I Am Declaring Bankruptcy!
Ok. I am not declaring financial bankruptcy but I am on a razor's edge with MS Money. Over the past couple months I have been having an increasing number of problems with MS Money. As such my user experience has plummeted and my desire to play around with MS Money has dropped catastrophically. Hence the progressively later and later month-end update posts.
Several months ago I began having issues DLing my transactions from ING. For some reason only some of the transactions would pull across the internet and I would have to go through each transaction to see where the gaps were. Ok, I could deal with that. Usually I could identify which ones were more likely to get held up.
A couple weeks later my MS Money program just started to not work. I would log into program and almost as soon as I got my bearings the program would encounter a run-time error and automatically close. After opening and having it close several times in a session I would inevitably give up on it. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program about 5 times and cleaned out the registry since this issue has arisen.
Once I finally get a session to stay open, I want to get as much done as possible. Now I find out that none of my transactions are pulling across the internet and I have to manually type in each one. While working on this I try to apply a payment I have made to Discover but for some reason that account isn't on the list anymore. I do some investigating and determine that the best course of action is to reopen the account with a start date at the first of the month. Well MS Money says my account still exists. When given a link to the account it has the discover logo in the top left but it is the transaction history of my Corporate AMEX card!!
At this point I have completely thrown up my arms in frustration.
I give up. Screw you Microsoft!
I don't know what to do, I have the better part of 7 months of transaction data in there that I don't want to lose. I have been considering switching to Wesabe. Has anyone used it? Any expreiences with any of the lesser known programs (web-based or local)?
5 comments:
I had similar issues with MS Money. A friend of mine sent me a private beta to this site called Spendview.com. I use ING as well (which is great considering your goals). As of now, I cant autosync to ING, but ive been uploading statements w/o any issues. What I like about the site is that they try to categorize (tag) your expenses. Once you categorize a a transaction from a vendor, they will automatically tag that vendor in the future.
There's a solution coming soon from Mint!
Quicken is honestly your best bet for a standalone application- yes, it takes time to set up, and yes, it takes time to familiarize yourself with it- just like MS Money.
However, the long term payoff with Quicken is wonderful; now that my information is in, set up, and I'm familiar, It's a breeze. Tagged expenses are memorized by Q, all my accounts use a Direct Connect feature with a few exceptions (like ING), and my work is mostly automated and I simply monitor what is going on.
Trust me, it's worth it.
I'm a big fan of Quicken. It works pretty well with ING. It still has issues. But as someone who works with software, I can tell you there is no panacea unless you write it yourself.
Before you sign up for an online company, I'd try another desktop application first. I work with SOX stuff and frankly, I'm still very wary of putting my info out on the internet for someone else to manage. (Check out Valleywag's coverage of Skype going down. Your data would also be in a supposed secure data center.)
I see your point! I guess I'll take another look at Quicken... you see how excited I am about that, not. Thank you for the tip!
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