No surprise on the massive disappointment. It's for reference, I don't
believe I said it would solve everyone's problems.

Did you read the part about the guaranteed match? 'Money defines a
"guaranteed match" as when the check number and amount match and the
transaction was not previously downloaded, ... in the specified date
range'.

BTW, I have monthly scheduled bills to both Discover and American
Express setup (two different AMEX cards to be exact), and mine (M04) has
never mixed up the matches.

There's a lot of discussion on here about this, search for "Preferred
Payee Names", "Transaction Match", etc.

harrelsonesq wrote:

- quote -

I looked at your MSKB reference, and it says absolutely nothing about why
Money tries to match your $20 payment this month to Discover with next
month's scheduled transaction with American Express for $110.

I'm massively disappointed!

Susan

"Retired Coal Miner" <...[at]...> wrote in message
news:tIydnVSOXqfjOU3fRVn-ow[at]comcast.com...
- quote -

In addition to the MS KB article you mentioned, this one is good for
future reference:

How Money matches Online Banking transactions (it explains the algorithm
money uses to match transactions):

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;166236

Dan wrote:

- quote -

"I don't think you mentioned what version of Money you are using. I
think everyone is assuming M05?"

You're right, I think I forgot -- it's Money 05.

Overall, I think my point is, other than the mathematics and accounting
involved, making a Money-type application that works, and works well,
shouldn't be THAT hard. I mean, in terms of programming complexity,
Money is no Excel or Powerpoint (and I should know, I worked as a MS
intern for a summer in the Office group a few years ago). The fact
that Microsoft is just taking Yodlee's data, downloading it, and
importing it into your file should shouldn't effect other parts of the
app like I've seen it do first hand. It just seems like laziness to me
-- the KB article I linked to is a perfect example. Microsoft has
essentially "given up" on the problem of matching transactions multiple
times, and basically said "deal with it; it'd be too hard to fix."
This mentality is just impossible to agree with.

The thing everyone has noticed is that new Money versions for the past
few years just seem to be upgrades of the old versions, and as a result
the whole thing is getting bigger and bigger and slower and slower. If
I were Microsoft, I'd take a year off and start Money 07 from the
ground-up. Hell, maybe that's what they did with 06. At least, we can
wish.

-Dan

People need to understand what this stuff can and cannot do. They also need
to know what to do when it goes toes up. Once people are past that, I say
Knock Yourself Out!

But for people who think this stuff is going to be foolproof, provide data
uniformly suitable for use elsewhere in the application, and expect things
never to go wrong: I don't have time for it. There is an alternative. It's
really simple. And it works exactly as you expect. Every time.

"Retired Coal Miner" <...[at]...> wrote in message
news:_sydncHEDtLYzFrfRVn-jA[at]comcast.com...
- quote -

Unless I missed it, I don't think you mentioned what version of Money
you are using. I think everyone is assuming M05.

This topic (is downloading transaction bad for you or your money file?)
has been debated on here before, here's a recent one:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...d62943fffea4b0

I'm in the Bollar camp on this one. I think new users on here should be
well aware that Dick Watson champions a very narrow view of using the
online features of the product. Dick being the owner (and therefore the
editor) of the Unofficial FAQ means that carries a lot of influence, and
I think it does a disservice to people to tell them 'to avoid that
problem, don't use the feature'.


Dan wrote:
- quote -

I count 746 root transactions (as my db design defines it--intended to
largely mirror Money) in the first six months of the year. That's just over
4 per day average. You said you were basing your count on FI downloads to
accept. Mine includes everything including things I could never download
like cash transactions, so my transaction entry rate is substantially lower
than yours. Mine also has 1,984 total elements (root+splits, basically).
That's 1,238 children to the 746 transactions--an average of almost two
split elements per transaction. Obviously Paychecks skew this greatly since
I get paid weekly. But my db design does know both halves of a transfer
(including loan payment, buy investment/CD, realized investment income) as
one transaction in these numbers. There are 1,130 account links in the 1,984
elements. That's a primary account for the 746 and 384 transfer account
links--on average more than half of the transactions have a transfer account
somewhere in them. (That's a simplification because, for instance, Paychecks
have a root account and many transfer accounts given how I'm counting.)

Anyway, it's all interesting stuff.

"Richard Bollar" <bollar[at]bollar.org> wrote in message
news:e$1q8irfFHA.572[at]TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Apparently we agree that just downloading transaction data only gets you so
far and, sooner or later, unless your only goal is checking for suspicious
transactions at the FIs and seeing the FIs idea of your balances on one
screen, you end up having to know a little bit about how transactions work,
how to schedule them, how to edit them, what goes where in a transaction,
and so forth.

