On a personal basis (and not attributed to any other person in the entire
universe): All indications I have are that downloading data can't possibly
be worth the effort. Might save a little time. Might add lots of new
problems in setup and from time-to-time based on changes in an environment I
have little or no control over. Given the amount of value I add to the data,
I'd still end up tweaking most if not all of the transactions downloaded.
I'd mostly just end up matching transitions that for one reason or another
already got added by hand or are already scheduled. From that point, it
becomes just a way to see if I match the bank. I almost always do. What's
the benefit given the costs of screwing with it?

For newbies: The troubles involved getting it all working get in the way of
the problem to be solved. The problems the data can create (like Transfers
coming down as two transactions from two FIs at two different times, all of
the Payee name issues and non-conforming FIs who put Payee in Memo and so
on, the ways Fidelity mangles cash accounts into Investments and so forth
and so on) overcome their understanding of how to fix it and how the data
needs to be for everything else (BP, Cash Flow Forecast, Tax Estimator, etc)
to work right.

For everybody else: knock yourselves out. But don't expect miracles and
don't come here asking how come Money is broken every time one of these
thousands of things goes wrong. E.g., original subject of this thread.
Downloading transaction data is entirely optional. There is not ONE feature
in Money that works with downloaded transaction data that does not work as
well or better with hand-entered data except for Essential Register in M05.
Downloaded transaction data is to Money like the radio is to an automobile.
Kinda nice if there's something on you want to listen to, but hardly the
reason to own one and certainly not a reason you can't get somewhere when
it's broke.

Signing off, again.

"Mark Horn" <mark[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrncuku6i.ede.mark[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

On 2005-01-15, Dick Watson <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:
- quote -

I will help out however I can. That being said, my "expertise" is
in downloading transactions from the FI's that I currently connect
to, using the version of Money that I currently use. So if you're
expecting me to jump into every download discussion in order to
justify my use of this feature, I don't really think that would
be valuable.

But more importantly, my purpose for having this discussion isn't to
try and justify my use of a feature. I'm trying to learn why you are
so committed to manual entry, because it's counterintuitive to me.
I hope you haven't taken my comments as a criticism of how you're
doing things. If that's how it came out, I apologize. It wasn't
my intention. I'm just trying to learn why you do it that way,
in order to determine whether or not I should switch.

What I really wish I could do is sit down and watch you enter
transactions. I'd like to see what tricks you've learned in order to
enter them so quickly. Because that's what it comes down to for me.
I can't imagine being able to manually enter all of my transactions
in 5 minutes.

Cheers,
- Mark

I more than aware you cannot infer what proportion of all users it causes
problems for from posts in the newsgroup. But you contradict yourself
because we can also not infer anything about what proportion of users who do
have problems with it actually find their way here. 100 posting here in a
month could be 0.001% of the people who bought Money and actually tried
using the feature or it could be 1% or it could be 10%. Who knows?

You can surely assess what proportion of all problems those people who are
savvy enough to find their way here have that are related to downloaded
transaction data. And it's a high proportion.

But that's not my primary point. There's a boat to be bailed here. I don't
really care how many people are in that boat. I don't really care how many
people haven't felt compelled to jump overboard into that boat. If you have
such great success with downloading and are so committed to the value of the
feature, there are hundreds of people here monthly who could benefit from
your expertise.

I'm really glad you are a true believer in this feature.

Signing off.

"Mark Horn" <mark-d-1105838601.6bc633[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrncuim1p.8gk.mark-d-1105838601.6bc633[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

On 2005-01-15, Dick Watson <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:
- quote -

I'm not sure that you can assess, based on the people who post to
this list, whether or not I'm in the majority or minority of people
having success downloading transactions. People post to lists
because they're looking for an answer to a problem. People who
are having success with downloads have no reason to post to the
list since it's working for them.

Perhaps the biggest problems that people have are with downloading
transactions. But if 100 people post here monthly with that
problem, that would suggest to me a HUGE population of people
who use the program without any problems. I don't know how many
copies Microsoft sells monthly, but if only 100 are ending up with
a problem with downloads, I think that's a small number.

