1. Yes, the Home & Business version of Money will do what she needs.
Is it more intuitive and user-friendly than Quickbooks? That's hard to
say. There is an excellent help function that answers just about any
question you could dream up (or at least it has for me). For example,
I work for an employer and have a side business. When I changed jobs,
I wanted to create a new paycheck and calculate deductions, taxes,
ect. automatically. To do that, you actually have to go to BILLS, then
NEW> PAYCHECK, which seems counterintuitive to me. But it was right
there in the help file so I found it easily...once I gave up searching
on my own.

2. No, the file format appears to be proprietary (.mny extension),
though I have not tried to see whether I could trick Access to import
it. You can download a 30-day trial and test it for yourself, though
you can't get the full-blown Home & Business as a trial. The report
functions are pretty robust for a small business, and--as you can
imagine--anything can be exported to Excel. So Access integration may
be a mulit-step process if you require it, but it's at least doable.

My only complaint to date is that most banks (all banks that I've
researched) seem to charge for direct Money integration, where manual
download of a Money import file is free. Anyone have a bank that
doesn't charge for that [and require that I have at least $5k in one
of their useless savings accounts]?


On Feb 15, 10:29 am, "cr113" <c...[at]hotmail.com> wrote:
- quote -

I'm helping my wife with her small business. She runs a small school/
tutoring service teaching foreign languages. She basically has two
types of customers, ones that are taking private hourly classes and
ones that are taking a semester class in a small group. Her teachers
are independent contractors. She needs to be able to bill her
customers and pay her teachers. I want to find the simplest possible
application that she can use because she really, really struggles on a
computer.

She bought Quickbooks last year and paid like $500 so she must have
bought the premier edition. I tried using it and was not impressed. It
looked way too complicated for what she is trying to do. I'm a
programmer and I'm used to working with Microsoft products and usually
find them to be more user friendly than other vendors. If I could find
something that uses Access as its database that would be a bonus.

Anyway 2 questions. Will Microsoft Money do what she needs? Does Money
use Access to store its data?

Thanks!