Answers inline.

"KJTV" <KJTV[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5CC921AB-6D8D-497F-B439-01E34F9FD528[at]microsoft.com...
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There needs to be a "light bulb moment" when you see how Money really works
and I think for most people there also needs to be some inner motivation to
spend the time and effort to make it work. Even if you use all of the
shortcuts and don't much care about things like the data quality of what you
collect, without collecting all of the transaction data (at least total
transaction amount if not categorization, payee, etc) for the accounts you
elect to track, it's not terribly useful or maybe worse. Some of us find
that tracking some accounts leads, inexorably, to tracking all accounts.

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No. Many others do.

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Yes; I enter most every transaction that is either not cash or is > several
dollars. I do not manually enter every bill/income/investment from
scratch--virtually all of my recurring items are scheduled with a
transaction "template" and all I have to do is enter that scheduled item in
the register, making corrections as necessary. No, I reconcile most accounts
to paper statements once a month or less often.

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Every time something is relevant. For me, this is nearly daily. But I enter
data by hand. See below.

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Yes. But only an average of maybe 6 or 7 a month.

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I spend maybe an **average** of five minutes a day entering data or
scheduled transactions. The longest single factor in my use is how slow the
application is. Unconstrained by application speed, I could enter one
transaction, say a gasoline charge, in maybe ten seconds. The overhead to
start Money (wait), direct it to the appropriate account (wait), enter the
data (wait), and exit money makes the ten second action take three or four
minutes best case. My case is somewhat atypical since I have a LOT of data
in my Money file. (Though MANY users come here complaining that the
application is just plain old slow.) For these reasons, I tend to collect
three or four days worth of receipts and, by then, frequently have a
scheduled transaction or an investment purchase or something else to do
besides. I would probably do it all in maybe 20 or so minutes once a week if
I chose to do it this way. I backup habitually and that (at least the one
backup to floppy disk) is the longest single thing I do every week with
Money.

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I am interested to see how different people use this program as I have a copy
and have been only dabbling in it and never seriously using it.

Do you only download your statements, sort them into catagories and just
monitor your finances?

Do you manually enter every bill into the program, then reconcile every week?

Do you use it weekly or monthly?

Do you print cheques from it?

I would be interested to see just how practical it is to do all this in
everyday life.

Many thanks to all who answer.

KJTV