Since Steve hasn't piped in, I will. I share your conviction. Unlike Chris,
I generally do not find manual entry tedious and every indication I have is
that it has to be less error prone (or prone to different errors of lesser
magnitude) than the download stuff.

Now, mornings like this morning when I have probably a hundred transactions
to enter from a week on travel, well, that's tedious. Of course, in the best
case, I'd only be able to download maybe half or fewer of these--and many
wouldn't be available for download yet even though I need to get the task
done for expense reporting purposes. Of the ones I could download, virtually
all of them would be new payees and subject to a high likelihood of wrong
category guesses. Since my wife went with me on a business trip, I'd have to
split virtually every transaction by hand. Since many transactions are on
corporate card or were cash, I'd have absolutely no way to download those.

"Robert Sharon" <rcsharon[at]att.net> wrote in message
news:cRxJe.565479$cg1.531698[at]bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
- quote -

On 2005-08-11, Steve <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote:
- quote -

Although it wasn't my goal in having the conversation, I'm glad I
was able to help with this.

That would be a problem for me, as well. Don't consider it acceptable. Find
a credit card provider that supports direct statements in Money. There are
many that will, for free, and they're falling all over themselves to get
your business.

"Steve" <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote in message
news:1123768201.938610.230600[at]z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

Mark & Chris,
First I want to thank you for motivating me to try
the so called automatic downloads to Money. Last night I checked my
Capitol One visa web site and found that they do indeed download their
monthly statement to Money in the OFX format. I tried it and it worked
very easily. The matching process was all there also. I had one item
with a one cent difference in which the download was WRONG! The bank
balance was off by the one cent after the download. Why, I don't know.
Capitol One allows the download only with the monthly statement which
is a problem for me. I want to reconcile daily and there is no ability
to download to Money on their recent activity statement. After playing
around with the data I can see that this can work for many people. I am
sure that Capitol One will eventually allow daily updates, but for now
I will continue to do my manual reconciliation. I still believe doing
it manually is quicker and less complicated FOR ME. Thanks again. Steve

Alternatively, do you *really* care that you spent that money Saturday,
versus Monday? I don't, and I buy everything possible using my credit card.
If a particular transaction falls on the 2nd of one month rather than the
31st of the previous, and that effects my monthly budget, it's probably
balanced by the same event the previous month and the following month. In
short, it's a wash.

Ignore all the discussions of OFX or QIF or whatever. Just make a backup and
do it. Your loss of time reentering data, if you decide to bag it and
rollback to your backup, will be really, really small. In fact, you won't
even have to rollback. Just revise the posting dates to match the precision
of date accuracy that you demand.

What could you possibly lose by trying this.

NB: My positive comments refer to banks that support Money directly. You'll
know which ones do by not having a Passport password in Money. If you try to
set up online banking for a particular credit card, and Money says you have
to create a Passport, you'll know that bank is supported only through
Yodlee. In that case, it may still work well for you. I just don't have
personal experience with that.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL



"Mark Horn" <mark[at]hornclan.com> wrote in message
news:slrndfkans.500.mark[at]home.hornclan.com...
- quote -

On 2005-08-10, Steve <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote:
- quote -

Usually they say so.

- quote -

You'd enter it manually in exactly the same fashion that you
do now. The difference is that you'd reconcile that entry with
a transaction download instead of with a visual inspection of
a website. When you download the transaction, it would try to
match your manual transaction. If there's something different,
it will show you what's different. If it matched incorrectly,
there's a "change" button to change the match.

Or you could do what I do, which is wait until the transaction
downloads and categorize it then. I'm forced to do this for almost
all of the transactions that my wife puts on the credit card since
she doesn't keep receipts.

- quote -

My experience has been that if they have a link to a quicken download
seperate from a money download, it means that they support both
OFX and QFX (Intuit's extension to OFX). If they just have some
generic link to downloads, then it's probably QIF.

