Microsoft money
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Looked at GnuCash several years ago and, IIRC, it doesn't do automatic downloads from banks & credit card issuers, does it?
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obermd wrote:
it uses XML files
... as opposed to ? Does not MS Money store them as binary encoded xml as well ?
I doubt it. MS Money was initially released while Microsoft was putting everything on their Jet Blue database, which is a stripped down, single user, MS-Access database. It was also the height of using Internet Explorer for all display functions, which is why it wants to "install" IE on newer systems. For those who don't know, the Jet Blue database is used heavily inside Windows for things like Active Directory, Exchange (at least until the first cloud hosted Exchange was released), DNS, and DHCP. It's the same database engine found in MS-Access but doesn't support multiple users.
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I've been using it for 15 years and have never felt any need to use anything else. Though I haven't tried it on Windows 11 yet...
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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When MS Money came out I switched over from Quicken and LOVED Money I was a heartbreak when MS discontinued it. Used the sunset edition for a while, but I felt I HAD to switch back to Quicken in order to use the automatic downloads. Wife & I have several credit cards and both joint and separate bank accounts. Too much manual data entry without the automatic downloads. Tried Money in Excel for a little while (also now discontinued), but that brings/brought down all transactions from all sources into a single Excel table. Parsing the table's data into separate accounts and then reconciling was too much work. I'd love to try some alternative to Quicken. The annual subscription model is a blatant money grab for damned little in the way of improvement. If you don't pay it, they disable transaction downloads. You can't even download a qfx file from each bank to your PC and then import it. The key thing for me for any alternative would be having a file converter that could ACCURATELY read my many years of Quicken data.
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Duke Carey wrote:
automatic downloads
I never fully understood how this was working : could you just get your transactions online from within Money directly ? This is/was not possible with banks in France. I have always had to download data as .ofx files from my online banking accounts, and then import them in Money. I even wrote a VB Macro in Excel (stop throwing me stones, it is quick and efficient !!) to convert the files content before importing, so that I do not have to update too much manually, since the payees in the banks files are not always recognized automatically by Money - the bank adds transaction numbers or even dates in the "Name" field in their export...
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Thanks for the information - I am still running version 12 from 2004 on Windows 10. So it's good to know what will work on Windows 11
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Looked at GnuCash several years ago and, IIRC, it doesn't do automatic downloads from banks & credit card issuers, does it?
Not unless I've missed something. This does add a step, (downloading the QIX file and importing ) but I download pdfs and make card payments on the card site anyway, so it doesn't add much. QIFs are a bit of a pain but the best you get from PayPal. Having gotten used to it, it's way of working makes more sense to me than Quicken ( not the download, the account setup ( but that shift was 5 (?) years ago with a new and not well organized ( first try ) set of Quicken accounts for a non-profit my wife worked for - so 1, I don't remember it well, and 2, the Quicken setup hadn't been done as well as possible - it did seem better for her to work with as day to day office person, and worked sharing with the treasurer. )) I _think_ I looked at KiCash (?) some time ago while trying to find something that covered what I wanted better. Didn't then see reason to change. YMMV ( The company I used to work for, tried PeachTree and JobBoss and still didn't find a solution that fit well for accounting / job tracking so I'm not surprised. )
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I got hooked into Quicken and then it went to the darkside. Quicken's main benefit is that they "sort of" keep it working for banks. Every three years they lie through their teeth saying "you must upgrade to maintain the interface" - which is elephanting nonsense. Banks do not change their interfaces at a whim and certainly now on a 3 year schedule. They finally just fessed up to an annual subscription.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I've been using Quicken 2012 for 10 years and haven't paid them a cent. Yeah, there's some things I have to do manually but I figured out a way to download security prices from Yahoo and convert them into a file I import into Quicken. Quicken 2012 still works fine on Windows 11. I guess I'm a tightwad (the wife agrees) but I can't see paying them $50 a year for software that does the same thing as last year's software does, at least the parts that I use.
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Looked at GnuCash several years ago and, IIRC, it doesn't do automatic downloads from banks & credit card issuers, does it?
I started tracking my finances when I bought a new PC and it came with MS Money back in the early 2000s or perhaps late 90s. I loved it and was rather distressed when MS discontinued it. I looked for a replacement and landed on Quicken but I always felt it wasn't really worth the cost. I finally got fed up with the renewal costs and their incessant push to put my financial data in their cloud. About 7 years ago I switched to GnuCash. It had a bit of a learning curve but once I got used to it I much preferred it. At the time it did not have bank/CC downloads but it does now. With some limitations. In the US, if your bank supports OFX Direct Connect it can be set up. There is also OFX Web Connect but that is an Intuit thing and GnuCash can't use it. There are help pages that tell how to do it and explain the limitations. Other nations have different banking standards, and of course, different formats at least some of which can also be set up to download into GnuCash.
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I started tracking my finances when I bought a new PC and it came with MS Money back in the early 2000s or perhaps late 90s. I loved it and was rather distressed when MS discontinued it. I looked for a replacement and landed on Quicken but I always felt it wasn't really worth the cost. I finally got fed up with the renewal costs and their incessant push to put my financial data in their cloud. About 7 years ago I switched to GnuCash. It had a bit of a learning curve but once I got used to it I much preferred it. At the time it did not have bank/CC downloads but it does now. With some limitations. In the US, if your bank supports OFX Direct Connect it can be set up. There is also OFX Web Connect but that is an Intuit thing and GnuCash can't use it. There are help pages that tell how to do it and explain the limitations. Other nations have different banking standards, and of course, different formats at least some of which can also be set up to download into GnuCash.
Since it now has downloads it may be worth giving it another try. Thanks for that info!
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I got hooked into Quicken and then it went to the darkside. Quicken's main benefit is that they "sort of" keep it working for banks. Every three years they lie through their teeth saying "you must upgrade to maintain the interface" - which is elephanting nonsense. Banks do not change their interfaces at a whim and certainly now on a 3 year schedule. They finally just fessed up to an annual subscription.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I still use Quicken 6 for DOS on an old Win 7 laptop that I rarely connect to the network. It never hassles me about upgrading or anything, is lightning quick, and highly transportable! ;)
FormerBIOSGuy
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Is anybody around working at Microsoft ? If yes, any way to attempt at finding someone who could help with Microsoft releasing the source code of Money as an open source ? I've been using it for ages, and it is simply great. No other accounting software comes close to it, but it lacks a few features (like ... search combobox everywhere) and it slowly gets incompatible with recent windows versions. So it would be great if we could revival it, that would be such a great project ! But it would be far more easy to get the initial code base...
I wrote an iOS & macOS app that was partly inspired by MS Money: “Cashflows Pro”. It’s focused on the forecasting side, but pretty good.
Chris C.
