derived from an answer provided by Derrick Cole.
It is not clear if this was fixed in M06. For this reason, I've referenced this answer to M06 until a we know for sure that it's been fixed. Since the half life for defects like this in Money seems to be about three or four releases, it's entirely possible it's still in there.
Q) When I go into Tax Estimator, the display is garbled. What can I do about this?
[Relevant to Money2003 (v.11), Money2004 (v.12)]
A) This problem first showed up in M03. When M04 came out with the exact same issue, it was obvious how many of the Money developers actually use the Money Tax Estimator. The workaround is to go to the previous screen then go back to the next screen. This usually resolves the problem.
Q) Why do I get a disk space error installing Money 2002? I have gigabytes of free disk space.
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10)]
A) If you get a message like "Microsoft Money 2002 cannot be installed. Please make sure you have 4,095Mb free on drive C: and try to install again" when trying to install Money 2002, read the referenced MSKB--the error message is misleading but there is a workaround.
Reference courtesy of Glyn Simpson, Microsoft MVP - Money
References:
MSKB: Q313999 diskspace errors on install of M02
Q) What does the envelope with the lightning mean on a scheduled payment?
A) It means the transaction is setup as an Epay.
LisaLisa (the Money marketing manager) got a page put up to decode many Money icons. Then Microsoft disappeared the page. Glyn Simpson replaced it. You might want to refer to his icon reference page.
References:
Glyn Simpson's replacement for LisaLisa's reference page for icons
Q) What does the lightning bolt next to the account name mean?
A) It means that Money knows something about doing electronic data interchange with the financial institution you named for this account.
Q) What is the 'bleeding envelope' icon in the register?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10) and up]
A) This icon indicates that Money thinks this transaction is a candidate for being added as a recurring scheduled transaction. If you click (double click?) on it, a dialog will pop-up allowing you to enter it as a recurring scheduled transaction or you can tell Money to quit bugging you about it.
Check "potential recurring transactions" in Help.
Thanks to Cal Learner for the Help file topic reference.
It turns out the bleeding dagger is really a question mark. LisaLisa (the Money marketing manager) got a page put up to decode many Money icons. Then Microsoft disappeared the page. Glyn Simpson replaced it. You might want to refer to his icon reference page.
References:
Glyn Simpson's replacement for LisaLisa's reference page for icons
Q) I can't find where to download Money updates on the Microsoft web site. Why not?
A) Microsoft hasn't provided Money fixes on their web site for any version of Money still supported. The updates that are available will be downloaded when you do an "Internet Update." [What's in the updates, how do you tell if you've got the most recent update, and similar questions all deserve answers that we don't have.]
Q) Is Money better than Quicken?
A) Many of us here prefer Money to Quicken. Some of us started using Money after having used Quicken. Your mileage may vary. M05 signals a quantum change in the nature of Microsoft Money away from a standalone application for self-directed personal financial management. More of us may be reconsidering the Quicken vs. Money trade soon.
Q) Is there/when will there be a Mac version of Microsoft Money?
A) This is much less frequently asked than it used to be. It is not clear what can be inferred from that.
Nobody here is aware of any Microsoft plans for Money for the Mac. If they were, they couldn't say anyway.
Money has been on the Windows platform for more than ten years now. It seems that Microsoft would have done Money for the Mac long ago if they thought they could make a decent return by doing so. The barriers are pretty high given Money's dependence on Microsoft core technologies like COM, IE, and MSISAM, none of which exist in the same form or at all on the Mac. And it's not as if Macs have become more popular or common over the years, "switchers" like Ellen notwithstanding.
Q) What's the difference between the various Money packages? Between M03 and previous versions? What's new in M03?
A) The Microsoft Money web site has a page that compares the features included in the various packages. There is another page that highlights what has changed with each version of Money from M99 through M02. Finally, there is one that summarizes what's new in M02. Check them out.
Answers courtesy Richard Bollar - MVP Microsoft Money and Kim Renna, Microsoft MVP - CSO Consumer
References:
Microsoft Money Package Comparison
Microsoft Money Version Change History
Microsoft Money What's new in M02
Q) When will the next version of Money release? What will it do?
A) Anybody reading the newsgroup that knows has likely signed a non-disclosure agreement and cannot say.
If the past is any guide to the future, the next version of Money will be available starting in August. Microsoft's press release announcing the product will use the word "great" a dozen or more times. It will have some features that will be really cool to some people. It will have some features that will be minor improvements to lots of people. It will fix some of the worst issues created with the last version. It will create some new issues of its own. It will have many minor changes that are annoying and unnecessary to long time users, added in the name of "ease of use" but mostly just serving to dumb the product down further. It will have more hooks to other services that Microsoft hopes we will use and that Microsoft hopes will produce ever more vigorish. It will incorporate any really neat features Quicken incorporated last year if those features generated much "buzz" amongst reviewers or by the Intuit marketeers. Quicken will release a new version about the same time. Magazine reviewers will like each product about equally. They will not mention any of the major issues since they will not have used the product enough to find them. A rebate will be available to all purchasers having the effect of reducing the average sell price to less than some people will pay and more than others would have paid at the cost of a hassle for those of us in the latter category. If the past is any guide to the future, that is.
Q) Can Money import my Quicken data? How about my current version Quicken data?
A) Money has provided Quicken conversion tools in all recent versions of Money. These converters have supported import of the "previous" version of Quicken and older versions. Since Quicken changes their file format every year and Microsoft and Intuit release about the same time each year, Microsoft cannot provide a converter for the current version of Quicken in the box with the current version of Money. They used to release a converter to get from the current version of Quicken to the current version of Money in late spring, but have not done this for several versions now. If they resume this practice in the future, the Money web site will reveal this first.
References:
Microsoft Money web site
Q) How do I access the Money API (OLE, XML, ODBC, object model, Jet database, MSISAM database, etc)?
A) Any external programmatic interfaces for Money are undocumented, unsupported, and without any promise of retention in the future.
Certain ISVs (Ultrasoft and Kiplinger/H&R Block come to mind) have implemented programmatic interfaces to Money, presumably with help from Microsoft. Try contacting Microsoft directly. Let us know how this works.
Money does support OFC/OFX for interchange with financial institutions. (E.g., statement download, EPAY.) If this is what you want to do, refer to the Microsoft Partner, Microsoft Active Statements Interface, and Open Financial Exchange links.
Thanks to Cal Learner for the OFC/OFX interface info.
References:
Microsoft Active Statements Interface
Microsoft Money Partner
Open Financial Exchange
Q) How do I export to Excel (or .TXT, .XML, .CSV)?
A) There are several approaches to exporting data. None of them solve all problems.
Money has always supported "export to QIF." QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) is documented and an Excel macro exists to write to this format. You could extrapolate from this macro how to go the other way.
Money reports can be copied to the clipboard. They can then be pasted as plain text into Excel cells.
Money 2002 added some enhanced capabilities in this regard with a direct "Export to Microsoft Excel" that writes .CSV files. (Obviously, there is nothing unique to Excel about .CSV files.) They can also be exported to a tab-delimited .TXT file from the "Export…" r-click menu on the report.
Money 2003 added a choice to export reports as "Send to Desktop." This writes .CSV, .TXT, and .XML files to you desktop with the report data.
Finally, there is the MoneyLink Excel add-in. This add-in provides a number of queries (e.g., account transactions for specified account for specified date range) that can retrieve data from your Money data file into Excel. It's a one-way trip only. Money-version-specific versions of the add-in are available for Money 98 through Money 2003. MoneyLink does have some specific limitations. For instance, it does not retrieve classification or the parent of split transactions.
The MoneyLink add-in was a download for Money 98. Then it was included on the CD with Money 99 and Money 2000. With Money 2001, Microsoft thought nobody would notice if they removed it. After a great upheaval on the newsgroup and on the support lines, they relented and made MoneyLink available on the web. Beginning with Money 2002, they have left it off the CD. For Money 2002 and beyond (through M06 at this writing), it is available, for free, from Ultrasoft. What transfer of responsibility for this tool from Microsoft to Ultrasoft means for its future, no one can say.
Thanks to Myrna Larson for the tab-delimited export method.
As of August 20, 2004, links for the M98 and M02 download are still (back?) available. Thanks for this correction provided by Pete.
References:
Microsoft M98 and M01 MoneyLink download links page
Ultrasoft (MoneyLink)
Q) How do I import from Excel (or .CSV or etc.)?
A) Money can only import .QIF format data, entire Quicken files (into a new Money file, with the restriction that it be from an older version of Quicken than the version of Money doing the importing) and, in more recent Money versions, OFX and OFC format data. OFC support was removed from M05. (Incidentally, QIF support was removed from Q05.)
