Thank you for your lengthy reply. Maybe envelope
budgeting is what I"m after. For the past 4 years I've
used a monthly 'envelope budget' that was adjusted
once/year at the start of each of my personal fiscal
years. This was all done in excel with custom
categorization and lots of calculation-filled cells. It
worked beautifully. I hoped to move to a more elegant
solution and bought MS Money 2003 Deluxe. When I first
began manually translating all of my excel-based accounts
into Money, I experimented with the budget. I guess it
permanently altered the way the budget operates, because
now it's not close enough to reality to be of any use. I
don't want to start over because I would lose all the
categorization on thousands of transactions (I tried this
with a handful of accounts). I know how to forecast a
budget, and am aware of the fact that income and expenses
can change. However my income hasn't changed more than 5%
per year over the past 5 years (I guess I need a better
job, or better job performance), and my budget income in
Money is far, far beyond that variance - in fact if it
were my real income I'd probably just hire an accountant
to handle my budget and inform me when a decision needed
to be made. It is sad. but Money is still useful as a
sort of intelligent ledger of accounts. I will continue
to download monthly transactions and load into an excel
spreadsheet for budgeting purposes. Again, thanks for all
your feedback in this matter - its been helpful.
- quote -

Comments/answers inline.

"William Blaster" <anonymous[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:04c101c3d2ce$812e0a80$a601280a[at]phx.gbl...
- quote -

Envelope budgeting refers to the cash management practice of putting real
money in separate envelopes at the beggining of each month for various
expense categories and spending throughout the month from on these
categories the respective envelopes until the money is gone. This practice
is abetted in Quicken with a thing called subaccounts (envelopes) into which
real money is put (transferred) from a parent account yet balancing is still
fostered. (I.e., your checking account register balance--as displayed to
you--is close to $0 so you don't spend to balance yet the sub accounts with
real money in them are factored in--e.g., shown as the total of the accounts
and subaccounts: account balance $1.74+groceries sub account balance
$64.50+gasoline subaccount balance $22.50...--when you go to balance the
account against a statement.)

- quote -

I agree. Perhaps you need to refresh me on the specifics of your issue. So
many BP questions in the last week or so--lots of New Years Resolutions, no
doubt--so little time.

- quote -

Did they match what was there when the budget was first created? Bear in
mind that Money tries to do math to adjust for the calendar. This has
confused some people because, for instance IIRC, it sets monthly income for
a weekly paycheck to scheduled paycheck value * 52/12. I think the Money
designers did design it so that when you create a new budget the values THEN
PRESENT in the scheduled bills and deposits are accepted as the basic
starting point for income and expenses.

Beyond this point, things seem to get very problematic. I'm really not
entirely sure if they intend that changes to these items get picked up
immediately or when the budget is next edited or when a new budget is
created. Some changes to scheduled items seem to propogate into the budget
and others don't. Over and above that, there are strange things that happen
with BP sometimes for no apparent reason. This has LONG been the case and is
the reason I have historically avoided getting involved in Budget Planner
threads.

I am on record as opposing the automatic mandatory setting of budget ==
scheduled transactions as I know there are frequently expenses that I
schedule that I knok I haven't budgeted for in any way. Further, there are
odd things in this process to this day like it will IGNORE the start date
for a transaction and budget it now. When the IRA max contribution was
increased over time, I set the IRA investments to expire after a certain
number of occurences and be replaced by a series of higher contributions
with appropriate start dates, frequencies, and number of occurences so that
they never overlapped. Imagine my surprise when BP thought one investment
from each non-overlapped series was going to be made this month!

- quote -

Strange things happens sometime in BP. (See above.) (Kinda like my cash flow
forecast that just restarted tripling my transfers to savings from my
paycheck each week. It even shows the thing three times in the list of
forecast transactions. It was doing this last year and I discovered that I
could edit the scheduled transaction and it would go back to just
forecasting the one transfer until the next time I entered a paycheck into
the register. Eventually, I deleted and replaced the scheduled paycheck with
a new one and all was well until the first paycheck of the new year. Now
'It's Back!!!') When these things happen, you frequently have to just create
a new budget and move on. I'm not aware of any magic way to avoid these
things and don't think Microsoft has ever patched BP. Heck, they didn't even
fix the Tax Estimator screen rendering issue from M03 to M04 and many, many
people readily see that frequently. Some of the BP issues are pretty
esoteric.