You are surely correct that few people try M/Q and few of those put enough
effort into it to actually get some Personal Financial Management out of
them. Certainly many people who think "gosh, I should do this" aren't really
willing to put forth the effort to set it all up or to actually learn what's
going on. We see it here all the time.

I have no desire to evangelize for PFMware just so that people can have the
"effortless way" to "stop typing" if all they are going to get out of the
exercise is a way to see suspicious transactions at the FIs and seeing the
FIs idea of their balances on one screen--assuming everything works OK. (If
they think that's "personal financial management", Yodlee has a solution for
them!) The problem I see is, beyond that, M promises a lot more than it can
deliver to these users. And this isn't Money's problem. The root problems is
that the plumbing in the system wasn't designed to accommodate this outlet.
The banks and merchants and so on would have to fix that. They clearly don't
care because there's no business case.

By all accounts, many combinations of users and FIs and versions of Money
just can't reliably do what you are asking--maintain the users main accounts
solely from downloaded transaction data. At best, they get the amounts,
posting dates, and some general hint of the payees correct. Sometimes
they'll even get in the ballpark for categorization. You are correct, if
they bootstrap it with hand-entered data like scheduled transactions and
fixing the payees once and setting their preferred categorization in
transactions so that future ones can auto-fill, they will get better
results. Which comes first? The downloads or the bootstrap data? I'm ALWAYS
arguing for the latter when I suggest newbs skip the automagic stuff for a
while. M05 tells the new user exactly the opposite: the only way to use
Money is to setup all of the automagic stuff straight out of the chute and
let the data fall where it may. It even goes out of its way to hide the
alternative. I'd be curious to know whether this "GIGO" model of PFM has
more users still using the tool after six months than the M04 and earlier
"This Is Going To Take Some Effort" model

The users want something for nothing. They want free energy. They want gold
from straw. And all Money is really prepared to do for them beyond this
dates/amounts information is steer them to ads or show them a little
mediocre and potentially misleading and maybe not even correct data unless
they put in the effort and learning required to help it do better for them.

I'm going to try to get a metric on my number of root transactions per day,
but my tool for doing so is in Broken State at the moment. Something about
ambiguous outer joins. I'll get back when I sort that out.

"Richard Bollar" <bollar[at]bollar.org> wrote in message
news:e$1q8irfFHA.572[at]TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
....
- quote -

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:%23SsZZGofFHA.2268[at]TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Dick, you know me well enough to know that there are lots of things I do in
Money that I don't have to do. I've got 25 years of data in my file which
is all balanced to the original statements (and obviously much of this was
entered by hand).

But minimally, categorizing each transaction gives enough information to
make Money work well.

- quote -

If it's important, I do.

- quote -

I usually do, but it's not required. If it's a payee I've used before,
Money takes care of it.

- quote -

No, I rarely split transactions other than my paycheck.

- quote -

If I use cash, of course I enter the transaction. But I'm generally
cash-free, so this only happens a couple of times a month.

- quote -

No, my paycheck is a scheduled transaction, so it's already entered and
split. If the downloaded transaction doesn't match the scheduled
transaction, I'll edit the piece of the split that has changed.

- quote -

Of course, but that just takes clicking "accept"

- quote -

I don't do business with FIs that don't provide Direct Services through OFX
and not through Yodlee.

- quote -

Nope. Don't invest in Government debt. In any event, everything I invest
in has downloadable statements.

- quote -

Not at all. In reality, I reconcile the accounts as I go. I see the
transactions every day, when they're still fresh in my mind and I accept
them if I recognize them. If I don't recognize them, I don't accept them
until I remember what they are. As an aside, I do a lot of PayPal
transactions and they're a pain to reconcile at the end of the month, as my
bank statement only says "PayPal".

Otherwise, I haven't actually written or printed a check in more than a
decade. Well, maybe there are a couple -- my checkbook has an address three
addresses old and is on check 110.

I do use EPays or my Bank's online bill payment, and of course, both are
entered into Money automatically.

- quote -

We both know that the people who come to this newsgroup aren't necessarily
representative of the entire user population.

- quote -

The problem that I perceive is that people look at their financial plan like
they look at a diet or a new year's resolution. They start with the best of
intentions, but can't keep up with the file maintenance and give up. If
(and you're right, it's a big if) the new user can have the main accounts
kept maintained for them (especially their primary checking account) they're
more likely to stay with the program.

However, I think the people who stick with Money (or Quicken) and actually
have an accurate financial picture are very few.