Once upon a time, Microsoft provided an Excel macro that wrote .QIF format files from Excel. Unfortunately, that macro is an old XLM style macro and Excel has not supported that type of macro for many versions now. Microsoft has never seen fit to issue any new capability like this. As of this writing, it appears that even the Knowledge Base article has been disappeared.
Having said that, it is worth noting that QIF is just a text file with a format that is not, apparently, all that complex. It should be reasonably straightforward for someone used to mucking around in VBA for Excel to write code to generate passable QIF files. The QIF file format is an ad hoc standard semi-documented by Quicken. The references, all identified from a search at google, may help you get there. There were many more references that were not included here and these references may not be good currently. If you create some code for this, please report back here and offer it up to the community.
One reader, Didier Lachièze, has done just that. Several readers have reported good results with Didier's macro. Didier has also developed a web page that provides resource links to other similar tools.
Another reader, Ron Rosenfeld, reported on a shareware CSV to QIF converter written by James Lavery of Monthtwo Systems. There has been no other feedback on this tool.
(These things must be really popular lately.) There's another one written by a guy named John. No user reports on it yet, either.
Chris Cowles reported yet another CSV to QIF converter--built to go with a personal finance manager application for Palm, the web site for which provides yet another spin on QIF documentation.
Colin Smales asked me to include a reference to his MT2OFX converter tool that provides conversions of a number of different formats to OFX.
References:
Another attempt to document QIF
Colin Smale's MT2OFX format conversion tool
CSV to QIF revisited
Didier Lachièze's Excel to QIF macro
Didier Lachièze's QIF conversion resource page
google.com
John's XL to QIF
Monthtwo Systems' CSV to QIF shareware
MSKB: Q077220 Excel to .QIF macro
QIF Apple-centric documentation, but maybe still valid
QIF documented by the GnuCash folks
QIF documented maybe a little less well
QIF documented yet again and app for Palm
QIF documented
Q) I've decided to convert from Money to Quicken. How do I do this?
A) Since Quicken has so much market share and Money so little, Intuit hasn't felt much need over the years to make it easy for Money users to switch to Quicken. Per Russ Paul-Jones, Quicken offered a converter to import Money M98 data files to the Q99 format. A poster going by the moniker of "CIS" pointed a new converter for M03 and earlier files to Q04. The Intuit notes on this tool indicate that, among other limitations, it doesn't convert loan accounts. That seems like a pretty serious limitation.
References:
Quicken Q04 Money file conversion utility
Q) How can I make my posts here more likely to get answers?
A) Remember that everybody who replies here is doing so voluntarily.
1) Make your subject meaningful. "Microsoft Money" isn't. Besides, it's completely redundant in the microsoft.public.money newsgroup--what else would you be posting about? "M02: how do I setup my stock options?" is. Somebody who knows how to do the latter might read your post and answer. Many of us won't even look at the former.
2) Don't whine. Oh, and DON'T SHOUT.
3) Provide sufficient environment information. As a minimum, this always includes the version of Money. Many times this also includes the operating system. If you are having problems printing, tell us the kind of printer.
4) Describe what you are trying to do, what is happening, and what you have attempted to do about it.
5) Please use the same terminology for things that the help file and the screens and the printed documentation use. Some questions don't get answered because none of us can figure out what you are talking about.
6) Please state your question. "I want to track savings bonds." is a poor question. "Should I enter my savings bonds in Money or just track them in Savings Bond Wizard?" is better. "When I entered my savings bonds the way Money told me to, it seems there is no good way to track their value. Is there a better way than making them CDs?" is likely to get some meaningful responses. All too often people post things like "Subject: Microsoft Money. When I installed Money it crashes." and expect help. This will get nowhere. It's not even a question and it provides insufficient information about environment and an insufficient description of the problem.
7) Don't expect miracles. The newsgroup is very good for "how-to" and usage case information. It is less useful, generally, for non-pervasive application crashes, installation problems, and so forth. If your installation of Money v. 4 on your WindowsXP dual-Athlon system stopped working after you installed the Mk. XVII VideoBlaster unless your modem is disconnected and you are simultaneously running Laura Croft Chases World Terrorism, you are unlikely to get help here. You likely have a unique configuration and problem that nobody else in the world shares. The fact that nobody here replies means nobody has a clue, not that nobody cares.
8) Don't post the same thing multiple times thinking it increases your chances of getting a reply. It doesn't. Quite the opposite.
9) Spare us the "if you don't fix my problem, I'll just get Quicken" histrionics. We are not a marketing arm of Microsoft. We really don't care. And, frankly, if going to Quicken seems to you like a preferable alternative to working through your problem, we'd by all means prefer you went that way. Then you can pester people in their newsgroup about fixing your problem or converting to Money.
10) Finally, remember why you posted and remember that Money is what it is. When you want to rant about how a feature works or doesn't work for you, we can suggest workarounds or offer alternative ways to solve your problem, but we can't change the product. Ranting at us about why the product should be changed and ignoring our suggested workarounds and solutions won't encourage people to try and help you in the future.
References:
newsgroups: Quicken newsgroup on your default news server
Q) I've been using M95 on Win95 happily for years now. All of a sudden I have a problem. Why can't anybody here help?
A) Unfortunately, the world and most of us here have moved on. While we'd like to help, many of us here haven't used this combination (or others that may be slightly newer like M98 on Win98) literally for years.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that personal computer hardware and software technology has advanced very rapidly, one in lockstep with the other. While you may find your environment just fine for your needs it is nonetheless as functionally obsolete as a DC-3 or a 1932 Packard.
The good news is that new Money licenses are very inexpensive--watch the sales; $40 or less, before rebate, is very common in the Sunday ads--and new versions import the data files from all old Money versions for the same locale, generally with a minimum of complications. Of course, the new version of Money probably won't work on your old hardware. Again there's a bit of good news among the bad: many inexpensive new PCs include OEM Money licenses.
See also the answer to "What's the worst thing that happens if I don't buy a Money version upgrade?"
Q) What's the worst thing that happens if I don't buy a Money version upgrade?
A) If you want to stick with an orphaned version of Money and pass on one or several upgrades, there are some known issues as well as some speculative ones you must consider:
The known issues:
- Support for older versions ends sooner.
- Services including transaction and quote download end sooner.
- Older versions will get "unsupported" sooner by FIs and so forth. "Unsupported" may just mean "don't call us if something goes wrong" or it may mean a change in interfaces that the old Money version can't deal with.
- Newly discovered issues will not get fixed. Not that they fixed old issues when the version was still current, but as you continue to use an old version, the odds of finding a new issue don't drop to 0.
- Changes in tax law will not get reflected in things like the Tax Estimator and the categories available for Investment Activity.The speculative issues:
- If an upgrade comes out that is compelling, data upgrades may be more problematic depending on how far back-level your data is. Based on M05, the odds for a compelling upgrade seem low unless something radically changes how Microsoft views the product and the market. Indeed, M06/7 can't import M98 files directly. (See "I just installed M06, it refuses to upgrade my M98 [or 99 or ???] version file. Why? What do I do?" for more on this.)
- The "learning curve" for such an upgrade grows as a function of the number of versions you are jumping.
- As the version in use becomes further back-level, the odds that an OS or other application/driver upgrade irretrievably breaks it increase. Your copy of M04 may not work on Windows2012 (or with IE 7, for that matter).
- You may not be able to re-install and update your old version with all the patches on a new machine or in case of a hard disk reload or replacement. This is one of the scariest issues in that there have been reports of problems restoring Money data file from backups if a new installation of the same version of Money doesn't have the same service fixes installed. This is because Microsoft has a) only made updates for Money available via the Money Internet Update integrated install--i.e., no patch file to download and store away, and b) routinely disappeared updates for old versions. Microsoft's push to sell Money as a download without CD and with most of the program downloaded through some internal protocol only makes this worse--you may not even have a way to install the basic application, much less the patches.The implication of this latter issue is that there may be **no way** for a user to install a usable/working/updated copy of your **fully-licensed** but obsolete version of Money on a new machine or a reloaded hard disk after the point where Microsoft withdraws support and disappears the Internet Updates. In the case of, say, replacing a failed hard disk, there may be no way for you to get to the point of being able to restore a working good backup of your Money data short of buying a newer version of Money and hoping that it can restore/upgrade this backup.
Microsoft really should provide the product updates some alternate way where the patch file is downloadable from Microsoft Downloads just like patches for normal Microsoft products. If Microsoft did that, the onus would still be on the user to download and save the patch indefinitely--but that would be better than today's case where there is nothing the user can do to protect against this risk.
References:
Microsoft Downloads site
Q) Where else can I go for help?
