I live in Australia and use the US 2007 deluxe version set with Australian
currency as my base currency. I have no particular use for special tax
features but do rely on the investment section alot...there lies a very big
problem. The cost basis on my US based investments are always distorted
because there is no foreign exchange rate stored with the purchase cost.
(Purchase price is converted to 'cost basis' at the fx rate on the date a
report is generated.) Any reports that rely on cost basis are useless for
other than purely Australian investments (for me). That one change would be
a huge improvement of the functionality MS Money internationally.

I won't bore you with what I went through before settling on this particular
solution. It just means I have to keep alot of information in excel
worksheets. I would have switched to Quicken but found it was impossible to
convert my data and history.

"Richh" wrote:

- quote -

Richh,
There a couple of big things you don't understand, forget all the details of
the tax law.
#1 (Excuse the shouting) There is NOBODY FROM MICROSOFT in this group!
Everyone here is a user similar to you.
#2 There has not been any version other than a USA and a Japanese version of
Money produced since 2004 (Money 2005). Money is not updating any of its
other versions (and for all we know, may stop producing new versions of USA
and Japan Money as well).

Please make further comments with these two items in mind.
--
Peace,
BobJ

"Richh" <spam[at]spam.com> wrote in message
news:488c84ce$0$896$ba4acef3[at]news.orange.fr...
- quote -

"SteveB" <respond[at]online.newsgroup.invalid> wrote in message
news:xn0ft66ah16jmfu000[at]msnews.microsoft.com...
- quote -

The Canadian version actually disappeared a few versions ago. What we have
now is a "North American" version, that switches between USA and Canadian
mode based on the currency as set in Windows.

Making matters worse, from what many users have posted here, Money Plus (and
possibly a version or two before that) can't be bought by Canadians, unless
they give a fake USA address during the purchase process.

The last I've read, we're now down to a USA and Japanese version of Money.
Most of the other regionalized versions were dropped between Money 2000 and
Money 2005.

We sort of have a UK version, if MS disabling the online services timebomb
in Money 2005 UK counts. However, Money 2005 was the slowest and buggiest
version for many users, until Money 2007 introduced "Nuke the Bills".

--
Scott Tyler
agent_scotty-at-hotmail-dot-com

You do? And when was the last time ANY of those were updated?

"Richh" <spam[at]spam.com> wrote in message
news:488c3840$0$957$ba4acef3[at]news.orange.fr...
- quote -

assets in another country.
- quote -

OK, I should have rephrased my question - please can we have a European
version??

Europe is a bigger market than USA, even if you just include the five most
populous countries. So you would only have to make a version with five
principal languages and five sets of tax rules, to have a potential market
bigger than Money USA. There are/were Money versions for the four biggest
European countries - so just combine them into one program.

Richh wrote:

- quote -

Of course it is. But if you're going to sell software for your
international case, it has to work for all cases.

- quote -

I take your word for it that this is the way things work in Europe. But
remember, your package is international, so it has to work everywhere.

- quote -

Unfortunately, that's not a simple choice. There are just under 200
countries in the world today. Every single function in the Money
program would have to be followed by an IF statement with 200 branches.
"IF Country=USA THEN Taxable=Yes; IF Country=Germany THEN Taxable=No;
....". The Money program just got 200 times bigger. I'll be generous,
since I know some programming tricks that will simplify things, and say
it's only 100 times bigger.

But wait, there's more. Countries have conditional taxes based on who
you're doing business with. "IF CountryHome=USA and
CountryForeign=England THEN TaxRate=1.3; IF CountryHome=USA and
CountryForeign=Cuba THEN TaxRate=38.7; ...". That's 200 x 200 = 40,000
cases to worry about. Let's say your code only got 100 times bigger.
Combining these two examples means Money is now 100 x 100 = 10,000
times as complicated.

Now granted, some of these issues exist already in a single-country
version of Money, but for the most part they're ignored. Money just
keeps track of bank balances, leaving the tax issues for your CPA to
worry about. But there's the problem of multiple currencies, only one
of many that adds more layers of complexity. Let's just say the program
is only 10 times as complex.

- quote -

I can believe that. I think of the the EU as the United States of
Europe. People in the USA often do the same thing.

- quote -

Ah, but they don't. Microsoft long ago quit making versions for anyone
but the USA and Canada.

Let's talk development costs (again with SWAG numbers).

For each country, we need a financial and a legal expert. Assume we get
lucky and find 50 people who can do that whole job for 200 countries.
Their salaries cost us 50 x 100,000 = 5,000,000. Further, we need an
additional, say, 20 programmers for 20 x 75,000 = 1,500,000. There's
lots more, like offices and coffee, but let's stop there for a total of
6.5 megadollars increased development costs to produce an international
version.

Money sells for about $40, on average. Let's give Microsoft an
extremely generous profit margin of 25%, so they make $10 on each
package sold. To get their investment back, they have to sell 6,500,000
/ 10 = 650,000 additional copies of Money. They're now even. To make a
reasonable profit, they have to make at least 10% over what they'd get
by simply buying a good mutual fund, say 20%, so 650,000 x 1.2 =
780,000.

