Microsoft Money Standard 2005 [Old Version] review:1 stars (This Product is AWFUL) - Be warned....DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT....especially if you have business accounts that you need to keep separate from personal accounts. When the program updates from the bank, it downloads every account with that User ID....Unlike 2004 or earlier versions, you cannot pick and choose which accounts to download...and if you try to delete one account, you get a message saying deleting one will delete ALL....You CAN set the account to closed...but the stupid program downloads it anyway....1 stars (Truly Terrible "Upgrade") - I'm not sure it gets much worse than this, I should have stuck with 2004. When it "converted" my 2004 Money file none of the totals were right. It didn't carry over the starting balances listed in the account settings for each of the accounts, it took me days to figure out that is what the problem was. Occasionally this will happen again when it has trouble connecting to the online services at your bank, it just wipes everything out and starts all over.

Had I known it was going to be this bad I would have never touched it.1 stars (Not Ready For Beta Testing) - Imagine if Microsoft Word crashed every time a period or capital letter was used or when opening saved documents some of the paragraphs appeared twice. Such is the state of affairs of Microsoft Money 2005. I have been using Microsoft Money since 1996; while it was never perfect, it basically did what it promised. I have also used the portfolio manager on the MSN website which is a subset of the Money program with a similar interface. Others have written about problems downloading bank and credit card statements; this review will focus on the portfolio manager.

The portfolio manager is the part of Money that keeps track of investment accounts. It is not unusual for multiple income families to own quite complicated investment portfolios including 401Ks, IRAs and college savings accounts. Something went very wrong in the fall of 2004 when Microsoft upgraded their software to Money 2005. Gone is the ability to analyze a single account or groups of accounts; you are forced to analyze your entire portfolio. When entering new equity transactions, Money used to allow you to simply enter the trading symbol and it would quickly find the name of the company and other information, now you must follow a wizard and enter the information manually. Previously, you could enter a back dated transaction and it would guess a price using the closing price for the day (this is very useful for watch accounts); now you must manually enter the information.

The worse part has been the removal of the associated cash accounts. I never really appreciated the separate cash accounts until Microsoft removed them. For those unfamiliar with software, here is the basic concept. Say you own an account with a discount broker like Fidelity or Vanguard that holds six mutual funds. Associated with that account is a cash account in which you add and remove cash, collect dividends and conduct other transactions into and out of the account. When you sell a mutual fund, the proceeds are put into the cash account; similarly, cash is taken from the account when you buy shares of an investment. Prior versions of Money created a distinct cash account associated with a specific investment account. You could open the account, view the transaction history and correct any errors. In Money 2005, when you create a new account it simply asks for the initial cash balance. Money then automatically mismanages this account by recording dividends twice and mishandling sales proceeds. Furthermore, money will not allow you to record interest dividends, contributions or redemptions. There is no way to view the history at all; Money simply gives you the current value in a little box. When errors occur, the fix from Microsoft is to simply change the amount in the little box to the correct value. If you access the cash account too often it begins to create multiple cash accounts labeled #2, #3 leading to cash account nightmare.

Microsoft did an upgrade to the software this weekend (May 20, 2005). They have added more features and unfortunately more bugs; I have not noticed anything that has been fixed. New problems include: 1) updates are no longer stored on the MSN server preventing you from accessing up-to-date account information from multiple computers (this may be a temporary problem); 2) investments that lack a trading symbol, such as specialty funds available through certain 401Ks or 529 plans, are no longer supported. You can see the investment in your portfolio but you cannot record "buys" or other transactions; 3) information contained in watch accounts, such as year-to-date performance was lost after the upgrade.

I hope once Microsoft is finished adding features to their Money 2005 software they will work on bringing it from Alpha to Beta quality. Perhaps, after a year or two of Beta testing, Microsoft will be ready to release Money 2005 (or 2008) for general sale. Until then, I do not see how they can legally be selling software that fails to perform its basic functions.

Microsoft Money Standard 2005 [Old Version] Features:
Computer software (programs)
Personal Finance (Financial)
Invest (Investment)
CD
View the big picture or quickly drill down to details
Easy-to-use personal finance software
Automatically consolidates online financial information
Works with bank Web site to access account info
Create budgets; track expenses; pay bills online

Microsoft Money Standard 2005 [Old Version] is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 27.99USD.