A) First, use the resources Microsoft provides with the product. On-line help has always been provided with Money and the amount and richness of this information has improved with every version of Money. Money 2002 comes with audio and video help, the traditional help file, the on-line Money user's guide, links to Microsoft resources on the web, the "Managing Your Finances…" book, and help for former Quicken users. Money 2003 omitted the book in favor of a book of ads. (Not many people read the old book. It's hard to imagine the ads will be more effective at reaching Money users.) Many of the "how-to" questions posed in the newsgroup are answered in on-line help.
Money 2005 moved the on-line help to "on-net". This complicates access to help for users who do not have continuous broadband connections. Likewise, Microsoft removed the audio help completely and removed most of the instructional videos.
Microsoft has finally linked many of the Money support resources to one support web page.
There is this newsgroup. The Microsoft news server has several months of this group available. Repeatedly "get more headers" until you have all of the messages and search from there. See "How can I make my posts here more likely to get answers?" for advice about posting to the newsgroup. If newsreaders make you uncomfortable or your proxy server blocks NNTP, there is also a web interface to the newsgroup.
groups.google.com has year's worth of posting from this news group and a very sophisticated search capability. Select Advanced Groups Search and enter "microsoft.public.money" in the newsgroup field.
There is a Yahoo! group on the subject, though it seems to have very little traffic and it does post a public membership directory, which may put you off.
The Microsoft Knowledge Base has lots of "how-to" answers and some--but by no means all--of the bugs and issues Microsoft knows about.
Glyn Simpson has an excellent page at mvps.org--it has some unique items tailored to the UK version of Money along with much else.
There used to be lots of books available for users of Microsoft Money. Perhaps a lot of them ended up getting pulped as there are fewer now. No endorsements are offered.
Opening a support incident with Microsoft Support may be the only possible solution to many installation, setup, crash and data file corruption issues. But remember, you bought the program for less than $100--in some cases a LOT less--and they will not fly programmers to your house to debug your problems.
References:
Amazon Microsoft Money books
Glyn Simpson's Money MVP page
groups.google.com
Microsoft Support Incident
Microsoft Support Money Page
microsoft.public newsgroups via web (select English/Money/Money General)
MS Support
MSKB
newsgroups: microsoft.public.money on Microsoft news server
Yahoo! Money group
Q) Why doesn't Microsoft issue a fix for this terrible problem immediately?
A) The only Money problems Microsoft has ever remedied prior to the next release are high-impact, pervasive problems that are not usage or "how-to" in nature.
High-impact in this context typically has meant those that result in display of incorrect balance information or the application abnormally ending in common circumstances. Problems with reporting and the finance management tools (budgeting, cash flow forecasting, debt reduction planner, etc.) have typically not been fixed prior to the next release, which has typically fixed some and added others.
Pervasive in this context has typically meant that the problem was likely to be visible to a majority of Money users--not just those who read the newsgroup.
They do this because they do not want to undertake major rework of the code on the fly due to concern about regression problems, they don't want to change how the product works--even when we don't like it working that way, and because they have limited resources for working on the code itself and most of these resources are dedicated to working on future versions.
Q) Why won't anybody answer my question posted here?
A) See the answer to "How can I make my posts here more likely to get answers?"
Q) Why won't Microsoft Support answer my question posted here?
A) This newsgroup is not a Microsoft-to-user support vehicle. It is for user-to-user support. Some Microsoft folks monitor this out of personal and, occasionally, professional, interest. They are not here--indeed, this forum is not here--to provide support from Microsoft to you. Try contacting Microsoft Support more directly.
References:
Microsoft Support Incident
MS Support
Q) Why won't the MVPs answer my question posted here?
A) The MVPs are all unpaid volunteers with real day jobs who give their time and talent to try and help where they can. Perhaps they're busy. Perhaps they don't know how to help. See "How can I make my posts here more likely to get answers?" for general advice on making your posting more likely to get help. Whining, begging and complaining that the MVPs haven't solved your problem is unlikely to help you solve your problem even if it does make you feel better. Worse, such behavior may get your name in their kill file so that your future postings will be invisible to them.
Q) How can I sort credits before debits in the register view?
A) You can't. But if you enter them in this order in the first place, this is how they will sort.
Q) I think this new version is terrible. How do I exercise the 30-day Money Back Guarantee?
A) Assuming that you are in the United States or Canada, call Microsoft Customer Service at (800) 426-9400. You will have to send the product back to them with additional information (like a receipt for purchase and the reason for return) and they will send you a check. Microsoft has a web page with more details on this process.
References:
Microsoft North American retail product returns
Refund Help Desk: 1-888-673-8624
Q) I've been reading this newsgroup and wondering: why is Money so full of bugs?
A) Looking at posts in this newsgroup should no more be used to infer the defect rate in Microsoft Money than a trip to an auto body shop should be used to infer the likelihood of automobile accidents.
People come here because they need help or because they are looking for different or better ways to do things. Many Money users (who may or may not have similar issues) never find their way here. Some of them may be having problems. Most of them are not.
You can reasonably expect that issues that are discussed here frequently may be issues for you as well.
Likewise, many posts here about crashes, data file problems, and installation issues reflect issues that are not common--many are not even rooted in Money--and you are unlikely to encounter them. (You may, however, encounter your own set of issues. As always, your mileage may vary.)
Many of us have used Money for many years and many versions and have learned to live with its characteristics and deal with the new set of cards the Money development team deals each fall.
Q) I've got a really neato feature idea. How do I get it to Microsoft?
A) You can submit product suggestions to MSwish or via the Money Registration/Feedback series of web pages, which seem endless but probably give them a better chance to get the item to the right place.
The corollary to this FAQ is: how come M[next] didn't incorporate the really neato feature I've always thought it should?
Prior to the release of M05, the answer to this question assumed that Microsoft was genuinely concerned with balancing the desires and requirements of the existing user community, identified through channels like MSwish and the newsgroup, with support costs, market share, market penetration and profitability.
Virtually no significant features that make Money a more capable or versatile product for personal financial management have been added to Money since M02--and about all it added was the ability to modify multiple occurrences of scheduled transactions. The bulk of the significant M05 redevelopment was geared to three things: Yodlee integration; the Essential modes that we are told, with no hint why we should believe it, "most users prefer"; and further blurring the distinction between Money as an application on your computer and Money as a web application and advertising delivery vehicle. The only aspect of this that has had any significant prior interest in the newsgroup is broader financial provider support for transaction download. Yodlee integration is Microsoft's attempt to address this. It's safe to say that very few newsgroup posters have asked for more ads.
The competition with Quicken and the relatively small market share relative to Quicken holds the price down. Microsoft makes very little if any money off a product retailing for $24. One support call and they're upside down. The bulk of their licensing revenue probably comes from the OEM licenses bundled with new computers anyway. (And the OEMs get those support calls.) Their only hope of making any profit from Money going forward probably requires three things: First, reducing the cost of sales and support. This explains the emphasis on download sales and dumbing the product down--and progressively migrating it toward being a web app--to reduce support costs. Second, "monetizing" the ongoing relationship so that a one time sale becomes an ongoing revenue stream to pay for even a little ongoing development, the services (like Yodlee and quotes) and support. This accounts for the focus on advertising delivery and tie-in marketing. (Examples include "Find great credit card deals," "Find cash for a car," and "Compare home equity loans" scattered all over the account registers plus all of the MSN web pages chock full of ads.) Finally, they need to convert more of the people who say they would use a home computer to manage their finances to actually doing something like that using "Microsoft Money". This probably explains the emphasis on "stop typing!" and "the effortless way". The people who are willing to go to any trouble at all to "manage their personal finances" using "Microsoft Money" probably already are.
As if this weren't depressing enough, consider the pace at which bugs in Money get fixed.
Given all of this, it doesn't seem that there is much incentive for Microsoft to care what existing Money users want the product to do nor have they released much evidence that they do. But go ahead and submit a suggestion. YMMV.
References:
Money Registration/Feedback
MSwish mail
Q) M97 (or earlier) stopped downloading quotes. What can I do about it?
[Relevant to Money v. 4, Money97 (v.5)]
A) Apparently your only recourse is to upgrade to a new version. Apparently this was an unintentional side effect of other things Microsoft was doing, but since M97 and earlier are no longer supported, they have no intention of fixing it. See the support lifecycle page for more information and the Microsoft Money home page for information about the current version. Thanks to Cal Learner and Bob Peel, both MVPs, for this information.
References:
Microsoft Money web site
Microsoft Support Lifecycle information
Q) What's this 'Savings & Spending Budget'? Where's the real budget tool?
[Relevant to Money2007 (v.16) and up]
A) Lots of people, apparently, found the long time Advanced Budget, née Budget Planner, budgeting method too hard or cumbersome or just not useful. Somewhere along the way, Richard Jenkins, an editor at the MSN Money website, "invented" a simpler one-size-fits-all solution that he called "the 60% solution". M07 incorporated this and calls it the "Savings & Spending Budget". Collectively, they seem very proud of it.
