I am very pleased with the Investment account downloads from Charles Schwab.
They have definitely worked with Microsoft for a positive outcome so that
they could get rid of their Street Smart software years ago. Hence, no
micro-managing involved.

My only complaint with Money Plus & Schwab updates is that I can't prevent
the Bond prices from updating like I could in Money 2004. If I buy a CD and
intend to keep it, I'd like the option of keeping the price at $100 so that
the return is the interest earned.

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:07:02 -0400, "Scott Tyler"
<agent_scotty-at-hotmail-dot-com> wrote:

- quote -

Haven't noticed any problems with the Ameritrade account. My Vanguard
accounts are constantly adding and subtracting almost the entire share
balance. I giave up and always say "yes" Sometimes the account
summary is correct and the next time it's not. Perhaps it's the time
of day I connect as referenced above with regard to Ameritrade. I have
a couple other investment accounts with direct connect downloads that
have proven to be worthless to try tracking in Money,

I have pretty good luck with credit cards and my checking account, but
don't seriously use Money to track any investments beccause of
problems like you describe & others..

Some comments to some of your comments.

Microsoft tried sponsoring the OFX effort. They pushed the kinds of
interoperability efforts I think you have in mind. They had outreach to the
FIs. What you see is the end result. The FIs Just Could Not Be Bothered to
do better and one, of many, big reasons is that they see NO business case
for spending one thin dime trying to make Microsoft's product work better or
to make their customer's lives easier when they use Money to see Microsoft's
ads instead of using the bank's website to see the bank's ads.

And speaking of business case. There will be no annual update to Money this
year and any future release is "TBD" per Microsoft. They claim this is
because users told them they didn't want annual releases of marginal
incremental updates. One interpretation of this is that Microsoft never
found a way to come out with an update that was compelling enough to attract
enough user dollars to make it worth their while to go to the trouble to
make compelling updates. So then they tried dressing up completely
meaningless annual updates as compelling annual updates. (How many times can
you call a minor revamping of the budget features "Great new budgeting
tools"?) And they still couldn't attract enough user dollars to make even
that weak effort worth their while. If 10% of 100 million users upgrade
every year, that would have been one thing. But when 10% of a million users
(or less or whatever the number really is--I'm betting it's a lot less than
100 million--upgrade at $20 or less of sales per that just doesn't cover
very much software development even if you provide no Support.

FWIW, I don't have any of the kinds of problems you describe. But I also do
not use downloaded transaction data.

"Display_Name" <DisplayName[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:9B671358-973B-454A-B4B4-ADA9EBE8DCDC[at]microsoft.com...

- quote -

"Display_Name" <DisplayName[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:9B671358-973B-454A-B4B4-ADA9EBE8DCDC[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I opened a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade this summer, and have some
experience about how TD Ameritrade works with Money.

I'm not sure if the IRA accounts work like the brokerage accounts, but my TD
Ameritrade brokerage account works pretty well with Money, if I download at
the right time of day.

If I try to download the same day I trade, I'll get an "Add Shares" that
will sometimes be reported with the wrong date, a day or two off from the
actual trade.

If I wait until early the following morning (after the trade confirmation
emails go out), the actual transaction (Buy, Sell, Dividend, etc) will
download with the proper date.

As long as I give TD Ameritrade time to close out the previous day, most
transactions download fairly well.

As for some things that may need to be micro-managed, TD Ameritrade posted a
positive dividend for an ADR, along with a negative dividend for the foreign
tax withheld. I tried to manually enter this as an investment transaction
for the dividend, and a cash transaction for the tax withheld, but it didn't
work out too well. It was easier to leave it as it was reported by TD
Ameritrade's server.

I'm going to give this a day or two to correct itself before I try to fix
it, but it looks like splits might be strange, too. I recently had a split,
but it was reported by TD Ameritrade as a 1:1 split, along with an "Add
Shares" for the additional shares. I'm also due some cash-in-lieu, which
hasn't posted yet, so I'm going to wait to see how TD Ameritrade handles
that before trying to manually correct anything.

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

Just wondering if I am alone on this but it seems like with this app the
longer you use it the more things come up that are just baffling.. For me it
is duplicate transactions showing up, things not matching from the bills area
back to the account register and the latest is ever transaction from my bank
comes by default with NICOR as the payee and marks it as a utility. I know
allot of the problem is the different banks and companies the software has to
work with but common these discrepancies and constant need of babysitting
almost makes it a wash for any efficiencies gained.

I went with TD Ameritrade a few years ago as my IRA/Cash account because it
was advertised with MS money so I was thought that it would work well
together and of course it does not. I also use Citibank for most of my other
stuff savings/checking /credit cards/401k and they also have problems. I
could expect this from some ma&pop. Is there any kind of standard MS is
working on to make this whole experience better? Perhaps windows certified
Account provider? I know I would switch banks or accounts if I knew for sure
it would work without the BS.
Just checking in to see what the deal is for the yearly update patch (new
release [at] full price). It seems there is no 2009 money unless I am wrong
(even though they say on the site that they call it Plus because “Because
Microsoft Money Plus has taken the award-winning features of Microsoft Money
to a whole new level for 2008.” which of course is complete crap, switched
the name and are not updating yearly anymore. I saw some updates come down on
Sunday but I don’t know what they are yet … probably have to wipe everything
and start over I like I did with plus after using it months it was like oh
yeah … all this is different now that I started a money file from scratch.
Just my yearly rant…