tragic!

I'm having an ongoing dialog with one of the Microsoft support people
about this issue right now. Will post here to let you all know how it
turns out.

Once upon a time Money prided itself on implementing basic accounting
principles rather than just pretend stuff like cookie jar budgeting. Then
along came lots of users chewing up support budgets who didn't know or care
about such things but wanted to know why their credit card payments weren't
in the budget, et al. That was the beginning of the end for Budget Planner.

<jgirard[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1121095079.129016.320940[at]z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

Follow-up to #2, in case anyone else shares my frustration on this..

I installed the trial version of 06, and the same bug exists in 06.

I see what you're saying, Derrick, thanks for the input.

The reason I label this a bug is because it violates basic accounting
principles, which essentially say that anytime you transfer between two
accounts that you own (even if it is to buy an asset like a stock), no
expense or income should be recorded. This makes sense: when I buy a
stock, the money is not disappearing (hopefully!); it's being
transferred into an asset and can later be transferred out of that
asset. From an accounting point of view, buying a stock is no more an
expense than selling one is income.

I understand your workaround, and appreciate you sharing it. The only
challenge I have with this (on top of what I mentioned in the earlier
post) is that Money automatically downloads all of my transactions from
my stock accounts, so this would require manually changing all of them.
I may just go ahead and do it, based on the trouble this is causing
with reporting..

thanks again!

This occurs in M2004, too. Not sure I would call it a "bug"; buy
converting cash to shares of stock/funds, you are literally transferring
money out of the usable cash flow. No comment on dividend recording.

Regardless, this is how I "account" for this. First, I exclude all my
investment accounts from my budget. Next, I record transfers of cash
between investment and non-investment accounts not as a literal
"transfer", but two separate transactions.

For example, if I want to buy $100 of GOOG via ShareBuilder:
- in my cash account, record an expense of $100 to "_Transfers
Out:Investments", where "_Transfers Out" is an expense category;
- in my investment account, record an income of $100 to "_Transfers
In:Cash", where "_Transfers In" is an income category;

This way, the _Transfers (In/Out) categories allow me to bridge between
budget and non-budget accounts, and everything "balances".

Hope this helps,
Derrick

jgirard[at]gmail.com wrote:
- quote -

There is a bug that has been documented elsewhere in this newsgroup
that I am running into in Money 2005. Namely, stock transactions show
up as "Transfers in/out of budgeted accounts" even if the stock account
in question is "included" in budgets.

This results in double counting or inappropriately high expenses in
looking at the budgeted vs. actuals report.

For instance, if I receive a dividend, it shows up as income AND shows
up as a "transfer to a budgeted account" (counted twice). If I buy a
stock, it shows up as an expense: "Tranfer from a budgeted account".
This, of course, is nonsense -- transfers of any kind do not create
expenses, nor should they be counted as income.

My two questions:

(1) Aside from excluding the relevant stock accounts from the budget
(which would work, but then would remove the ability to budget for
dividend income, which I would like to do), is there any work around
here?

(2) Does anyone with Money 06 know if this bug is still present in 06?
(I think it has been present sense 03 or 04 . . .)

Thank you,
John