Perhaps it will work well for some people and if it does, more power to the 60% scheme, to Money for adding it, and to the users it works well for. It seems like a simplistic toy to me, but that's just me.
Where the new toy budget gets a little more complicated is that they hide the old Advanced Budget, née Budget Planner, tool from anyone who didn't have an Advanced Budget in their file pre-dating M07. But a crafty poster, Ronald Pierce, resorted to reading the help files and found out that there is a way to get to it by typing "money://navigate/newadvbgt" into the M07 URL text box. As Michael Gordon pointed out, this is finally a useful purpose for the URL text box. Perhaps a more strategic question is how long Money will continue to support the budget tool the developers seem intent on making disappear.
References:
MSN article that gave birth to the "Savings & Spending Budget"
Q) What's up with this expiration date for online services I read about in the EULA?
[Relevant to Money2003 (v.11) and up]
A) Many of us always figured there was an implicit date beyond which Microsoft was not going to provide services that cost them money to provide on legacy interfaces that cost them money to maintain in exchange for the same $10 we paid for the software way back when. Beginning with M03, Microsoft finally made this explicit by setting service periods and cutoff dates after which they won't provide these services. Further, these periods vary by the package licensed with the expensive packages getting support longer than the cheap ones. It makes some sense--who else ever agrees to provide a service to you forever for nothing more than you paid in the beginning?
M05 set the same service period without regard to the version. It also added Yodlee integration which probably does have marginal cost to Microsoft as a function of time. Microsoft is steadily moving Money away from an "application software licensed in perpetuity" business model to a "service subscription" model where the fees will be based on time used, regardless of version.
Mark Horn read this answer and correctly pointed out that it doesn't mention a more insidious aspect to this. Money's service cutoff also includes transaction data downloads direct from your financial institution to you. These downloads, provided they work and don't entail support costs or use protocols that Microsoft and the FIs would rather make disappear, cost Microsoft absolutely nothing. It's like Stanley Tools telling you that the hammer you bought from them will stop driving nails in two years. But there it is. What are you going to do?
Q) Why is my Money file so large?
[Relevant to Money98 (v.6) and up]
A) Money files have grown in size dramatically since early versions. The reasons for this are no doubt complex and numerous. Added functionality certainly accounts for some of this increase. Design choices accounts for some of this--in particular, the choice to use the Jet database instead of the custom ISAM, made with release of Money 98, increased file sizes by factors of three or more. (Certainly, those of us who follow this also continue to collect data each year.) Whether its storage is efficient or economical is beyond the scope of the newsgroup. We see no evidence that Microsoft considers compact Money data files a priority in the design process.
Archiving is one way to reduce file size. See "How do I un-archive?" for reasons not to do this. Some files imported from Quicken have been reported to be huge, though with use and the automatic compacting of the database, many of these shrink to more reasonable sizes.
Jet- and MSISAM-based versions of Money support periodic or as-required compacting of the database. Salvage (see "What is the -s option? What is the Super Salvage utility?") has been reported to help some cases of this.
The wide availability of huge hard disks and writeable CDs has reduced the significance of this problem over time.
(My Money 2004 file has had continuous data entry since March 1993, and has never had entries archived. As of November 2004, MoneyLink retrieves almost 34,000 transactions, i.e., splits, and almost 4,700 investment transactions from my M04 file. The file is 53.1 MB and backs up, compressed, on ten 1.44 MB floppies. Your mileage probably varies. As another point of reference, my data file is growing by about 550 KB per month. At this rate of growth, my data file will still fit on a 640MB writeable CD in the year 2092. The more immediate problem in this scenario is that the Excel row limitation will prevent retrieving all transactions with MoneyLink sometime in 2011.)
M07 added an interesting new "Repair Tool" that has significantly shrunk some files. One case went from 67.9MB to 54.8MB. Whether this reduction remains as the files is maintained going forward is not yet known. For details, see "Can you tell me more about the remarkable new Nuke-the-Bills miracle repair method?" for details.
Q) Back to the check stock question: Isn't it obvious that Money should print the MICR data?
A) No, actually, it isn't.
Money assumes you are using pre-printed check stock. The pre-printed check stock has bank, payer name/address, check number, and the MICR stripe. Money doesn't print this stuff because, at least for the MICR stripe, very, very few (if any) Money users are equipped to print this stuff in ways that conform to the requirements for these features. MICR stands for magnetic ink character recognition. As the name suggests, special ink is required to print proper MICR characters.
Yes, you can print checks with VersaCheck, etc., that "look" right and, at most banks that use optical instead of magnetic equipment, work acceptably. You may also find that those that aren't using optical equipment are within their power to reject the check and they will certainly have problems with them even if they don't reject them. These problems may delay payments, etc. Despite whether they "work" or not, they still don't meet specifications and standards for such things. For one discussion of the special toner requirements from somebody in the MICR font business, see the MICRfonts page. VersaCheck stays below this radar by being small and selling MICR toner cartridges for those users who care to do it right. If mass-market software like Money from a company of the profile of Microsoft enabled lots of ignorant or devious (or cheap) people to ignore the FRB requirements for such things, you can bet they'd hear about it. They call this type of activity "aiding and abetting."
Money is now common enough that most any company that prints check stock can print in the formats Money expects. This competition has brought the prices down to the point where the pre-printed stock is always a better choice than any of the other ways to do this.
References:
MICRfonts page about printing checks
Q) How do I change the category groups?
A) You can't, quite. Category groups are used internally by Money. You can create new categories and subcategories, or use classifications, but the 'category groups' cannot be changed.
There are, however, a variant set of groupings, called Budget Groups, derived from the default Category Groups and associated with each budget. These **can** be modified, deleted, or supplemented in M02 and beyond. To do this, when editing the budget, use the context (R-click) menus on the budget group labels or select New to add a Budget Group. (Note that some of the Budget Groups, like Debt, cannot be modified.) These Budget Groups are not reflected back to the Category Groups that can be assigned to each category and subcategory from category details, and, being attributes of each budget, they are deleted when a budget is deleted or reset. (To my shame, I went over a year without knowing this could be done until another poster, Carl Draus, pointed it out. This capability is pretty well hidden.)
So, this leaves the immutable Category Groups which must be used somewhere else in Money. We will award the newsgroup post of the month award to the first poster who can identify two or more remaining uses for these Category Groups besides their being the defaults for the Budget Groups. Honorary mention for even one other use of any consequence. These things are truly cryptic. Given this, there seems no point in fretting about modifying the default Category Groups, even if it were possible.
Q) How do I schedule a bill to recur every six weeks/third year/fourth Wednesday of the month?
A) Sorry, you can't get there from here. What you see is what Money can schedule. One of the greatest single weaknesses of Money--and one of the easiest to fix if they only chose to--is that the recurrence model is pathetic. Outlook provides a great example of how this should work. But the Money designers don't seem to care.
The only workaround (that really doesn't work very well) is if your desired frequency is something that is a nice factor of one of the frequencies provided: for instance, six weeks can be faked, almost, by two identical "every three months" transactions set six weeks apart. As I said, this really doesn't work very well.
Q) I want to use a different budget month/financial year. Where do I set this in Money?
A) You can't. Quite simply put, you can't because Money doesn't offer a way to change it. You will have to find a way to make do.
Q) Why can't I schedule a Loan Payment with pre-assigned classification?
A) Only the Money development team knows for sure. It's always been this way. When you enter the transaction in a register, or once it is entered, you can classify the split transactions in a Loan Payment. You just can't schedule it this way.
Q) I think open source software is pants! Why won't Microsoft release the Money source code under the GPL?
A) Because they want to make money by developing software and using that software to vector us all to other things that generate revenue for them as well. You might want to check out GnuCash. Note that as of 2Q07, the GnuCash team has an "unstable" port of GnuCash for Windows. Aside from its admitted and readily apparent lack of stability, it's biggest issue seem to be that it looks just like a Linux app ported to Windows. This will surely reduce transfer of training for Windows users. OTOH, it is a start. Please report and additional GnuCash findings/experiences back here.
References:
GnuCash
Q) I think Quicken is pants! (Or, Quicken has some neat feature Money doesn't.) Why don't you all change to Quicken?
A) If you would prefer to use Quicken, by all means, be our guest. Send specific feature feedback to MSWish or via the Money Registration/Feedback pages.
References:
Money Registration/Feedback
MSwish mail
Q) Must I really install version Y of IE for Money? I prefer version X; version Y is evil. This must be a conspiracy…
[Relevant to Money98 (v.6) and up]
A) Money versions since M98 depend on IE functionality for their user interface. When Money says it needs version Y, it means it. If you don't want that version or later of IE, then you will have to do without the version of Money that requires it.
