My wife and I are looking for your recommendations on which personal finance software we should purchase: Quicken or Microsoft Money? We’re most concerned with the interface and the ease of use, but we’d also like to be able to import our bank account information with minimal hassle. (IS there any difference between the two pieces of software in this regard?) Also, we want the pretty pictures – graphs of what we’re spending our money on (food, entertainment, travel, etc.)
So, what do you guys and gals recommend? TIA…
First check out what your bank offers for downloads. Every bank I’ve seen that even offers downloads at all has both Quicken and Money formats available.
Usually you can figure this out by going to your bank Web site (don’t forget credit card and other account web sites!) and looking for the “Statements” section and seeing what formats they have available.
If you poll your bank, credit card companies and other investment company sites and see that either Quicken or Money is NOT listed…well then go with the one that’s most listed.
If your bank doesn’t offer downloads in those formats at all (my primary bank doesn’t!) then…I don’t know. I’ve only used Quicken and it’s fine.
Hmm. I was faced with this same choice just last week. People I talked to who had used both programs indicated that their features and capabilities are pretty much the same. I ended up going with Money purely because it was $5 cheaper on Amazon than Quicken.
I have not had great experiences with Quicken when importing from accounts. In addition, the company that makes Quicken is dishonest.
- It regularly ignores all but one of my paychecks (direct deposit) when I download from my checking account. It’s possible that this is due to my bank’s idiocy, but it means that I either have to download every 2 weeks or figure out why things aren’t matching up.
- It tries to auto-complete information, but does so really poorly. If I transfer from account A to account B twice, but one time I download from A, then B, and the next time I download from B then A, the first time I will put in the transfer in account A as [To account B] and it will create the appropriate double-entry in account B. The second time it will auto-fill the transfer as being [To Account B], even though it does so in Account B. It won’t create any corresponding entry. It will be as though money has just materialized in account B (or disappeared, if it goes the other way).
- Intuit are dishonest bastards. My copy of Quicken came with my computer, but I wouldn’t buy anything from them after finding out about this.
Yeah, and the company that makes Money is Micro$oft. Enough said.
Look at Grisbi (http://www.grisbi.org/) – a free, open source program that does much the same financial stuff as Quicken or Money. And it can import QIF files, which is what most banks & financial institutions will make available for download.