- quote -

I don't think your thinking is wrong. I just didn't understand it.
I think I do now. When you go to a particular FI, you don't know
if you're getting QIF, OFX, or Yodlee. And trying to figure out
is more of a headache than visually matching manual transactions
to a website. That's not been my experience, but I'm not trying
to dismiss yours.

IMHO, the easiest way to avoid Yodlee is to avoid M05 or M06.
If you're using those products, then the next easiest way to avoid
Yodlee is to avoid setting using passport in Money. If you do that,
then it's fairly easy to avoid QIF. If you can do direct downloads
into Money and it doesn't ask you to setup a passport account,
then you get OFX.

Mark. Chris, Richard. My point is I don't know a thing about OFX. How
do I know if my vendors use that type of transaction? Even if they do,
how do I reflect in Money that I spent $25 last night at a restaurant
when the transaction doesn't post to my Capitol One visa card until
tomorrow or the next day?

Mark, sorry for the long winded sentence. I'm not really against really
saving time with these "automatic" downloads, but based on what I hear
on this forum, I'm afraid that the true integration we all seek is not
yet there. Sure, I could experiment with Capitol One credit card, but
if their web site doesn't prominently display a link to Money 2006, I
assume they do not yet support the transactions. I sure don't want
yodlee involved. Why is my thinking wrong?
Steve

Indeed. OFX transaction download is fantastic!

--

"Chris Cowles" <NoSpam[at]For.me> wrote in message
news:OLLpRQVnFHA.2472[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Make a backup, then download for a few days. After you've done some initial
vendor matching and categorization, I think you'll find it's pretty
intelligent and you can save a lot of labor. I don't enter any credit card
transactions manually. The exception is credit card payments which Money
suggests automatically when balancing the account.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL


"Poster Man" <mark[at]nospam.com> wrote in message
news:1123558182.d14c9eaff7d9626d921b3139602b16f0[at]teranews...
- quote -

On 2005-08-09, Steve <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote:
- quote -

Wow. That is one *LOOONG* sentence.

That being said, I'm not sure exactly how you come to that
conclusion. The point that I was trying to make is that OFX
works great. It works exactly the way I think it should work.
I'm hard pressed to think of something else that I'd want it to do.
QIF works, but with tradeoffs that even I (a pretty staunch
downloader) wouldn't want to deal with.

The only time that OFX stops working great is if you intentionally
do something like turn off online services for an FI and then turn
them back on.

- quote -

For bill pay, Wachovia's integration with Money is free and I avoid
double entry and possible errors in the manual transfer.

But, like I said before. I'm not trying to convert you. If you
like what you're doing, go for it. I still don't fully understand
your complaints. But, of course, I don't have to.

Mark, your answers to the above set of questions about OFX and QIF
convince me more than ever that Money and the various prime time
vendors like Bank of America, Fidelity, various credit card companies,
etc are NOT yet ready to provide the "average" user of Money with the
comfort level that ALL their transactions will post CORRECTLY thru
automatic download vrs just manually entering the data and manually
checking the vendor's web site for confirmation. For bill pay the
double entry I do with BOA saves me from any monthly charges for the
service. Steve

On 2005-08-09, Cal Learner-- MVP <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote:
- quote -

It will do the matching to any transaction that is not already
associated with an OFX transaction ID. It doesn't matter if the
transaction is cleared or reconciled. What matters is whether
or not Money can find an OFX transaction ID associated with an
existing transaction. If it can find one, then it will remove
that transaction from the pool of possible transactions to match.
If no OFX transaction ID is asociated with that transaction, then
it will be put into the pool of possible transactions to match.

One way to see this is to do this (these assume M04 instructions):

1. Accounts & Bills -> Online Services Manager
2. Select an FI and click on "Modify services"
3. Select "No, I want to discontinue using online services"
4. Complete this process.
5. Accounts & Bills -> Online Services Manager
6. Select the FI and click on "Setup online services"
7. Complete this process.

After doing this, you will have completely disassociated any OFX
transaction IDs from all of the accounts held at that FI. When you
re-setup your online services, it will ask you how many days worth
of transactions you want to download. Money will rematch those
transactions and you'll have to re-accept all of them, even though
they're already reconciled.