Q) Why do I have to use Passport authentication with Money?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10) and up]
A) You don't. Use of Passport/WindowsLive ID authentication with Money is only required for certain features.
Passport/WindowsLive ID (Passport hereafter) can be used as nothing more than a file access authentication scheme. In this role, it is not inherently evil in and of itself and does not, by itself, put Microsoft in some unique position to access your Money data or sell your personal information or anything else. Passport authentication enables password recovery for continued access to your data file via the Passport methods for password maintenance--a much better method for password recovery, if you insist on using file access authentication.
Passport has been required for use of the "Money sync with the web" feature since that feature was first offered in Money 2000 +/- and survived through M06.
Use of Passport was expanded with Money 2002 when they made it a prerequisite to "background banking."
When MSN Bill Pay service was added, Passport was required to authenticate access.
M05 added the requirement for a Passport if you use the Yodlee capability to download transaction data.
If you or Microsoft has connectivity or service problems with Passport authentication, it can complicate access to your data. In the summer of 2004, Microsoft made an administrative mistake on their servers that prevented users from accessing their own data, even off-line, until a special fix was developed that effected users had to execute off a Microsoft web page. The better part of a week expired with effected users locked out of their own data files.
M05 set a new low in its insistence that you should use a Passport to "Help protect your online Privacy and Security."
The suggestion that Passport INCREASES your Privacy and Security is dubious at best. Compared to what? I'm not saying Passport is insecure or that it is poor from a privacy standpoint. But it's NOT BETTER AND AT BEST SURELY SLIGHTLY WORSE than not using it if you do any of the things Passport enables that result in your data stored on their servers. Assuming you trust the people in your house, your data will be most private and secure if you keep it on a machine that never connects to the net and do not use a Passport or file password. Anything else is demonstrably less private and secure.
If you tell M05 to go shove on the Passport thing, then it tells you that you really should have a file password. Even this seems over the top. Telling the target user audience for Money to put a file password on without giving A PROMINENT WARNING that they are likely putting their data at greater risk-- forgetting the password--than it was at with no password at all seems like a profound disservice to the users. It's all just more pseudo-security, just like the xxx1234 account numbers on the Account List page with the real account numbers and everything else just a few clicks away.
It is likely that there are other reasons why Microsoft is trying to encourage Money users to use Passport. Passport may be more important in future versions of Money than it is now.
(See also "What if I don't want to use Money with Passport authentication?")
Q) Why does Money Setup insist on installing Internet Explorer? I despise Internet Explorer…
A) Microsoft has used Internet Explorer (IE) components to implement the user interface for Money versions starting with Money 98. Without IE, Money will not function. This in no way means that you have to abandon your web browser of choice. Browse the web using whatever you want. But install IE if you want Money to work. This newsgroup is not the place for discussions about web browser politics.
Q) How do I convert my data back to a previous version of Money? I upgraded and now I wish I hadn't.
A) In general, you don't. For this reason, any Money version upgrade should be done with this in mind. If you are reading the newsgroup in a panic because you just now realized that you made a mistake deciding to upgrade months ago you will be disappointed. You may want to consider maintaining your data in both your current and new version simultaneously for some period before committing to the new version. All of these issues are explained in excruciating detail in the screens that led you through this process.
When you first open your data file with a newer version of Money, it saved a copy of your old file--with a renamed file extension of the form .mnx, where x is the version number of Money that the file came from up until Money2003, or, for a Money 2002 file save by Money 2003, .M10. You can go back to this file--with the old version of the application--and enter transactions that have occurred since you converted. You can do this by manual means (print a report and re-key the stuff in) or by exporting the accounts via QIF before uninstalling the never version. Once exported, you can edit them in Notepad or similar to remove the transactions that were in the original file before importing the files into the old file.
For more information, see the MSKB article on reverting a data file to a previous version.
References:
MSKB: Q178465 How to Revert to an Earlier Version of Money
Q) How do I do batch submittals of Epays?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10)]
A) You don't. Money 2002 took away this capability since Microsoft thought it caused problems for some users. Possibly based on feedback here and on the support lines, this capability returned in Money 2003 as the "new feature" called Bills Outbox.
Q) I bought Money online. Now I need to reinstall but have lost the download/key. What do I do?
A) (This question used to begin with the premise that "I made the mistake of buying the demo upgrade online". Now this is the only way to buy Money. Please keep copies of the download install/setup file and any keys or activation codes you needed to make it work. Burn both onto a CD. Test the CD to make sure you can read it. Maybe burn a second one. Save it somewhere you won't lose it. Or be prepared to buy Money again if you find yourself in this situation--at least as long as that remains an option.)
The answer depends on what you've lost. If you've lost the download, but have the key, the online activation site may be able to help. If you've lost the key, it's kinda like losing the key in a store-bought CD version. You're probably out of luck. Because of these complications, many of us recommend AGAINST upgrading from trial to full versions online: go to the store an buy a CD--you may end up wishing you had.
M05 changed the process somewhat. Detailed instructions to recover for M05 were posted by Rick MacKeigan, more or less like this after comments from other users and editing:
1) Download the trial version and install it. (How this will be possible when Microsoft removes the M05 trial edition from the Money home page is unclear--hopefully they will still make it available at Microsoft Downloads.)
2) Open the sample file and allow the update to complete.
3) Verify the update has been installed by going to Help and choosing About Microsoft Money. The version should be listed as 14.*.*.1105 (or higher) which is the minimum usable version of M05.
4) Assign a Passport to the sample data file. This must be the same passport you used to purchase the trial version. This can be done by going to the File menu, choosing Password Manager and following the steps to add/change the Passport associated with the file. (If you don't have that Passport anymore or can't remember which one you used or similar, you are probably Out Of Luck. See above re. recommendation about just buying the CD.)
6) Once you have assigned the Passport to the sample data file, close Money and reopen it.
7) Accept the prompt to install another update. This will download the full version of Money. Note: This is a silent download meaning you will not see a progress bar for the download. Approximate time is 15 minutes on a DSL connection.
8) Once the download has completed and installed you will be prompted to restart Money.
9) Once restarted you will be prompted upon sign in "Thank you for purchasing Money…"Now you should be able to File|Open your regular data file and get on with your life. And next year just buy the CD and skip all of this nonsense.
There is also an MSKB item that treats this question. It may or may not be helpful. Note also that the online fulfillment process has been changed entirely in M07. That may be good or bad; time will tell.
References:
Microsoft Downloads site
Microsoft Money Trial (US version)
MSKB: 889930 I lost the downloaded installation file. Now what?
Online download for licensees
Q) I don't want to disable Norton Anti Virus to install Money. What's the workaround? Why doesn't Microsoft fix this?
[Relevant to Money2004 (v.12)]
A) Money Setup says you need to disable Norton Anti-Virus to install Money because you do. In fact, Norton's copy protection scheme may even necessitate that you uninstall it to install Money (and other apps, for that matter). You can re-enable/re-install it after you get Money installed.
Norton created this problem, Microsoft didn't. Remember this the next time Symantec wants some of your money. Oh, and go to their message board, support line, and/or web site and complain.
Several poster, wiredup and StevenFromTexas, report that M05 and NAV (05?) work and play well together.
Q) I just got a new PC with Money Essentials. It won't open my Mxx Deluxe data file. Why not?
A) Money Essentials (MEss for short) is a toy Microsoft hopes to use to wean lots of new users from a complex and expensive-to-support product toward something much more like a bank web site that delivers ads from Microsoft rather than the bank. They are, apparently, filling the OEM channels chock full of this thing. The probably license it to the OEMs for a $5 discount on the Vista operating system license or something.
For some people MEss probably does all they want or need. If all you are interested in is a consolidated view of balances and transactions--as viewed by the FIs--and don't much care about analysis, reporting, investment performance, serious budgeting, income and expense categorization, etc., MEss may be for you. Cal Learner--MVP posted a handy link to Microsoft's features comparison. But there are a number of things you can't determine from this table. Examples: MEss can't even do a Transfer that shows in two accounts at once. It also won't/can't upgrade your pre-existing Money data file since it's a fundamentally more "Essential" (less capable?) approach to the problem. For previous Money users, that's the disqualifier for MEss.
So, if you have been using a previous version of Money, you may just want to uninstall Mess to get the waste disk space back, then install your previous version and get on with life. If you haven't used a previous version of Money, you might want to fiddle around with the thing, but remember this: it isn't representative of the rest of the Money product line. If you like it and think it's all you need, that's great. But if it seems like it's missing something, that's because it is.
References:
Microsoft Money version feature comparison
Q) I just moved my Money file to a new computer. All of a sudden Money wants a password. Why?
A) You need to make sure that the version of Money on the new machine is the same or higher version. If not, this is the bizarre way Money elects to tell you that Money files are not backward compatible to older versions.
