I think I misunderstood you, and, if so, I apologize.

Did you mean that "skip payment" keeps it from showing up in the "actual"
column of the Budget Summary?

I was trying to reproduce the problem, and couldn't do it, but while trying
it occurred to me that might have been what you meant. I took your question
to mean that the expense was removed from the Budget itself, which I am
pretty sure doesn't happen.

I didn't see the connection, because, at least the way I use the program,
scheduled bills are all things I don't have much control over. For instance,
you can't tell Money to budget $50 for the power bill in the winter and $100
in the summer. All you can do is budget $75/month, so -- even if you are
trying to influence it by turning up the thermostat -- it won't show up in
Budget Summary in any meaningful way. Also, credit card bills are lumped
together as "debt" in the Budget, and those are the ones I usually have to
manually categorize anyway and then go "skip payment" on.

Stuff that I actually have some chance of changing, like groceries, or
leisure activities, aren't "scheduled bills." That's why you need to budget
them, in my mind. So I just didn't get the connection at all. Sorry. And as
always -- YMMV.

Susan

"R. Ian Lee" <RIanLee[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:4870F149-592D-4C3E-8791-ACEE9E572458[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

The problem with "Skip"ing the bill is that it causes the budget to skip that
month in terms of allocating money towards that bill. What there really
needs to be is a "Paid" button...

I've found the budget to be very useful once you figure out all the right
switches and techniques required to make it work. With me and my wife both
making purchases daily it became almost impossible to control where the money
was going and impulse shopping was getting out of control. By using the
budget it makes you plan where your $$$s will go rather than just buying
whatever you want. More importantly, it makes you plan on having money left
over at the end of the month. Something that rarely happened prior to using
the budget.

"harrelsonesq" wrote:

- quote -

I would categorize the way I use Money as somewhere in between what Dick
does and what many people try to do. Call it "semi-downloader" behavior.
What I do works pretty well for me. As always, YMMV.

I download transactions from my bank about once a week. As you have noticed,
*some* of those transactions match to scheduled transactions. Some do not.

When I'm done accepting transactions, I go back to the home page, and if
there are "overdue" bills there which aren't, I go into bills and "skip" the
ones that didn't get matched. I have never noticed any effect on any other
part of the program from skipping them. The only thing that is affected is
the account balance at the bottom, but since that is broken from when it
used to be useful anyway, I don't care.

I'm not sure why they would change anything in the budget. I have never seen
that. I will admit I don't find the budget very useful, and don't rely on it
for anything. I already know I don't make enough money, but that's a whole
other problem.

I'm more concerned with making sure everything has been paid that was
supposed to be paid -- they do occasionally forget to send you a bill, but
not to assess a late charge if that happens, after all -- and having reports
be correct. As long as the bill has been categorized properly in the
register, it shows up in the reports. It doesn't seem to matter what happens
to it in Scheduled Bills.

I do *no* manual entry in my checking account. I do manual reconciliation on
my credit cards, as I have only a couple that download properly, and enter
any transactions at that time. Using my bank's website for bill pay and
downloading into Money is virtually trouble free, and IMO beats either
manual entry or trying to get those functions within Money to work
correctly. It works for me, but as I said, YMMV.

Susan

"R. Ian Lee" <RIanLee[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:4D936B3F-526B-4955-A2DA-FA5A4E4045DC[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

For me, Job 1 is to get the scheduled stuff entered. Many of my scheduled
items are set to enter automagically so all I have to do is start Money to
get them entered. Job 2 is to enter transactions that aren't scheduled. Job
3, on an exception basis, is to pick up data from other sources (Discover
web site for stuff for which I couldn't know a final amount, entering
investment Buys once price can be known). If I do this in the middle of a
cycle, I will mark transactions Cleared as appropriate.
Occasionally--generally when off-nominal things are going on like vacations
or paying for kid wedding stuff or cash flow crunches or whatever--I will
test the C balance against things like Discover web site running balance to
make sure there are not surprises lurking. Job 4 is to use the Balance
wizard against statements. (I conclude from your description that you do not
use the wizard. I suspect this creates more work for you.) Sometimes Job 4
reveals stuff that fell through the crack or charges that ended up different
in amount than what I entered.

Note that this suggests I work essentially backwards from the way you work.
Perhaps this is because I use Money to manage more proactively (Forecast
Cash Flow is how I steer the boat) rather than retroactively (Budget Planner
performance and Net Worth are of secondary importance to me).

