Interesting story and history. My first PC was an IBM Mdl 30.

At one time I spent hours every month balancing a check book. Then
BNY added dialup banking. I was one happy camper. Now I am totally
online. So, the need shifts to integration ... bring it all home. I
could do it manually but at a cost of my time. So, time is what I get
from Mny. The auto account updating makes Mny worth while. I have no
need to know and regulate life's costs to line items. C'est la vie.

arthur
==
On Tue, 23 May 2006 12:28:01 -0700, Dick Watson
<littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:

- quote -

Once upon a time, I did cash flow planning/forecasting on an HP 41c/cv with
the mag card reader. I'd use one mag card per pay period and allocate account
balances to various memory registers. Read in the previous period's card.
Add/subtract new transactions in this period. Write the end of period card.

Along came 123 and my first IBM 5150. (Wow!--both an MDA and an EGA and two
screens with the spreadsheet on the amber Amdek 310a and the graph on the IBM
5154 "Enhanced Color Display"! When 1-2-3 v. 2a came out, I bought an Intel
8087. Such POWER!) The budget/status system moved to the spreadsheet and what
horizons it opened up. I could have every pay period for a moving year or
more on it. I could allow lots of rows leading to a period ending balance
just for keeping the individual puts and takes. I could easily sum the
balances of the liability and asset accounts to get a quasi-net worth. I
could pick pay periods to put future projected expenses in and get much
better cash flow forecasting! Budget? Impossible or very difficult. Tracking
who the money went to? Tough. (My solution at the time predicted the Money
question: payee or account?)

This never really transitioned to Excel because Money and Excel basically
were available to me at the same time.

With Money, I could keep track of why the money went and where it went. I
could look at transactions by Payee. I could keep notes in a transaction. For
a couple of Money versions, I lost cash flow forecasting but then Money
finally added some real capabilities there.

Now that Money is firmly in middle age and "jumping the shark", I've
actually dabbled with migrating the functions I need out of Money to Access
by doing a proof-of-concept prototype. (With M98/9 I tried peeking around in
their database when it was directly exposed to Jet. They obfuscated what they
were doing pretty seriously and I was less adept with Access/SQL than I am
now. Got nowhere.)

I have developed schema and migration tools to get a full-up set of
transactions into Access via specially crafted standard reports, exported to
..CSV, and a significant investment in code and queries to normalize the crap
that comes over from Money and to deal with some of its quirks like VOID in
the middle of a check number field. (This turned into a bigger deal than I
first thought it would be because of all of the complications in stitching
transactions back together that show up in various reports multiple times but
are really the same transaction.) LOTS of data gets lost like loan terms,
account and category details, paycheck tab association of the split data,
etc. My schema even does cool things like transaction level currency
exchange, recursive split, and arbitrary depth of transaction vectors (e.g.,
Food:Groceries:Produce:Green or, perhaps more to the point, Paycheck:Before
Taxes:Insurance:Health). Presently, I'm mentally dabbling with morphing what
I have into a schema more like the GnuCash pure double entry accounting
schema were Accounts (Money term) like Discover are treated more or less the
same as Categories (Money term) like Food:Groceries and everything is a
transfer. Solves some problems. Creates others.

But despite a significant effort to get here, my Project Dinero database is
a long way from being a Money replacement even for my needs. I've done
essentially nothing to create a UI for easily manipulating transactions and
their data. There is some business logic that isn't created/enforced. I
haven't dealt with entire issues like lot sales and scheduled transactions.
Some of the fundamental capabilities like cash flow projection and displayed
running balance I haven't dealt with yet. (Running balance, it turns out, is
really not something SQL knows how to do.)

OTOH, my whole transaction data set takes less time to read in and stitch
back together from the Money reports than Money takes to create and export
the reports in the first place. And the database fits in 10MB with all of the
code vs. 67MB in M06 fpr just my data. (Big reasons I suspect mine is smaller
is lack of historic quotes and, I suspect **the** biggie, no replication.)

I guess the point of this long ramble is, more or less, "been there, done
that". Done right, this is more than a simple row/column database or
multi-sheet spreadsheet. Even to get to the level of function I would
consider a replacement for my use of Money--and I'd give up some features in
exchange for total control--there's probably thousands of hours of effort to
go. I may not download, but Money still has an amount of function that is not
as readily replaced as you imply. I wish it weren't so.

"arthur" wrote:

- quote -

Dick

Why not just use a data base program then?
If you have to do it manually you might as well do it your way instead
of accepting what some programmer designed for you.

For example, I was using a Lotus Approach database to inventory our CD
music collection. I have since converted it to an OpenOffice
spreadsheet when I moved to a new machine.

An accounting ledger is simply a 2 dimentional - row / column - book.
It maps perfectly to spread sheets. Tracking expenses and income is
just a matter of 1 or 2 additional sheets with columns for category as
one approach. This can be keyed to the checking and in a similar
manner to credit cards.

Remove all the Money or Quicken glitz and sans the auto transaction
updating, it is a waste of money. I suspect any database program
could be adapted to keep track of ones finances. Financial analysis
is a separate problem depending on individual situations.

arthur
==

On Mon, 22 May 2006 19:21:18 -0600, "Dick Watson"
<littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote:

- quote -

See http://umpmfaq.info/faqdb.php?q=150. I can't entirely vouch for what it
says--I don't download transaction data. Every day I read posts here and am
reminded why.

"Andrew M" <AndrewM[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:F8AEE762-7EF5-4EED-B9AB-515D2A34A78F[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I am running MS Money 2001 Standard OEM Edition, version 9.0. When I
downloaded my VISA statement once from my bank's website, I selected the
wrong account in MS Money. Now every time I download the VISA statement, it
places the transactions in this incorrect account. Is there any way to
reassign it to the correct account? I now have to go into the account in MS
Money and move every transaction into the correct account.

I tried exporting the data from the incorrect account, creating a new
account and importing it and then deleting the incorrect account, but there
are too many foreign exchange transactions that didn't import correctly. I
therefore had to recover MS Money from a backup.

Thanks.