Q) I tried the (M03) trial version and didn't like it. Now (M2K) wants a password to open my file. What gives?
A) Didn't you read the screens that popped up when it upgraded your file to M03 telling you that you could not reopen an upgraded file back in your original version? That's what they put them there for, it turns out. The password message you are getting from M2K when trying to open your M03 data file really has nothing to do with you setting a password on it--it's just a lousy message meaning Money data files are not backward compatible.
You will need to go find your old file that the upgrade procedure left behind. The screens told you all about this, too.
It'll be in the same directory as your [whatever].MNY file--which you can rename [whatever].M11 or just delete--and will be named [whatever].MN8 (if I remember my version numbers correctly). Rename it to [whatever].MNY and double-click on it (assuming you've uninstalled M03 and reinstalled M2K) and you should be right back where you were before you started messing with M03.
See also the answer to the question "How do I convert my data back to a previous version of Money? I upgraded and now I wish I hadn't."
Q) I want to transfer my copy of Money from my old computer to my new one--why can't I just copy the files?
A) You haven't been able to do this with most applications for a long time. The reasons are many, but all come back to the same thing: the setup and installation tools do many things to install the application that don't involve the obvious files you want to copy. They scatter different files all around the computer. They assure that pre-requisite files and settings are configured. Finally, they register many settings with the operating system that are not files but are essential for the application to function. Without executing the setup/installation package, you just can't get there from here.
Sometimes people ask this because they upgraded a trial version to a full license online and now they can't find the CD they never had. If this is your case, you might also want to read "I bought Money online. Now I need to reinstall but have lost the download/key. What do I do?"
Q) I'm having one of an infinite number of possible problems with downloaded transaction data. Why doesn't Money work better?
A) Some weeks it seems that a quarter or more of the posts to the newsgroup are from people who are having some problem involving downloaded transaction data. Many of these people swear that they download transaction data "to save time and trouble." Others apparently don't know that you can enter transactions by hand. Some people occasionally even say they have no problems with downloaded transaction data. For the rest, it seems that there are an infinite number of possible problems that can stem from downloading transaction data. It is obvious to some of us that downloading transaction data is more trouble than it can possibly be worth for many or even most users. I never download transaction data and have no such problems. Go figure why.
Why doesn't downloading transaction data work better? In most cases, Money isn't even the problem. The problem is that all of the back office systems in the financial industry were never designed with this interface in mind. All of the support for this has been grafted on, on the cheap, so that the banks can sound hip and Internet Aware. They can advertise supporting it. Money can advertise supporting it. "It makes your life easier!," they can say to attract new buyers who want their lives to be easier. People buy it. Then they come whining to the newsgroup when they discover the bitter reality of it all.
The worst case is users brand new to Money who have never entered a range of types of transactions by hand. They are utterly unequipped to understand what's going wrong and how to fix it because they don't understand how Money really functions and how it approaches personal financial accounting. Hence this single most important recommendation to new users: don't even think of setting up all of the electronic banking stuff and downloaded transaction data in particular until you've gone three or four months entering your own transaction data. By then, you'll understand how Money works and how to enter transactions. Then come and read the newsgroup postings for a week. Then ask yourself how all of these problems with setting up transaction downloads, keeping them working, fixing all of the weaknesses in the data they download, and unscrewing all of the problems they can create can possibly "save time and trouble" compared to just entering transactions by hand.
M05's integration of Yodlee further complicates solution of these problems. The previous interfaces depended on your bank's cooperation. Yodlee specifically goes around your bank. Now your bank is even less likely to care if you have problems with the data you are downloading to Money. For more information on Yodlee, see "Who/what is Yodlee that M05 keeps talking about?".
Q) I'm having problems with Money. Should I reinstall the application?
A) You can certainly try that. In most cases it does nothing to fix your problem though it may make you feel better. Before you spend the time, you might want to try opening the sample data file that installed with the application. If it opens and works fine, then your problem probably has origins in your data file, not the application's program files.
Q) Money is using 100% CPU/reported 'not responding.' Isn't this a crisis? So I killed it…
A) I don't know who started the rumor that 100% CPU utilization was, ipso facto, a bad thing. It's the height of efficiency. Less than 100% utilization means that the CPU is sitting idle with nothing useful to do. You didn't pay good money for a computer just to have it sit around idle sucking electrons through your electric meter and providing no useful return, did you? What's wrong is using 100% of the CPU while refusing to service the user. I think we'd all prefer Money to be snappy to the user and average using 95% of the CPU than ignore the user at 100% CPU usage some of the time and average only, say, 20% CPU usage over time.
By the way, killing Money from Task Manager when it is working is a profoundly bad idea as it can lead to corrupted data files. If you think this isn't much to worry about, you have not read "I think my file has been corrupted. How do I tell? What do I do then?" or you have great faith in your backup practices.
Why does Money do this? Well, that's harder to say. There are lots of things it does in the background like searching for recurring patterns of bills, checking all of the alert and advisor stuff, updating the spending thermometer stuff, checking if the transaction you just entered is a match for any upcoming scheduled transaction and so on. (See "Why is Money so slow?" for how to turn some of this off.)
I'll be the first to agree that it should use mechanisms like threading and so on to make this more transparent to the users--a well behaved CPU hog still allows the Windows message queue to be serviced--but the notion that 100% CPU usage is, by definition, bad is silly.
Q) What happened to 'Updated'/~/multiple recurrences/multi-select balance and enter on my scheduled transactions?
[Relevant to Money2002 (v.10) and up]
A) M02 completely redesigned the scheduled transactions implementation and interface. Before M02, there was the estimated tilde (~), the "updated" status message for a changed next occurrence, the ability to see all bills in a series for time X not just the next occurrence of each series, and the ability to multi-select transactions and see a projected balance after these transactions or enter them all into the register. M02 brought us the ability to change any of the next twelve future instances of a repeated scheduled transaction series.
M03 came along and added back the estimated tilde and multi-select projected balance but did nothing to show more than one future instance of any recurring transaction for some window of time, the updated status of individual scheduled items, or allow multi-select enter. M06 deleted the multi-select projected balance again. Microsoft must really dislike that feature.
You can see multiple occurrences of scheduled items over time using "Forecast cash flow."
Q) Why don't budgeting, cash flow projection and debt reduction planner produce sane results?
A) There could be a number of factors here:
1) Budget picks up some value from DRP and declares it in your budget. The value from DRP is calculated who knows how, but it can be off-the-wall sometimes.
2) Budget says that all scheduled income and expense are, by definition, budgeted income and expense. So, if you have an unplanned income or expense scheduled, it will distort your entire budget.
3) Budget ignores the first due date of a future expense that is a scheduled income or expense. (E.g., if you have scheduled next year's IRA contribution separately from this year's, Money will put both contributions in your monthly budget now.)
4) DRP assumes that any account in plan will never be used once paid off. For this reason, if you are a "convenience user" of your credit cards, it is almost worthless. (I.e., if you continue to charge new expenses and pay the bill off every month and do not incur interest charges.)
5) Money makes some assumptions about which account will be used for budgeted but unscheduled expenses and income--generally it assigns these amounts to the last account that accrued for the category in question. (Starting in Money 2002 you have more control over these assumptions.) This can lead to some very flaky results from the cash flow projection.
6) If you have set amounts of other expense or income in the budget manually, and use accounts in the DRP to pay them you may have essentially doubled-up the amount in the expenses half of the budget.
7) The settings in the "Customize cash flow" Common Task may help you get results from Forecast Cash Flow that work better for you. Try them and see.
8) There seem to be a number of other strange things that these tools do.
Q) You must help me! My only floppy backup has a data error reading. What do I do?
A) If you are dependent on restoring a Money data file from floppies and are getting a message like "cannot read from the specified device," there is nothing anybody here can do to help you. It's really sad how many people show up at the newsgroup with this story because they were depending on a $0.10 floppy to hold one of their most important data files.
Error messages stating that the system cannot read from the specified device are typically due to poor quality media (what do you really expect when you buy white box diskettes for $0.10 apiece?), media damage (scratches from dirty floppy drives or worn out diskettes), or media interchange problems (writing floppy drive out of alignment one direction and different reading drive out of alignment the other direction). Other things like CRT proximity to floppy drives can cause transient problems--though this doesn't happen much anymore.
Morals of story: #1) Always test backups to be sure they really are. #2) Never depend on just one backup or form of backup as your only backup. #3) Bad Money files can produce bad backups--so have multiple generations of backup. #4) Never trust floppy drives and diskettes. Corollary: the less you use the floppy drives, the more likely you are to have problems with data errors. They get dirty and the dirt chews up diskettes. Corollary 2: using diskettes cleans the drives by ruining the diskette.
