Glad you figured it out.

You are probably right about the bugs. I have had crazy things like that
happen when I used to trade options as well. In fact I switched from
Quicken to Money because Quicken could not handle short option trades at all
and I was selling a lot of puts and calls at the time.

As long as you are careful to cross check your reports against account
balances like you are doing Money is pretty safe. It definitely is not
perfect but no cheap software like Money will ever be perfect. When I was
trading full time I kept a duplicate set of trade records in Excel which I
knew was correct to the penny and I used that to verify Money's account and
report balances. After several years of comparing Money' reports with my
Excel spreadsheet, I developed a very high degree of confidence that Money
was completely reliable for routine matters but some off the wall stuff like
you described would happen occasionally so I continued my Excel backup work
until I finally retired from active trading.

Regards

Bill Wood


"garbanzo" <garbanzo[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:75C8D3CE-DD01-453E-BDC2-1C10F282B230[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I spent the better part of
yesterday doing exactly what you suggest and did find the specific problems.
From my point of view there are bugs in Money 2006 (and probably earlier
versions). The solution was actually twofold. First, for some reason Money
doesn't ignore Voided transactions. I found two Voided transactions which,
when deleted yesterday, changed the cash balance. Not the way I would expect
a program to treat that situation.

Second, and more important, I was able to determine that several Option
transactions which were properly entered and visible in the Transaction
Register, were not being used to calculate balances. By deleting these
trades and then re-entering the EXACT SAME information, my balances finally
matched the reports.

For a program as sophisticated as Money to ignore transactions which are
clearly visible in the register leads me to believe there are bugs. There is
no excuse for this behavior. I doubt you would run into this problem because
2002 handles options much differently than 2005 or 2006.

"William R Wood" wrote:

- quote -

This problem can probably be solved.

The reason you have not received an answer to your post is probably because
nobody has seen this specific issue. You did not provide enough facts to
fully understand the problem and, as a practical matter, it would be too
time consuming for others to reproduce the problem even if you did describe
it fully. Money's reports can be complex and it is not always obvious where
the numbers come from.

I have been using money for many years (I use version 2002 because I don't
like any of the newer versions) and I can assure you that it is accurate and
reliable. There is a reason for the discrepancy that you are seeing and it
can be found if you look hard enough. If the issue is a bug it can be
reproduced and then you can deal with it. MSFT may even fix it if you
report it.

The best I can tell you is to very carefully investigate the reports and
figure out where Money is getting the problem numbers from. I have seen
problems similar to yours and all of them were caused by mistakes in the
original transactions and usually my fault. Once you fully understand how
Money computes numbers in reports it will be far easier for you to get Money
to do exactly what you want so fixing this problem will help you in many
other ways over the years.

If you have more questions that are more specific, ask away.

Good luck.


Regards,

Bill Wood
Fountain Hills, AZ



"garbanzo" <garbanzo[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:87E30628-B552-458E-8E59-B600B1317FCB[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I don't know if anyone else has encountered this problem or is aware of any
discussion but I just noticed there is a major discrepancy between the
investment account value as shown in Portfolio and the value for the same
investment account as of the exact same date as shown in the Net Worth report.

I would expect that the Net Worth report would pick up the account values
from the Portfolio manager but this doesn't appear to be the case. What
leads me to believe it's a programming bug is that the amount changes over
time. In other words, I compared the values for this account at month's end
over a 6 month period and the difference between Portfolio and Net Worth for
this specific account changes significantly.

What is especially weird is the discrepancy is large (I'm talking thousands
of $$), it's always an even dollar amount (no cents), and it doesn't match to
any transaction values during the month.

Equally strange is for 1/31/06 the discrepancy has disappeared. However,
when I go back and create a Net Worth report for 12/31/04 and compare it to
the report I printed at the time, again there is a big discrepancy. This
leads me to believe that it occurs within the program over time and will show
up for 1/31/06 at a later date.

I completely depend on Money to manage my finances and rely on its accuracy.
It is very disconcerting to discover this problem and would appreciate any
help.