Microsoft Money

[fossicker]

First, say you have bank account A and bank account B. You transfer $1,000 from bank account A to bank account B. So, in the end, you have not increased or decreased any of the money in your accounts. To me, I would call this a transfer; however, if I categorize it as such, Money places an additional "balancing" transaction in the other account. So, it puts values out of sync by adding in the additional transaction amount, which I consider to be unnecessary. I would have this same problem if I were to transfer a balance on a credit card as well. How would you categorize these types of transactions?

I'm not sure if I follow your problem -- I don't use Money, I use Quicken, but I think the principle is the same.

If you are transferring money from one account to the other, there is a debit from one account and a credit to the other -- one transaction per account. In Quicken, these transactions have a "category" of the other account. Such transactions can be excluded from any reports you create, since they represent accounting artifacts, not actual income and expenses.

I'm trying to imagine how you think it should work -- how can you balance the accounts if you don't show a debit from one and a credit to the other?

 

[DKnumberOne]

Thanks for the suggestion; I'll give that a shot.

It's suprising that they don't make the program smart enough to say...OK we just made a transaction from one account on this list to another one on this list, the amounts are the same, so maybe we should prompt the user and ask if that's the case.

I just thought of another one of my gripes...Say, for the sake of this example, you used a credit card for every transaction you made in a month. You're very diligent, so you categorize every transaction into the appropriate "bucket". Your credit card bill comes to $1,000. So, you have expenses categorized totaling $1,000. When you make the credit card payment of $1,000, you then categorize that as a credit card payment. So, when you look at your special MS Money pie chart, it looks like you had $2,000 in expenses for the month.

Would the strategy there be to code the cc payment as "Not an Expense"? Because, I don't really consider Credit Card Payments an expense. It's a medium for paying for expenses you've already incurred.

 

[DKnumberOne]

I'm not sure if I follow your problem -- I don't use Money, I use Quicken, but I think the principle is the same.

If you are transferring money from one account to the other, there is a debit from one account and a credit to the other -- one transaction per account. In Quicken, these transactions have a "category" of the other account. Such transactions can be excluded from any reports you create, since they represent accounting artifacts, not actual income and expenses.

I'm trying to imagine how you think it should work -- how can you balance the accounts if you don't show a debit from one and a credit to the other?

Well, first, I have an accounting degree, so I know that debits have to equal credits.

The way this works, in Money, is that say I have $2,000 in Account A and my balance in Acccount B is $1,000.

I make a transfer from Account A to Account B of $500. So, Money updates my accounts and then my balance in Account A is $1,500 and my balance in Account B is then $1,500. Right now we're ok.

Now, when I go to categorize the transaction for Account A, if I tell Money that it is a "Special" (probably your "Other") tranfer to Account B, Money then creates an additional transaction of $500 in Account B. Account B is now out of balance because, according to Money, I have $2,000 in Account B because the extra $500 was added in. So, basically, Money just doubled my transaction.

The way I think it should work is by using the "Special" categories, Money should look for an offsetting transaction (of the same $ amount) in whatever account you transfered from/to. Then it should match the transactions, which would net the transfer (suspense) accounts to $0.

The suggestion given above, would essentially do this, I just don't see why it's not added into the program - seems silly. Unless I'm missing something???

 

[fossicker]

One thing I like about Quicken (it may be true of Money as well, but when I first started using Quicken in the DOS days it was _not_ true of the competitors) -- it is totally laid back about entering whatever data you want to and leaving the rest blank.

For instance, sometimes it is not immediately clear to me what category makes sense for an expense, so I'll just leave it uncategorized (but with a memo describing what the expense was for). At some point later when I'm examining my accounts, I might look at all of my uncategorized expenses and when seen together, I figure out a category that makes sense.

Along the same lines, it is worth setting up a Cash account even if you don't plan to track cash expenditures. Mostly, you'll just balance out the cash account with "Misc" transactions, but sometimes you'll want to record particular cash outlays. You can do that without a cash account, using split transactions, but I think it's cleaner to use a cash account.

someone earlier made a comment about having to keep track of everything and it's just too much effort, but that's not true. You can track as much or as little as you want, and add details when you're in an obsessive mood.

