11-21-2012, 12:16 AM
I'm making some effort to move my electronics & software into this decade, so I'm interested to see what people out there are using. I've been using Microsoft Money for 10+ years (MSMoney 2004 on XP right now - super stable, never have any problems), but they killed MSM in 2009 and completely stopped supporting it in 2011. Apparently, it's quite hard to get MSM installed on the newer OSs, and since I'm looking to switch to a Win8 laptop soon, I'm trying to figure out my options:
-keep the old desktop just for using MSM2004; man, talk about wasting energy and space...
-get an old XP laptop, install MSM2004; spend a little money, but retain mobility, stability, familiarity, and all of my history
-put some time in and make an XL spreadsheet that does my essentials; can do most of what I do, cheap but time consuming, can consume all of my historical data, most labor intensive for the future (yeah, I could also build my own database and a rudimentary program to operate it, but we're talking even more time and effort there - maybe a future project...)
-adopt something new; change is bad?
Personally, I really like Money for what I need, which are relatively basic yet pretty specific. It's super useful to have years of records available for reference at my fingertips, and I use it remarkably often in my day-to-day life. I tried to define my use cases, so if you know of a program that can do this (or have suggestions on top of my what I listed above), please share your experience
1) I don't care about the program hooking into my actual bank accounts, that's not a seling point for me.
2) It is extremely important that I be able to make custom categories to classify purchases, and be able to assign purchases to those categories. Furthermore, being able to break individual receipts down into multiple categories is also pretty critical (Ex: go to Walmart, but a jug of motor oil and your groceries; need to be able to split those)
3) Ability to enter receipts/transactions before they hit accounts. This is twofold - I want to be able to enter receipts when I get home to get them out of my wallet instead of waiting for it to hit the bank, but more importantly I like to enter fake transactions to predict the state of my accounts, then delete them once I have a plan (yeah, I can do it in XL, but that's annoying sometimes...)
4) Maintain numerous account types: savings, checking, loans, physical assets, escrow, 401k, IRA
5) Budgeting, including warnings when approaching/going over budget
6) Automated updates of stock information is a pretty good feature. Likewise, showing a portfolio summary broken out by account giving me the details of each holding is pretty big (close price, yield, intraday hi/lo, 52 wk hi/lo, my market value, etc.)
7) Searching for transactions by keyword, or viewing all transactions within a category
8) Charting/reporting: monthly income & expenses, spending by category over time, cash flow over varieties of accounts and date ranges
9) I write pretty specific notes on a lot of my transactions, this helps me clarify what the purchase was.
-keep the old desktop just for using MSM2004; man, talk about wasting energy and space...
-get an old XP laptop, install MSM2004; spend a little money, but retain mobility, stability, familiarity, and all of my history
-put some time in and make an XL spreadsheet that does my essentials; can do most of what I do, cheap but time consuming, can consume all of my historical data, most labor intensive for the future (yeah, I could also build my own database and a rudimentary program to operate it, but we're talking even more time and effort there - maybe a future project...)
-adopt something new; change is bad?
Personally, I really like Money for what I need, which are relatively basic yet pretty specific. It's super useful to have years of records available for reference at my fingertips, and I use it remarkably often in my day-to-day life. I tried to define my use cases, so if you know of a program that can do this (or have suggestions on top of my what I listed above), please share your experience
1) I don't care about the program hooking into my actual bank accounts, that's not a seling point for me.
2) It is extremely important that I be able to make custom categories to classify purchases, and be able to assign purchases to those categories. Furthermore, being able to break individual receipts down into multiple categories is also pretty critical (Ex: go to Walmart, but a jug of motor oil and your groceries; need to be able to split those)
3) Ability to enter receipts/transactions before they hit accounts. This is twofold - I want to be able to enter receipts when I get home to get them out of my wallet instead of waiting for it to hit the bank, but more importantly I like to enter fake transactions to predict the state of my accounts, then delete them once I have a plan (yeah, I can do it in XL, but that's annoying sometimes...)
4) Maintain numerous account types: savings, checking, loans, physical assets, escrow, 401k, IRA
5) Budgeting, including warnings when approaching/going over budget
6) Automated updates of stock information is a pretty good feature. Likewise, showing a portfolio summary broken out by account giving me the details of each holding is pretty big (close price, yield, intraday hi/lo, 52 wk hi/lo, my market value, etc.)
7) Searching for transactions by keyword, or viewing all transactions within a category
8) Charting/reporting: monthly income & expenses, spending by category over time, cash flow over varieties of accounts and date ranges
9) I write pretty specific notes on a lot of my transactions, this helps me clarify what the purchase was.