My Money data is **far and away** my most important data file. It gets backed up over the net to a second system on every exit. Once a week it gets backed up to floppies and a) copied to another system, b) copied to an MO drive on primary, c) copied from the second system backup file to a Jaz drive on primary system, and d) copied to a MemoryStick on the laptop. Every time I do anything major I make a copy before doing it and keep it around until the next time I do something radical. This way if a problem creeps in and doesn't get noticed for a while, I can go further back than one week. Think all that's anal? Every time I go to the safe deposit box (twice a year minimum) I take either or both of a Jaz cartridge and an 8cm CD-RW or CD-R with a copy of the Money data file as a minimum. On top of all that, after my most recent problem with corruption, which occurred on the day of the weekly backup and also corrupted the "on-exit" backup, I wrote a script I run as a scheduled task every night, which maintains a weekly cycle of rotating daily backup copies on the primary system.
YMMV. But consider yourself advised.
Q) I bought M05 Standard because M04 Standard did everything I needed. Where's Forecast Cash Flow?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14), Money2006 (v.15)]
A) Microsoft removed Forecast Cash Flow from Standard. Apparently they didn't think forecasting cash flow was something the average user needed to do. The average user just needs to see ads.
The Microsoft marketing materials on the web indicate that M05 Deluxe adds "essential tools for improving credit and organizing taxes" to the tools in Standard. Microsoft must think that Forecast Cash Flow is a feature that makes it easier to organize taxes or improve credit. Shows how well they understand the problem.
M07 did away with Money Standard and replaced it with Money Essentials. There has been almost no feedback on Money Essentials in the newsgroup and few, if any, of the regular posters have tried it. It is surely less capable than M06 Standard.
Q) I just reloaded M05. Now it crashes when I start it. Why?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Additional forms of this question include:
- I just reloaded M05. Now it complains that my file is read-only. Why?
- I just moved my data file to another machine with M05. It refuses to open my data file. Why?
- Why does M05 on my new, or newly re-loaded, machine refuse to restore my M05 backup file?
- Why does M05 on my new, or newly re-loaded, machine ask for a password when I've never used one before?
- Why does M05 on my new, or newly re-loaded, machine reject my password?
The basic issue in all of these scenarios may be the same one: you are trying to open your data file on what is, effectively, the previous version of Money. As with opening an M05 file on an M04 system, this does not work. Some users have reported this only effects users who use Yodlee download or some other subset of users. FWIW, I duplicated this issue on my experimental M05 file which has no online services enabled. The workaround is to either:
a) open the sample file by navigating a Windows File Explorer to the Money installation directory (c:\Program Files\Microsoft Money 2005, typically) and double-click on the Sample.MNY data file.
b) temporarily relocate your data file, start Money, and let it create a new data file. Somewhere along the way you can skip the setup wizards.
Now you can do an Internet Update and Money will download the service updates to get the Money application software to the latest level that will deal with the "M05.1" data file format.
After completing the update, Help|About should report a version of 14.0.*.1105 or higher. Note that the originally shipped M05 CD installs 14.0.120.728 (for a US Deluxe edition, anyway).
In 12 prior versions, it's not clear Microsoft ever released a patch that broke intra-version compatibility. Problems in the initial release of M05 were so severe that they had to release, essentially, a version 14.1 file format. The really sad thing about this is that the chaos this will create--indeed, already is creating judging by newsgroup postings--will merely confirm in the Money team's minds the importance of moving this whole thing from a client computer hosted application to a web service where they control what version you are running, every time you open their web page. This way they won't have to bother worrying about the "dumb users" who dare to do things like reload the application from the CD whenever they feel like it and expect their original M05 to open their randomly up-level M05 data file.
References:
MSKB: 890393 There are two M05 file formats
Q) M05 always wants to connect to the Internet. Why?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) This is probably because M05 insists on getting Internet Updates including stock quotes every time you start it, even if you turn off the setting to update quotes automatically. Even the on-line help has moved to the Internet. Microsoft seems to be trying to desensitize Money users to Money and the Internet being tightly coupled. You could probably get around this with firewall settings, but you would surely have other side effects, given M05s dependence on the Internet.
It is not clear if this was fixed in M06. For this reason, I've referenced this answer to M06 until we know for sure that it's been fixed.
Q) M05 seems to have cut back on the on-line help resources. Doesn't this seem backwards?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) You'd like to think that keeping the help files on-net would enable Microsoft to fix errors and back-level information in them and respond to search terms to improve the help and so on. Given that some of the same errors and out-of-date information have been in the help file for several versions, this seems unlikely. Removing the audio help and most of the instructional videos is even more perplexing. Perhaps they've given up on improving "help" as a way to reduce support costs. Long time followers of the newsgroup certainly know that lots of users don't find the on-line help resources. Perhaps telling users that "most users prefer" the dumbed down version will keep them from doing anything even slightly complex. OTOH, maybe this is all about making the download smaller. Perhaps they are pushing so hard on the download installations to make a precious few bucks for themselves on the sale since they probably don't make more than $1 or $2 on the $23 copy at Sam's Club. And that's before we return it to Microsoft for retail+tax+shipping.
Q) My account numbers are alphanumeric. How come they display as XXXXXnnnn in the M05 Account List?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) This is nothing more than stupid knee jerk pseudo-security. R-click and go to the account settings and it will look correct. Some security, eh?
Q) My transaction data is only available via Yodlee. Why must I store my data on the web to download transactions?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) Only Microsoft knows why Yodlee transaction data download forces storing your account data on the MSN web servers. Some possibilities:
1) Not enough people were actually using the MSN Money access feature in previous versions to rapidly advance their plan. The plan is to wean us all from dependence on a locally installed licensed application ("Money") toward using a web based subscription service ("MSN Money") without our really noticing or caring. This helps move another large chunk of users in that direction.
2) They knew the coupling to Yodlee was going to be troublesome, and they wanted the Yodlee interface to be available to exclusive MSN Money users. So, in order to implement it once, do it in a way that they could easily keep tweaking it to get it right, and do it in a way that involved the least development for the (hopefully soon to go away) client side application software product called Money, they setup most of the Yodlee-to-Money stuff as server side Yodlee-to-MSN Money code and just hooked the existing sync with the web feature in Money to actually get the data into the client-stored file.
There's probably a third reason, but I'm just a skeptical curmudgeon and those are the only two I can think of.
No matter, if you want downloaded transaction data via Yodlee for even one account, your account data for all accounts is going to be stored on the web. As of M07, only data associated with the Yodlee accounts is stored on the web. If you don't want your account data stored on the web and Yodlee is the only mechanism for downloading transaction data from some account you want to download data for, you'll have to learn to enter transaction data the old-fashioned way. It's really not so bad.
Q) We had Transfer and Credit Card Payment in M04. What's with Credit Card Payments/Transfer added in M05?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) Microsoft added an expense category "Credit Card Payments/Transfer" to M05. Note that this is not the Transfer we are familiar with or the Credit Card Payment we are familiar with. It's a new expense category guaranteed to confuse further the meaning and rationale for the other two. That's REALLY BRILLIANT! Adding something that has a 100% probability of confusing new users. Way to go!
New users have enough trouble getting a grip on Transfer or Credit Card Payment. So now they add "Credit Card Payments/Transfer" just to mess with them and leave it to people like us newsgroup regulars to help explain all of this? What were they thinking?!?
Cal Learner--MVP wisely suggests just deleting this category.
See also "I've entered charges in my credit card account, when I pay the bill aren't I spending twice? Is my card a category or account?" for more information on Credit Card Payment and Transfer.
It could be worse: they also added an income category titled "Not an expense." Well, duh. Curiously, they didn't add the symmetric expense category "Not an income."
Q) What happened to Money Express in M05?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Microsoft sent it off to the same place they sent Money Side, the bin of long lost Money features. It didn't work right in M03 or M04 and apparently was easier to remove than fix.
Q) What happened to the option to see Single Category Lists? Now it's all I can see in M05.
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Microsoft removed the option, which had been available since maybe as far back as Mv1, to display categories in a single list. Instead they made it the only behavior available in the initial release of M05.
To ease the pain, once Money autocompletes the category, you can advance to the subcategory by hitting Shift+;. Tommy Becker pointed out--and a number of long time users learned a new trick--that autocomplete will complete a full category:subcategory if you just start to type an unambiguous subcategory name. For instance, if you want Food:Groceries, typing gro will work. Unless you never type a category name first, you will probably still have to type more for autocomplete to disambiguate your entry.