"R. Ian Lee" <RIanLee[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:4D936B3F-526B-4955-A2DA-FA5A4E4045DC[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Dick, I agree with you that if one regularly (daily) enters transactions
manually, then there probably is little advantage to using the downloaded
statements. Over the past ten years of using Money, my ability to maintain
this type of discipline has been hindered many times due to extensive travel
and what not that caused me to only be able to update Money once a month or
worse. I had neglected Money for most of this year until the start of May
when I decided it was time to give the budget feature a good attempt. Being
able to download the transactions for the first five months of the year and
then just step through them and apply categories was a huge time-saver. Now
that I'm using the budget feature, I feel more of an urgency to keep the
transactions up-to-date since there is more value in it than just being able
to see my net worth. For people only tracking net worth and investments
there is alot of value in this feature even if it means going back and making
a few corrections since they most likely don't need to see the balance on a
daily basis. As an almost daily updater now, I'm tending to lean more
towards just using manual entry, although I still believe that it would save
me considerable time to use the downloaded statements if they would just fix
the few problems I've mentioned. I'll continue to give it a new look over
after each new version is released in hope...of a miracle.

Regarding the entry of bills... It probably helps to understand my manual
process that I currently use. What I typically do is go to my bank's website
and view my statement then starting from where I last left off, I will walk
down the transactions line-by-line and either reconcile a transaction that I
may have entered at the time of the purchase or I will enter the transaction
into the account register. If I have to flip back & forth from the register
to "Bills" depending on what kind of transaction it is then that seems like a
bit of extra work that I would rather not have to do. It would be ideal for
me to enter the transactions and then at the end mark off the bills that were
paid that didn't automatically discover this. If your process is more
effecient, I'm certainly willing to try it.

"Dick Watson" wrote:

- quote -

Gee, I still enter all my data manually. Based on what I see in statements,
what I read here, and the amount of value I add to the data (splits,
classification, memo data) that will NEVER get downloaded, I'm convinced the
extra effort is not all that significant in magnitude and worth it many
times over in data quality. But to each his own.

That having been said, I am continually amazed how many people come here
with one or another manner of problem(s) directly traceable to the
downloaded data thing who still swear by it. If it's so good, they wouldn't
be here. And many of them say, more or less, "Microsoft should make this
work better". How would they do that? Many of the problems stem from the
utter unwillingness of the FIs to expend any effort to play along and the
fact that their systems are from the 60s and were just not designed with
this interface in mind. After a decade of trying to work that, Microsoft got
essentially nowhere. A lot of the remaining issues--like yours--can only be
solved with "perfect" transaction matching and that problem clearly can't be
solved with an engineering solution using existing technology. It's an AI
problem. BTW, if you want to experience Microsoft's idea of "fixing the core
functionality," try Essential Register.

You say manual entry doesn't solve your problem since "[you] would still go
to the account to enter the transaction instead of through the 'Bills' tab.
If it didn't pick it up automatically when [you] entered it, then [you]
still have to perform the workaround to hide the bill reminder." This is
surely true and it illustrates the point precisely: Enter bills from Bills
and your problem is 100% solved. What's the point of scheduling a bill and
then typing it in? That's one of the ways I save lots of manual transaction
entry. I have virtually everything that recurs on any schedule (even
passport renewal on 10 year centers) scheduled.

"R. Ian Lee" <RIanLee[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:A0586A31-C5BC-448B-AECF-F90141963D6D[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Sure. I remember the days when we had to enter every transaction in
manually... I enjoy that couple of extra hours of sleep I get now.
Microsoft needs to spend less time playing with all of their online features
that noone uses and spend some time fixing the core functionality...

This wouldn't solve the problem, though. I would still go to the account to
enter the transaction instead of through the "Bills" tab. If it didn't pick
it up automatically when I entered it, then I still have to perform the
workaround to hide the bill reminder.

"Dick Watson" wrote:

- quote -

Not downloading transaction data is another way of avoiding lots of issues
like this.

"R. Ian Lee" <RIanLee[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:CB927E68-A69B-49CA-A7D2-8B8EDC53F220[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I have bills setup in the "Bills" section of Money 2006. When I download
transactions from my bank that Money thinks are the bills that I'm paying,
then it matches the transactions and asks me if this is the bill. After that
the bill is marked as paid and doesn't appear again in Bills until next
month. This works great. However, when Money fails to match up the records
and I do not manually associate a transaction with a bill then there appears
to be no way to mark the bill paid and make it stop showing as over due in
the bills section. I can choose "skip", but that makes it think that I want
to skip it in my budget also. So, that's not a good solution. The only way
I've found around this so far is to go to bills and choose "Record a payment"
which puts an entry into an account which I must then go and manually delete.
If anyone knows of a simpler solution, please let me know.

Thanks,

Ian