You're reading too much into my comment. I'm certainly not trying to deter
you from using Money anyway you see fit. You might gain some perspective and
some appreciation for your relative luck with downloading transaction data,
though. I don't particularly care if you do. You might also contribute back
to the community of Money users. I do care about that since the proportion
of downloaded data issues is approaching the majority of issues posted in
the newsgroup.

"Mark Horn" <mark-d-1105799210.f17d38[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrncuhe80.5bm.mark-d-1105799210.f17d38[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

On 2005-01-15, Dick Watson <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:
- quote -

I'll be happy to help out whenever I can.

I'm not sure I understand your point though. It almost sounds
like there's a hidden, "And come back next week and tell me what
you think then." If that's the case, I'm pretty sure that a horde
of people who don't understand how to do something isn't going to
deter me from doing that thing since I do understand how to do it.

Or maybe I'm just reading too much into your comment?

Promise me this: spend the extra four minutes a day this week helping fellow
users who post here all day every day having more problems than you do with
downloaded transaction data.

"Mark Horn" <mark-d-1105788577.86e327[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrncuh5go.4do.mark-d-1105788577.86e327[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

On 2005-01-15, Dick Watson <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:
- quote -

True enough. I don't really count the download time because I can
do something else during that time. If I were manually entering
a transaction, I couldn't do that.

- quote -

Ah. Got it.

- quote -

The difference is that I said mine was "at most" 5 minutes a day,
while you average 5 minutes a day. On average, I'd say maybe a
minute a day. A 5 minute day would be after spending the weekend
doing Christmas shopping (for example).

- quote -

Right, but for you each "touch" is about 5 times longer than for me.
(If we assume that we have similar number of transactions, and I
average 1 min/day and you average 5 mins/day.)

- quote -

I don't really think it is. Because, in my case, the level of
error that I can accrue is probably at most pennies per transaction.
Whereas, if I didn't look at the transactions at all, I might not
catch if someone "borrowed" my credit card from me. Not being
perfect does not make it garbage. It's an improvement, even if
the error rate is outside of your acceptable limits.

The same thing is true for someone who goes from doing nothing
to doing something, even if it's less detailed than what I do.
Their error rate may be worse than mine, but it can't be as bad as
it was before.

At the very least, they will be able to track to some reasonable
approximation whether their spending exceeds their income.
That detail alone is more than a huge number of people know about
their finances. Achieving that is a gigantic step.

- quote -

Oh. Ok. Well that's a lot lower threshold than I thought you were
suggesting. Actually, this is convenient. I've been planning a
course at my church on using PFM software. Most people will have
been through a Crown Financial Small Group (1), in which they learn
how to do a budget on paper. My course will be for anyone interested
to extend that knowledge to using software to manage a budget.
It'd be interested in your thoughts on how to make that effective.
If you're interested in sharing them, please take it to email.

(1) http://www.crown.org/FinancialWisdom/Church/Studies.asp

Cheers,
- Mark

On 2005-01-15, Dick Watson <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:
- quote -

Well you've got your way of instructing your friends, companions
and fellow netizens. I've got a different way. Perhaps if I find my
friends not keeping up with it, or getting overly frustrated, I'll try your
way and see what happens.

Cheers,
- Mark

And one more comment: they teach pilots to fly in clapped out Cessna 150s
with no automatic anything. Only when they get really good at that do they
get to fly an aircraft with FMS, INS, GPS, ACARS, autopilot, autoland, etc.
There's a reason for that. I think of downloading transaction data as using
an autopilot.

comments inline

"Mark Horn" <mark-d-1105773644.cff109[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrncugo5m.398.mark-d-1105773644.cff109[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

As noted, if all you want is a string of amounts with single categorization,
downloading is a fast way to get the string of numbers. Also as noted, the
amount of value you add to the payee/amount is a big determinant in my mind
about the tradeoff from downloading to just saying no.

- quote -

Temporary annoyances and easy to undo take time. That's my point.
Downloading at best is not instantaneous.

- quote -

Your point was that accuracy is 100% since the bank's numbers are
transferred in the digital domain. My point is that accepting the bank's
numbers as gospel assures they are. Right or wrong.