After about two months of very upset M05 customers breathing down their backs, Microsoft relented and made it possible to re-enable the dual category lists through a registry hack. Note that the implementation forces Dual Category and does not expose a Tools|Settings UI to change the choice. It's all reg hacking. For this hack to work, the second (presumably or subsequent) "QFE" must be downloaded and installed. ("QFE" stands for Quick Fix Engineering--Microsoft-eze for a service update. Perhaps if they were doing more engineering and less marketeering in the first place, they could avoid having to issue so many QFEs, but that's another subject.) Once this update is installed, you must add a specific key and value to the system registry. It is the policy of this unofficial FAQ not to aid people in hacking the registry on the theory that if readers know enough to be safe doing so, they can find the specific details on their own. In this case, the thread where this was discussed is referenced. Registry hacking can be completely benign or utterly disastrous. Be careful out there.
It is not clear to us end users if they initially removed the feature from M05 for any reason but to annoy long time users who type in their data. Russ Paul-Jones, "MSN Money" development manager, was relentlessly pestered later in the thread announcing they'd relented and put it back, sort of, until he offered the following explanation [note this is extracted from a larger quote, see the whole thread if interested]:
"Very early on, we decided to settle on one version of the category combos for the new register, and a single combo was deemed better for the customers we thought would use it. It has been our default for new users for a few versions now, and it tests better with potential customers. … The team did look into the question of backwards compatibility, but convinced themselves that users didn't need both ways to accomplish the same task. This evaluation didn't take into account the attachment you naturally have to certain keystroke patterns or the seeming arbitrariness of the decision."
The good news is that this episode demonstrates the possibility of getting the development team's attention. The bad news is that it takes serious open revolt by the users, after the fact, to do so.
Cal Learner--MVP provided a pointer to an MSKB item that captures the workaround.
M06 put back the Tools|Settings user interface for controlling use of dual or single category lists.
References:
M05 UseDualCatMode reg hack
MSKB: 889931 dual list category key
Q) What happened to the register view spending thermometers and forecast cash flow in M05?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Removing them was probably a secret performance enhancement since turning off the feedback was the #1 piece of advice to people complaining that the program was slow. Besides, Microsoft had to free up some screen real estate for all of the new UI clutter.
Q) What happened to version 13?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) It's version 14's good twin. Apparently it died at birth. (That was just a guess.)
Q) Who/what is Yodlee that M05 keeps talking about?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) Yodlee is an Internet service company specializing in "aggregation" of your financial information from any financial institution (FI) that exposes any human-usable user interface (UI) to you via the web. You setup web accounts with all of your providers, then tell Yodlee about them and give them your account/password info. Yodlee systems then pretend to be you and login in and "skim" the information out of the resulting web pages ("screen scraping" is another term-of-art for this), reformat it, and present it to you in some aggregate form. This allows all of this data to be collected even if the bank doesn't want to expose an OFX or similar low-level interface. Since there are only a handful of UIs that these banks buy (written, one presumes, by Oracle, Sun, HP, Unisys, CA and similar players and then personalized by/for the individual FIs) and only the very largest players are developing their own from scratch, Yodlee only has to figure out how to fake out this handful and then figure out which FIs are built on which software. It is resold by some folks like Fidelity (as "Fidelity Full View") and, now, Microsoft Money.
For about a decade, Microsoft and Intuit have been trying to get the FIs to adopt low-level standard interfaces designed exclusively to let some application ware like Money or Quicken interchange data with the FIs. For lots of reasons, some to be discussed shortly, a decade later relatively few FIs have adopted these interfaces. This has prevented Quicken and, to a larger degree owing to its smaller market share and the threat the FIs consider Microsoft, Money, from providing a seamless uniform interface to all of your FIs.
With Money 2005, Microsoft threw in the towel and decided that integrating with Yodlee (and, presumably, paying Yodlee real money) was the only way to get lots of FIs integrated with Money. They claimed to have added thousands of institutions not previously supported for data downloads to Money in M05. Yodlee is how they did it. If the banks uniformly supported something like OFX well, Money could readily do what Yodlee is offering to do with good results, ease of use, and broad support from the FIs. Microsoft encapsulating Yodlee under Money is essentially a concession that a decade of futzing with QIF and OFC and OFX has failed because they could only add thousands of institutions at this late date by going the Yodlee route. The FIs couldn't be made to care about supporting OFX.
Why didn't the banks support the low-level interface? Apparently they couldn't make a business case to do so. Another reason is probably that they didn't want some other entity, much less Microsoft, "owning" the interaction with the customer. This is probably why Money found it necessary to include hooks for all of the branding support to make sure you see the FIs logo on the account register and so on. The FIs don't want Intuit, or, probably especially, Microsoft, getting in the middle of their customer relationship. Another reason is probably that they can't see any way to make more money off their customers by supporting the low-level interfaces. People won't pay extra for it, relatively few people use them, and relatively few of these people consider failure to support these interfaces cause to move their money to another FI.
Given all of this, improvements to make OFX work better are probably unlikely and so is increased adoption of OFX-like interfaces by the FIs. The FIs don't see a need to spend a dime in this direction. Yodlee wouldn't exist if the banks and so forth were stepping up to the plate. Yodlee couldn't do what they are doing without the FIs tacit acceptance--since it would be very easy for the FIs to play with their web sites enough to wreak havoc on Yodlee. But the FIs don't add their own low-level interfaces and do tolerate Yodlee; they apparently don't see a business case for doing anything else.
So what's wrong with Yodlee? Several things come to mind.
First, it's inherently an unstable technology. Yodlee's entire Reason for Being is that the FIs have not broadly supported a uniform low-level interface--e.g., OFX or similar--for transport of data to the customer, which would enable Money or Quicken to be the interface and tool for aggregation. Yodlee's entire model is to get around this by exploiting the high-level interfaces the FIs have supported to collect the same data. It's a fake-job. Because of this, it is less reliable than a purpose-built interface designed to do what Money is trying to do. As Joe Guidera posted, "the upside of [Money's integration of Yodlee] is that many institutions not previously available for use with Money are now available. The downside is, that from experience the technology is unreliable (at best). While I can't say this is necessarily the fault of Yodlee (it can easily be issues with the target web site), nevertheless it's much less reliable than the 'direct connect' (read custom) technology prior versions of Money used."
Second, when it doesn't work, there's much less chance of getting a resolution. Before Money+Yodlee, if you had a problem with downloaded data, the problem was either your FI's or Microsoft's. Maybe you could get your bank to care. Maybe. Add Yodlee to the equation, and, if you're an FI, you disown the whole thing if the data looks right on the human-readable web site Yodlee is skimming. That leaves you with Microsoft--Yodlee isn't working for you in this scenario, they're working for Microsoft. So now Microsoft owns 100% of the problem and your only hope is working any problems through MS Money Support. Good luck.
For the third concern over the Money+Yodlee integration we come fill circle back to the customer management issue. Yodlee views their value-add in terms of enabling FIs (not Microsoft or Quicken) to capture the entire customer interaction with them and with their competitors. It's all about "customer retention and cross-sell marketing, [so] aggregation can significantly increase an institution's per customer profitability" and "significant opportunity to use aggregated data to grow customer relationships through offers tailored to meet particular customer needs". Translated from marketing-speak, this means the FIs can monopolize you as a customer and mine all of your data to find more ways to transfer money from your pocket to theirs. This is certainly consistent with everything else about M05 that tries, first and foremost, to monetize your relationship with Microsoft and the MSN properties instead of just providing a tool you can use to manage your finances.
Some research after a posting by William R. Wood put me onto another example, referenced below and discussed in better words than mine in a newsgroup posting, demonstrative of Yodlee's "value proposition" to its customers--not you, by the way. They are there to help the FIs find ways to drain more money from your wallet into theirs based on things they can learn from data about your financial activity you let them handle. If you read these and then think Yodlee is doing anything that's in your best interest, then by all means sign up today.
Note that somewhere along the way Microsoft added a second "third party download" service named CashEdge. They may be better or worse in terms of stability and underlying motive than Yodlee.
References:
What's wrong with Yodlee
Yodlee describes what they offer to FIs
Yodlee does it again
Q) Why did the upgrade to M05 mangle Food:Groceries to Groceries? How do I undo this?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) After a decade of upgrades without mangled categories, M05 just had to be different. Only Microsoft knows for sure why this had to be.
To fix it, go to the categories page and Move Groceries to a category named Food:Groceries and move Dining Out to a NEW category named Food:Dining Out. Money will ask if you want to create these new subcategories. You do. Please do this as I wrote it. Do not Move Groceries to Food thinking you will end up with Food:Groceries. You won't. If there's any doubt you understand these instructions, post a question in the newsgroup asking for clarification or do it in a copy of your data file first.
Despite the relatively large number of postings complaining about this after M05 was released, M06/7/Plus still does it when upgrading M04 and earlier files. If you upgraded to M05/6/7 and undid this damage, M06/7/Plus leaves it as Food:Groceries and Food:Dining Out. Go figure.