Back in 1999, Money had something like 4 million users. Assume 25% of
those buy a copy each year, which I seriously doubt. Money sales have
to grow from 1 million to 1.78 million copies to survive.

Because the complexity of the code went up by a factor of 10, it now
takes 10 times as long to get a new version to market, so they have to
make 10 times a much profit.

It ain't gonna happen. No one will pay $400 for Money. Microsoft long
ago gave up on all but the USA and Canada markets, and I expect the
Canadian version to disappear soon.

So the root question is not whether it's possible to make an
international verion of Money, it's whether Microsoft can make a big
enough profit by doing it.

--
Steve Bell
New Life Home Improvement
Arlington, TX

- quote -

Well that is a very extreme example. But if you consider the European
market, all the Euro countries have double taxation laws - so you declare
yourself in just one country (where you live most of the time) and that is
the only tax you need to worry about - even if you have considerable assets
in another country. So you would just need to build into the program a
simple choice of which tax laws you wish to follow. There is significant
migration of peoples around Europe now - most of us have accounts in our
countries of origin, and countries of adoption.

I understand that MS makes versions of Money for UK, France, Germany and
(formerly) for Italy. I would bet that it would be cheaper just to build one
version for Europe than four different versions.

Richh wrote:

- quote -

Let's say you live in the USA, and you transfer money from your Swiss
account to your Cuban account, using your French broker, who transfers
the money through a Columbian bank. You have five sets of tax laws to
worry about. Knowing the way politicians think, each tax law will work
differently depending on the country of origin, the country of
destination, where you live, where the broker works, the time of year,
and your underwear size. Can you say "combinatorial explosion"?

Money is a low-cost program, and it's aimed at people with fairly
simple finances. Very few people are in the group that needs to worry
about multinational accounting, and those that *are* have accountants
with very expensive bookkeeping software to do all the work *for* them.
Microsoft would spend a million or so dollars to make Money work with
all these different possibilities, and they would never have enough
sales to make a profit on the investment. (Warning: I pulled the
million dollars out of my butt.) For all his talk about eating his own
dog food, I'd bet that Bill Gates doesn't track all his accounts in
Money.

Microsoft doesn't make much, if anything, on the sale of Money. The
most expensive version, Business, is currently available new for $45.
They get their profit from showing you ads as you work.

Microsoft offers a more capable system: Microsoft Office Accounting
(MOA). It's much more flexible than Money, allowing you to set things
up to your exact needs, not forcing you to change your procedures to
match the software as Money does. MOA also costs about four times as
much as Money, and you'll have to pay your CPA to help you configure
it. If you run a business, it would be money well spent. All that said,
MOA is still on the extremely low end of the market for accounting
packages. Some of them run $10,000 or more. Here's a link:
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_te...ose+an+account
ing+package&i=44417,00.asp

--
Steve Bell
New Life Home Improvement
Arlington, TX

- quote -

Hmm, but MS already makes several different versions for several different
markets - how difficult would it be to combine them all into just one
version- and let the user decide which is their tax market?

MS are already doing the updating for several different markets - so why not
just combine all into one big program?

SteveB wrote:

- quote -

Interesting story:

My brother used to work for a company whose only product was data about
US tax laws. Almost 100 people kept track of the *daily* changes in tax
laws in the more than 10,000 taxing jurisdictions in the US, then
formatted those changes so they could be loaded into accounting systems
used by large companies.

"Daily changes" is no exaggeration. Some state or town somewhere is
always deciding that milk is no longer subject to sales tax, that
automobiles pay the county sales tax but not the city, or that no sales
tax at all will be charged on a certain weekend, except on certain
items.

--
Steve Bell
New Life Home Improvement
Arlington, TX

They don't even build many of those anymore because they can't figure out
how to make money doing so. Now imagine how hard it would be to make money
on the version you describe given the small subset of users that want better
internationalization and don't particularly care about things like the
localized tax tools. Short answer: there is no business case for them to
make the investment in developing the version you want to buy.

"Richh" <spam[at]spam.com> wrote in message
news:488afe9b$0$920$ba4acef3[at]news.orange.fr...
- quote -

Richh wrote:

- quote -

The tax laws of each country are very different. Money tries to work
according to those laws.

Sometimes different countries have laws that directly conflict with
each other. That's OK for the countries, since they get to set up taxes
however they want, but it would make Money _very_ much more
complicated. So complicated that they wouldn't be able to sell it to
you for less than $50 US.

There are accounting packages available that do what you want, but they
are priced more like $1,000-$10,000, and you have to pay that every
year to keep up with tax law changes.

--
Steve Bell
New Life Home Improvement
Arlington, TX

Can anybody explain why MS builds different versions of MS Money for
different markets - which each assume that the user only has accounts in
that market, only pays taxes in that market, and only uses the language of
that market? I am sure that I am not alone in having financial and fiscal
interests in different countries, and a preference to use English over the
local language for the user interface. So please can MS make just one
version where users can select for themselves the interface language and the
fiscal residence, and connect to accounts in any country???