- quote -

Discover, to name one, groups them by things like Retail, Dining,
Automotive, etc. Even some of those are bizzare. I've seen different charges
at different stores of the same chain show up in different groupings, for
instance.

- quote -

I don't type particularly fast, but I'm certain I don't spend much more than
an average of five minutes a day entering transactions. You must have a lot
more transactions than I do if it takes you five minutes to categorize
downloads and I can do the whole enchilada in about the same time. Surely
this is another variable in the equation.

- quote -

You are more trusting than me.

- quote -

Ususally these are cases like a tip added to a ticket gets miskeyed or not
entered at all. Sometimes these are cases like a pre-order gets different
tax rates or shipping computed later or whatever. For simple transactions
that were electronic from POS to statement, I do not see errors.

- quote -

Categorizing every single transaction is part of this. Normalizing payee
names would be another example. You touch each transaction. So do I.

- quote -

Perhaps I'm too anal, but if they are just going through the exercise
because they the think they should but aren't willing to put any effort into
it to assure the data is good so as to make the product good, it's just
GIGO. And if touching every receipt gives a better visceral appreciation for
where the money goes than watching the computer go do something mysterious
and end up with lots of lines of stuff that doesn't really make much sense
and they don't really understand, then I'm all for it. You'll only get out
of it in proportion to what you are willing to put into it.

- quote -

I guess I take a slightly different tack. Crawling is doing one account, say
checking. Work to understand money flow. Work to understand income vs.
expense. Understand what it means to categorize. Otherwise it's all just
characters on the screen. Then add a credit card. Then understand Transfer.
If new users would just get this far by hand, then I'm all for them going
off to mess with the downloaded stuff.

- quote -

I'd only disagree with that in this extent: it's pretty obvious to me that
many posters new to Money who are having issues with downloading data are
frustrated with the problems, in part because they don't have any
understanding what's right and how transactions are supposed to work, and
they're more likely to give up the whole thing before they get enough useful
benefit out of it to see that the process is worth some effort. Maybe that's
why Essential *. No pain, no gain, but at least the user feels like they are
doing something.

- quote -

I'm all for that. But the shouldn't delude themselves that this problem is
fixable with no effort and no understanding just by having a PFM download
some data to their screen. It's kinda like dieting. There's play dieting
that makes you feel better and think you are doing something noble and then
there's the real thing that's hard and take effort and commitment.

On 2005-01-14, Dick Watson <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:
- quote -

[... snip on incredibly long list of additional stuff that Dick does ...]

Wow. You spend a lot of time doing this. About the only thing that
you do that I also do is I split my paycheck. But it's the same
splits every single time, so that's simply a matter of a scheduled
transaction, twice a month.

- quote -

This I don't understand. Connection problems and the FI service
availability are temporary nuisanceS. But they're temporary
nuisances for anything online, not just downloading transactions.
Bad matches are easy to undo. I don't use yodlee or passport.
I don't ever intend to use yodlee or passport.

- quote -

I'm not sure I understand what this means.

- quote -

Your credit card categorizes your expenses? Mine doesn't do that.
Who do you use?

- quote -

Perhaps if you type as fast as you do, that's true. As for me, I'm
only at about 90 words per minute. At that rate, I can't possibly
enter transactions faster than downloading. But I still categorize
every transaction individually. It takes me at most 5 minutes
every day to go through and categorize all of my transactions.
Even if I doubled that amount of time, I can't imagine I'd be able
to manually enter all of my transactions. I occasionally split
single downloaded transactions. E.g. when my wife goes to WalMart
and some of it is groceries and some of it is gifts. But for the
most part, the final transaction amount is all that I need.

- quote -

I've not been using Money as long as you, but since 2001,
I have not had a single typo or missing transaction. Not one.
Additionally, I used to balance all of my accounts religiously.
But after a couple of years, I stopped because it was pointless.
There was never a time when I had to do anything other than just
click through and say "OK". All of the transactions were always
correct.

- quote -

That is the first good reason that I can see for manual entry.
(Now I really want to know who you use for your credit card.)

- quote -

Maybe I haven't been around in this group long enough. But I've
been using Money since 01, with every upgrade except 05, and I have
never had to do any "hand-tuning" unless you call categorizing every
single transaction hand-tuning. If that's what you're referring to,
that takes a second or two per transaction.

