You don't mention whether you are using Deluxe or Essential (MEss). It may
be relevant. Following answer assumes Deluxe and Advanced Bills and
Register.

What you should do depends on your objectives. Basic scenarios range from:

Doing it all by hand, downloading nothing.

to

Doing nothing by hand and downloading everything.

Most users end up somewhere in the middle. Downloading, done properly,
needn't duplicate anything you've previously entered by hand and there are
reasons you may want to enter transactions by hand in advance of downloading
them. Likewise, you can go and edit a downloaded transaction to add
information that will never in our lifetimes download but that you might
want to collect by hand. Examples include the breakout of your paycheck
income and expenses, serial numbers and warranty information for your toys
when you buy them, and mode detailed categorization for, say, the $400 you
spent at WalMart on groceries, supplies, PS3 games, and a tree for the front
yard. (FWIW, I've never downloaded even one transaction to Money and I have
fourteen years of data collected. As near as I can tell it's a whole lot
more trouble than it's worth. But that's just me. Many others think I'm a
raving lunatic on the subject.)

The basic technique to avoid duplicating hand entries and downloaded data is
"matching" the downloads with hand entered transactions and/or scheduled
bills. This is the semi-automated/semi-manual alignment so that Money
recognizes that two separate things--the hand-entered transaction and/or
bill and the downloaded data--are really one in the same. This process is
the second largest gremlin for people who download transaction data because
a) the data coming from the FIs is frequently incomplete and mal-formed, and
b) Money isn't as good at this as it probably could be. See help or hundreds
of prior postings for the newsgroup on the subject. (Search, advanced, for
newsgroup microsoft.public.money at http://groups.google.com.)

The second technique to avoid duplicating download data causing problems is
to master the "Transfer" or "Credit Card Payment" and to delete the
pre-defined, but stupid, category "Credit Card Payments/Transfers". This
addresses the situation where, say, you download a $1,000 "bill" to pay
Discover from your checking account and then download a $1,000 "payment"
from Discover that are really fundamentally the same thing.

Hopefully that gets you started. The question is probably too broad to
address everything you need to know in one answer. Mess around and come back
with more narrowly tailored questions.

"Jambruins" <Jambruins[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:63F59D58-DB7C-493C-967C-6DB620C0F6A7[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I am using a trial version of microsoft money 2007. If I download all my
transactions from my bank account online should I still enter in my bills or
will this cause microsoft money to basically double my bills? Thanks in
advance.