 

[DKnumberOne]

MS Money also does do that.

Never thought of creating a cash account; not a bad idea though. So, basically you treat all your atm/cash withdrawals as a transfer to your cash account and manually key in entries until the account is netted to $0?

I plan on getting into this amount of detail at some point, but was considering, like you said, splitting the cash withdrawal into multiple categories.

 

[fossicker]

MS Money also does do that.

Never thought of creating a cash account; not a bad idea though. So, basically you treat all your atm/cash withdrawals as a transfer to your cash account and manually key in entries until the account is netted to $0?

I plan on getting into this amount of detail at some point, but was considering, like you said, splitting the cash withdrawal into multiple categories.

That's it. I usually count the money in my wallet and balance account to that, but balancing to $0 would work just as well. If you balance to the cash you have, and do it every week or two, you can make some reasonable estimates on how you spent at least some of it (e.g. $ spent on lunch, coffee, etc)

 

[ggrozier]

Credit card bill

You really should be downloading your credit card activity. Then you'd have all the transactions recorded on the right date.

The time-consuming alternative is to enter all the transactions from the credit card statement, using a credit card account in Money or Quicken, manually. You could make one entry listing all the transactions for one month, and another entry for the next month's transactions, so at least they would be recorded in the right month.

 

[DKnumberOne]

Helpful Hint

After poking around for a while last night, I found a couple good websites with some good information about MS Money. The first is a website of a MS Money MVP. The later is the "Unofficial" user guide for MS Money, created by various people from the microsoft user forum. (microsoft.public.money). The forum is a good place to get some answers as well.

http://money.mvps.org/faq/default.aspx

http://umpmfaq.info/index.htm

There's a ton of useful information on these sites.

It took me like 4 hours last night to create my suspense account and categorize all the transactions into them - but I have more accurate reporting now...thank God.

 

[billjane1@earthlink.net]

Money and my Credit card register

I pay off my credit card fully every month and have done so for 30+ years to avoid interest but Money assumes that everyone makes a set payment each month. The only way I can stop it is to click "disable for this payment only". This gets tiresome. Does anyone know how to prevent this pop up screen?

 

[DKnumberOne]

I pay off my credit card fully every month and have done so for 30+ years to avoid interest but Money assumes that everyone makes a set payment each month. The only way I can stop it is to click "disable for this payment only". This gets tiresome. Does anyone know how to prevent this pop up screen?

I'm somewhat confused by your post. First you say you pay your credit card off in full every month - and then you say Money assumes that everyone makes a set payment each month. You are effectively making a set payment every month, the whole amount.

Now, do you mean that you do not like how Money puts the monthly credit card payment on the bills section as an estimate? Money does this so you can estimate your cash flow. I can't imagine that you would want to "stop" this as you are making a payment. You can just edit the "estimated" amount. The only way around it is to remove it from your bills section and then manually enter the payment each month, which would involve more work. Since you make 12 credit card payments a year, I don't really understand now it is "tiresome"?

Also, what version of Mony are you using?

 

[neale]

MICROSOFT MONEY HELP - Gross and Net Pay

I am having problems when I look at my report for the month, my income includes both my gross and net pay. I have advanced bills set up and it is a bi-weekly deposit that includes all the taxes and everything.

That part is working fine - it is showing what I am have taken out for taxes and healthcare but I also have the deposit in my checking account for the net pay. I have chosen to exclude this from the budget but I can't eliminate it from the reports.

Has anyone else had this problem or know of a solution?

 

[greenlight]

If anyone is reading this, I need help with Money. I have 4 bank accounts that are linked. When I get my bank information thru Money, it accesses all 4 accounts, but I only want it to access 2 of them.. Is that possible?

 

[georgieporgie]

Money 2005

I have been using Money for a number of years without any problems.
My pc went south and beyond saving, fortunately I have the backups on two separate USB pens. I bought a new pc and installed Money and proceeded to restore Money from the USB pen but I keep getting the message that it is an "invalid name" how do I correct this? this years of transactions that I can ill afford to lose and do not wish to start from scratch.
Help
George