- quote -

Right.

- quote -

<soapbox
Considering the number of people who don't even keep a budget on
paper, I would much rather encourage new-comers to do whatever
they can to get on a budget. If the issue is that it's too
time consuming, there is no way that I would tell them to save
every receipt that they have, and manually enter it into Money.
If they're not willing to do this on paper, they're not willing to
do this in Money, either.

I'd rather a newcomer crawl before they walk, and walk before
they run. I think your stance might be perceived by a new-comer
as running a marathon as the first thing they do. I consider
myself a moderately experienced Money user, but I don't plan on
running the marathons that you run. I'm happy with my daily 5k.
But if I'm going to encourage someone else to try using Money, I'm
going to encourage them to crawl first. Download transactions and
categorize them. If they find, down the road, that crawling isn't
giving them enough detail or they run into problems that they can't
solve, that's the point to tell them that there's another way to
do it. They'll be self-motivated to get there because what they're
doing is already not satisfying to them. But if they have to run
a marathon as the first thing out of the gate, they'll simply go
back to not budgeting at all. That's not what I would want for
my friends who don't yet keep a budget. (I hope you don't think
I'm telling you how to treat your friends - if so, I apologize.
That's not my intent.)

The thing I think about all the people on the list who don't
understand how to do something in Money, is that at least they're
doing something. And yeah, maybe it's not the way that I would
do it, but at least they're to the point that they're trying to
keep track of their finances. They should be encouraged, and
applauded for doing anything, even if it's going to lead to a
few minor problems down the road. The problems a person has with
Microsoft Money are *TINY* in comparison the problems that come
with carrying $9000 of credit card balance (1). As for me and my
"evangelizing" it will be to use any PFM in any way that's easiest
for you.

</soapbox
Cheers,
- Mark

(1) http://www.forbes.com/home/personalf...sumerdebt.html

The time savings thing in part comes down to how much value you add to the
downloaded stuff.

I record things like serial numbers and warranties for toys, plant species
for trees and shrubs, utility consumption (KWH, Therms, Gal of water) for
utilities bills, splits of long distance expenses vs. phone line expenses
vs. all of the telecomm tax burdens, which vacation the airfare was for,
splits of money charged at the grocery store to food/supplies/transfer to
pocket change, order numbers for toys ordered online, trading confirmation
numbers for investment activity, and which vehicle the gasoline,
maintenance, license or insurance expenses went for. My paychecks record
literally more than a dozen splits, once a week. These are just examples,
but not one bit of this comes down in downloaded data. If you record any of
this, the time savings, best case, for using the downloaded stuff will
diminish rapidly. If you have any connection problems or accidentally agree
to a bad match and have to undo it or the FIs service availability is not
100% or Yodlee is lunched or Passport is down or whatever we read about in
dozens of postings every week, then I'm hard pressed to imagine the time
savings. But I **type** in lots of transactions and am very practiced at it
and can do it A WHOLE LOT FASTER than Money can keep up. Money's slowness is
the largest single contributor to how much time I spend entering transaction
data.

It also comes down to your definition of accuracy. If your definition is
limited to the transaction amounts you track matching the bank's, then I'd
agree with you. If you use their numbers you will get to their answer, no
doubt about it. (Which may well be wrong and seems to add little value to
just using their web site, but that's another subject.) On the other hand,
if your picture is broadened to include things like normalizing Payee names,
getting the values accurately categorized and so forth, then I'm skeptical.
I look at what's on the credit card statements for Payees and what category
they think these expenses are. I also look at Money's auto payee
categorization. Yikes. My data is much more useful to me than those would
ever be. And if you take any time fixing this, you are losing the time
savings you made above.

I don't take anything off statements except a quick match of cleared
transactions in the balance process. For rare occasions I don't balance
(probably one statement in five or ten I balance) the issue is usually a
typo in amount on my part or a missing transaction--the former being much
more common than the latter and almost never caught getting this far.
(Credit card statement transaction amounts not matching the one I SIGNED and
entered and have in the file drawer actually happens only a little less
frequently than I put a typo in the amount I entered.) And when I don't
balance it can take ten minutes or more to find root cause. On average, I
spend more time collecting all of the paper associated with the statement,
dropping the staple in it all, and throwing it in the yearly paper carton
filing system than I spend balancing to statements. Of course, some people
just throw away charge receipts without ever looking at them and just pay
the bill without ever looking at the statements. For them,
Yodlee+Money+Essential * might be the best thing since sliced bread.