- quote -

I'm counting the number of transactions that Money asks me to approve each
day. So, that will comprise:

o New bank and credit card charges
o Account transfers (which have to be approved twice, once for each
account)
o Investment transactions
o Investment dividends & stock splits

I'm only counting root transactions, aside from transfers, which are counted
twice.

Yes. Always.

But I don't use Yodlee.

There's no secret that I think the best version of Money ever is Money 97,
so from my perspective, the huge, clunky versions began with Money 99. 05
actually works much better for me than 03, which I found unusable.

--

"Dan" <danf879[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1120262806.913737.40070[at]o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

"statement download saves me at least an hour a month, and is no less
accurate."

Yeah, but does it always work for you? I haven't seen anyone here
respond to the complaints I made to start this post, nor did I actually
think they would. Truth of the matter is that starting with this
version Money feels huge, bloated, klunky, slow, and then added onto
that I go for help on the microsoft site and I get hilarious KB
articles like this one
(http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;890440) where
they essentially say, "uhhh, it's broken, and we're not going to fix
it".

In the time I spent battling Money this weekend I could have easily
entered every statement and been done with it. (And to follow up on my
earlier post, regarding #5 in my list, it wasn't just the Sam's Club
transactions that got screwed up. I lost data in multiple transactoins
randomly throughout my Money file. Lovely).

-Dan

"Richard Bollar" <bollar[at]bollar.org> wrote in message
news:%23hJ6fHmfFHA.1412[at]TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
- quote -

So you do not
- add memo information
- fix payees
- add splits and/or classification
- enter cash transactions
- enter paycheck distribution information
- match downloaded data with scheduled transactions
- enter data for any accounts/FIs that do not provide downloaded data
- track savings bonds, etc?
(Obviously there would be no need for you to balance with the paper
statements--you are already taking their word for it. You also obviously
don't print checks.)

- quote -

I'm sure for your use you have not over-generalized. I'm also sure that your
experience is not universally shared. Dozens of users show up here each and
every week with problems in accuracy and convenience. As to time, some users
clearly could spend hours downloading one or two transactions and still be
ahead. I'm pretty sure I'm not one of them. Mileage of others may vary.

Perhaps I am unique, but checking bank data for suspicious activity is a
very small priority for me--and that's the one thing downloaded data
uniquely supports compared to hand-entered transaction data. Once a month
seems to work quite well. Others are welcome to place more importance on
this.

And the only users I'm saying "don't download" to are the newbs: I do not
think they should mess with it till they understand how transactions work so
they can recognize and clean up after the problems that can be created if
their FIs are not as good at this as yours. If someone isn't a newb and
finds it convenient, accurate, and fast to mess with downloaded transaction
data, more power to them. And if the only reason you use Money is to
download transaction data, more power to you as well. But a Yodlee account
surely might be as useful and less hassle.

BTW, I'm curious: what are you counting to get to 10+ txns a day? I've can
derive some metrics on this for my data--number of root transactions, number
of split elements, etc--and am wondering how it compares.

Oh, sure, all of those things, with the exception of the budget are quite
useful, but none of them are as useful to me as having all of the daily
transactions for all of my accounts aggregated in one place so I can review
them for accuracy and suspicious activity. I have 10+ transactions a day
from any combination of 20 some-odd accounts and it's great to be able to
quickly review them. The only work I've had to do since Money 2002 is
categorize the transactions.

For me, it's heaps faster than going to all of my banks on a regular basis
and entering the transactions by hand. I'm quite familiar with the process
of doing it by hand -- statement download saves me at least an hour a month,
and is no less accurate.

So, just in case anyone missed my point: Statement download is more
accurate, more convenient and takes less time. Feel free to add (for me) if
you think I've overgeneralized.

--

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:edcEiSkfFHA.912[at]TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Let me put it another way: downloading data in and of itself is probably
pointless for most people. It's just one means to an end. That end is data
in the application that you can then look at, analyze, report, track to
budget, estimate tax liability from, use to forecast cash flow, check for
trends or suspicious activity, etc.

But downloading is not the end reason for downloading for most people. And
there is another way to get to 99.5% of the same goals. The other way is
manual data entry. And it's an entirely better way to get to some goals that
just downloading data can't get you to either reliably or at all.

Either way gets transaction data in account registers. Only then is data
entered by either means of any use whatsoever. And some amount of manual
entry--either of downloaded transactions by hand or getting it right in the
first place by hand entry from scratch--assures sane categorization and
collection of any classification, normalized data, addition of metadata
unavailable in the downloads such as paycheck stub elements and any other
split transaction information, and collection of any memo data (where were
those airline tickets to, what was the warranty on that TV set, what was
that oddball deposit actually for, etc).