FWIW, I don't have any inside information that this is how it works.
I'm guessing based on the behavior that I've seen when matching
transactions using both OFX and QIF and based on having had to do
the above process (for other reasons) in the past.

In microsoft.public.money, Mark Horn wrote:

- quote -

If the transaction is cleared or reconciled, does it still do that
matching? I was assuming the existing user would have cleared and
reconciled transactions.

- quote -

Yes, and the aggressiveness of looking for a match can vary with
different vintages of Money.

- quote -

Agreed.

On 2005-08-09, Cal Learner-- MVP <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote:
- quote -

While this is true, it's not the whole story. OFX downloads will do
duplicate matching the first time that you download the transaction.
Once you accept an OFX downloaded transaction, that transaction
will never be matched for duplicates ever again. The reason is
that every transaction in OFX has a unique identifier and Money
knows about that ID.

With QIF transactions do not have unique IDs. As a consequence
if today you download transactions using QIF for the last 7 days,
you'll have to match all of the transactions for the last 7 days.
Tomorrow if you do it again, you'll have to rematch many of those
same transactions. Since QIF transactions don't have a unique ID,
there's no way for Money to know that the new transactions today
aren't completely new transactions, so it has to guess as to whether
or not they're correct.

IMHO, the guessing algorithm is pretty bad. If you have a choice
between OFX and QIF, go with OFX. It'll save you daily headaches.

$.02

In microsoft.public.money, Poster Man wrote:

- quote -

If you go to http://www.microsoft.com/money/bankonline.aspx, look up
your bank/credit card/broker and the popup does not mention third
party, you will probably be getting OFX.

It stands for Open Financial eXchange format, and is the kind of
access that I prefer.

If you do access via a web site, the information will come in as OFX
or QIF. Those work well too, but are less automatic. Still very
worthwhile IMO.


- quote -

What is OFX download?

Thanks for your responses!

On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 22:53:49 -0500, via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx(Cal
Learner-- MVP) wrote:


- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, Poster Man wrote:

- quote -

You could make an extra backup of your file in case you don't like
the results.

- quote -

It depends on the download method. For OFX download, it remembers
after the first time what it has previously seen downloaded. You can
request how far back to go initially, and the supplier may honor
your request. ;-)

QIF download looks for duplicates, but I think you have to identify
the account each time.


- quote -

It asks for the first time.

I've never used auto updating. I've always been concerned that since
I'm manually entering every credit card item/ checking acct item, what
happens when I then download transactions from the bank? Will it
duplicate all the items or is it smart enough to figure that out? How
does it know what accounts/categories to put each on into?

Thanks!

On 7 Aug 2005 22:19:10 -0700, "Lori" <rhodesbiz[at]bellsouth.net> wrote:

- quote -

Thanks for all of your comments regarding downloading records. These are
the most positive replies I have ever seen. I guess this is because most
all postings are related to only problems that do occur.

I may have to re-think my current procedures.


"Lori" <rhodesbiz[at]bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:1123478350.810212.30540[at]o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

I love automatic updates (downloading) in MS Money. I do money updates
every morning before I go to work, and download 10 accounts from my
State Employees Credit Union, mainly banking accounts, and transactions
from 8-10 credit cards. I only have to go to the website for one bank
(Bank of America) to download my 2 accounts from there. I use a lot of
different credit cards, because certain cards earn me cash on different
things. When I max out one card, then I just switch to another.

Anyway, downloading is great! I know ALL my transactions are entered
(I forget about so many when I do it manually), my accounts are
balanced, and I feel I can really kept track of everything in just a
few clicks of a button. Between accounts with my hustand, two teenagers
and my mom, I would NEVER have everything listed if I had to do it
manually. And the best part is knowing that if unauthorized charges are
placed on one of my cards, I'll know it within a day (or two-three if
it is a weekend). It's also great knowing EVERY place your teen has
spent money... kind of a track record of where they have been. All of
this is wonderful peace of mind for me.

Lori