I'm not hard over about evangelizing on this subject to experienced Money
users like Steve can be, but I do find myself wondering frequently what
people see in this whole downloaded transaction thing if it causes so many
problems and requires so much hand-tuning to get good results. I continue to
stand firmly behind my conviction that new Money users should NOT do any of
this electronic stuff until they've done it all by hand once to understand
how Money wants to work so they are prepared with some intellectual
framework to know how to tell what's going wrong when the downloaded stuff
isn't working out 100%. I'm shocked several times a week that many of them
appear to have Zero clue that there is a way to use Money besides
downloading every bit of data that ever gets in it. At bottom, though, it is
really a personal matter and depends on what's important to you. Some people
even think Excel is a great database application. Go figure. But it works,
after a fashion, for them.

As always, YMMV.

"Mark Horn" <mark-d-1105766100.826c41[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrncugeam.2dn.mark-d-1105766100.826c41[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

On 2005-01-14, SJCOHEN730 <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote:
- quote -

I might be able to accept your argument for "best". Because it
depends on a subjective set of goals that you want to achieve.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that manual entry is best for me,
even if it is best for you. But I'm having a hard time with "most
accurate" and "quickest" under any definitions of those phrases.

The argument against "manual entry" being most accurate is aptly
made by Cal. What if I forget to add a transaction? What if
I lose my receipt? What if (a whole host of other things)
that cause me to make a human error? Of course, you could just
compare it with your statement. But how is that different than
electronic downloading? In one case, you look at your statement,
in the other case, you electronically look at the same statement.
In other words, accuracy depends on checking your statement. I don't
see how doing that with your eyes can possibly be *MORE* accurate
than doing it electronically. At best, they are equally accurate.
At worst, eyeballs make a ton of mistakes.

Additionally, I'm having a hard time contemplating how manual
entry could be quicker than electronic entry.

All of that being said, I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

Cheers,
- Mark

In microsoft.public.money, SJCOHEN730 wrote:

- quote -

Not at all. If I were doing it manually, I would not record each
credit card purchase. I probably would not record even dividends.
Yet I get all credit card, broker and other transactions with three
easy clicks, and they are available within a day of the transaction.
Yes, I have to look them over. No Yodlee handling my data. No third
party involved in the downloads. Money connects to the FI OFX
server, or in two cases I visit the web site, but less often: about
as often as I would get a paper statement.

I definitely would not record MM transactions if I were doing it by
hand, but that would be OK. No loss there. The rest of it I would
miss, and I would change FIs to keep the function for the accounts I
use most often.

- quote -

Money convince you guys that the best, most accurate AND quickest way to manage
your personal finance in Money is to enter your transactions manually. I've
been doing it for nine years and believe me, my personal finance information in
Money is robust and very helpful to me. It REALLY doesn't take alot of my time.
The only automatic downloads into Money that I do are the stock quotes which in
the 2005 version happen continuously. Try it. You may like it. Steve

If you go to yodlee.com and create your WaMu account there and experience
the same problem, I believe there is a way to contact Yodlee support from
that site. But, you'll need to make sure that you can actually reproduce the
problem on their site.

-Mark
"Christopher" <Christopher[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:65A20886-E50A-43C8-8CB1-2648C491B712[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Is is possible or advisable to contact YODLEE to add my experience to their
records and perhaps get some feedback on what might be done?
If anyone knows, please advise. Thank you Mark.

"Mark" wrote:

- quote -

It's likely being looked at by Yodlee currently. But it will be up to them
to work with WaMu to get it fixed.
It may have been due to some change that WaMu made on their website
recently.

-Mark

"Christopher" <Christopher[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7064DF2A-4631-4052-9341-FB76CB0ED951[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

It IS Washington Mutual. Is this a "known issue". Is there hope that the
problem might be addressed and corrected in the near future?