It's entirely possible to get things like tax estimates out of Money without
ever downloading one transaction solely relying on manual data entry. The
converse is not true.

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:%236fa2ujfFHA.2840[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
- quote -

You use the software to do statement download? Then what? After the ecstasy
of having downloaded the data, hurling it into the bit bucket is fine?

"Richard Bollar" <bollar[at]bollar.org> wrote in message
news:Ot7gYNjfFHA.1048[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
- quote -

I'm sure Luddites get hit by cars anyway!

In any event, I, for one, think that statement download is the single best
reason to use the software and I find that OFX statement download works very
well for my various accounts.

--

"Treadmill" <treadmill23nospam[at]email.com> wrote in message
news:h4frknsl8nxg.1rig2ty2pk2cs$.dlg[at]40tude.net...
- quote -

The 2005 alternative to driving a car is impractical in many situations--you
just can't get there from here. Hand entering transaction data in Money is
not particularly hard or, with some practice, time consuming. As evidenced
by dozens of threads daily it is clearly less troublesome than many cases of
downloading data. In 1910, driving a car was not necessarily a great choice
compared to the alternatives. I would suggest that the present
bank<-> consumer EDI interfaces are about that primitive and ill-designed for
the purpose at hand. And Yodlee is a step backwards not forwards.

That said, I've never denied here that my way is backward, ignorant, and,
well, luddite. But it sure works dependably.

"Treadmill" <treadmill23nospam[at]email.com> wrote in message
news:h4frknsl8nxg.1rig2ty2pk2cs$.dlg[at]40tude.net...
- quote -

Spoken like a true luddite!

If I don't drive a car, I probably won't get into auto accidents either.

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 07:51:34 -0600, Dick Watson wrote:

- quote -

I don't download data. I don't have problems like this. I wonder if there's
a connection?

"Dan" <danf879[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1119754878.050213.64320[at]g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

1. My two bank accounts that download statements via the MSN Money
website (which in turn uses the Yodlee service) stopped updating both
on the website and within Money. The error message said to fix it I
needed to stop using the "online services" then reenable it, but when I
did, I received an "Account setup is unavaiable" message on one of the
two accounts. I did this 4 or 5 times, for kicks. Finally today I got
them both to work.. for now.

2. The starting balances of two other bank accounts conveniently reset
themeslves from one value to another, seemingly randomly, when I closed
and reopened my Money file. This happened a good 2 or 3 times.
Finally today the proper values seem to be "sticking".

3. The "Pay to" field for a certain set of transactions in a credit
card account was mysteriously removed, set to just a blank entry.

4. A few recent transactions were downloaded from the internet and
matched without asking me, resulting in duplicate transactions and
crazy balance differences. Nice.

5. This one's wild: I go to Sam's Club for both Gas and Groceries,
using the category feature to differanate between the two. Yesterday I
noticed in one credit card account, ALL the categories for Sam's Club,
going back 2 years, had been reset to a "Split" Sam's Club transaction
from about a year ago where I had bought both gas and groceries on the
same transaction, and split the two for proper bookeeping. So I had
about 30 Sam's Club entries that had the categories all set to "Split"
yet were not split transactions. Wonderful!

6. My stock portfolio accessed through the MSN Money website (from a
different computer) became horribly screwed about 2 days ago. ALL my
stocks were duplicated into the "Investments to Watch" category (which,
incidentially, changed names from "Invesments to Watch" to "Investments
to Watch-#2", then "#3", and "#4", seemingly at will.) Then when I
saved my MSN money portfolio all the duplicates came back into my Money
file. At one point something else glitched and I had NO stocks listed
in the accounts on the MSN website portfolio (the empty accounts were
still there however), and ALL were in the "Investments to Watch"
category, despite going into the My Documents folder, deleting the
porfolio, and refreshing the whole thing again.

I finally fixed this whole thing by a) making a backup of my Money
file, b) doing a synchronize in Money, c) going to the MSN porfolio
and deleting all the accounts, d) restoring the Money file, e) doing
another synchoronize, and f) reopening my MSN porfolio. Of course at
this point I had yet another set of duplicated stocks in the
"Investments to Watch" section my MSN porfolio, so I g) did a sync in
Money, h) deleted the stocks in the "Investments to Watch" section
one-by-one (saving the Dow Jones index and the like), and i) doing
another sync. Finally (j), refreshing the MSN portfolio made
everything a-ok.

In summary, a great time was had by all. Thank you, Microsoft Money.

-Dan