Let me be clear: Budget Planner has more than its share of problems. (It's
the thing in Money I trust the least.) But it CAN be made to work and (with
the exception of its assumption that scheduled items are, by definition, in
budget) it does provide a good service in a sane way when it does. You have
to watch it. You can't just assume that anything it says is good. You have
to look at the numbers it generates and look at the data that it gives you
about how it arrived at that number.

Look at this from a business view point. In business a budget is something
that you do once at a point before the start of the financial year. It
contains your best guess as to likely income and expenditure during the year
by month. As such a budget is fixed in stone and is never ever altered no
matter what.

Once you have a better view of reality then you start producing forecasts. A
forecast is based on the budget modified by what actually happened in the
month just gone. But the budget never changes - it is a snapshot in time.

In Money terms the only way to emulate this is to create a new budget if
your spending/income gets out of line. Money will never change your budget
from the point in time when you created it.

Hope this helps clarify.

--
Regards
Bob Peel,
Microsoft MVP - Money
Hints/Tips
http://support.microsoft.com/default...d=fh;EN-GB;mny
UK Wishes/Suggestions
mnyukwsh[at]microsoft.com


Money does something similar. Once you have
"William Blaster" <anonymous[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:04c101c3d2ce$812e0a80$a601280a[at]phx.gbl...
- quote -

I don't understand what you mean by envelope budgeting.
In my opinion, any budget should be able to accurately
reflect monthly income this year. It is simply the sum of
two paychecks. I'm not asking it to guess what my income
is, or project future increases based on the past.

There is really no description of the budget in Money 2003
deluxe, so I can't say what type of budget it is. All I
know is that amounts in the buget do not match amounts in
the scheduled bills and deposits. If microsoft doesn't
intend for the 'bills & deposits' to feed the budget, then
that should be stated somewhere in the help files.

That being said, you mentioned something about the
software becoming wedged or confused. Is that something
which can be repaired or avoided with a patch or protocol?

Thank you-
Wil

- quote -

Envelope Budgeting is not budgeting except maybe in an elementary school
class or in a credit counseling group encounter session. It's a backasswards
attempt at using software to enforce behavior modification. I personally
applaud Money for not adding goofy stuff like this to the product, the
addition of Frequent Flier Mileage tracking notwithstanding. (Standing by
for all of the flames from the cookie-jar-accounting school of personal
finance management.)

What do you mean there are no subcategories? Quicken-style subaccounts?

What do mean by linked accounts? Quicken-style subaccounts?

Money certainly does have budgeting capability. For you to say it doesn't is
ludicrous. Now, I'm certainly not going to defend the Money BP to any great
lengths and am long on record identifying issues with it, as you can read in
many other threads. But it does absolutely--unless it's wedged or confused
or whatever--enable you to define a budget and track performance against
that budget over time.

If you find that "MS Money 2004 'Deluxe' serves no useful purpose for home
finance," by all means don't use it. Nobody is making you.

"andy" <anonymous[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:055901c3d19a$c5d9f430$a301280a[at]phx.gbl...
- quote -

Nobody is making you use Money and, indeed, if budgeting is all you are
using it for, you are better off with Excel. That will save you from having
to hold you nose whilst using Money.

By "baselined plan" I mean that the budget is not dynamically determined.
When you create a budget it takes a more or less one-time snapshot of the
scheduled items and they form the core of the budget till you start again no
matter whether you change the scheduled items or not. I would argue about
why it does this and certainly agree that is does so strange things in the
process (like ignoring start dates for transactions to name just one). But I
do think it makes some sense that setting up a budget is striking a
baseline--what's it mean to have a plan if that plan just keeps changing
every time you touch a scheduled item? I'm not surprised you don't find the
term in software literature or the on-line help. It's esoteric. Read up
about project management and things like earned-value project management.

You ask "what good is a budget if its not going to accurately reflect my
income?" I'd argue that it doesn't mean much to strike a budget if you are
going to change it every time something changes. The point of a budget, as
Money does it, is to compare actual performance over time to the original
("baseline") plan from way back. If suddenly you are making more money than
you originally planned, the point of the budget is to reveal that as a
variance--hey, income is higher than planned!--not to suddenly change the
plan. If you really want to make a new budget, do just that.

Beyond that, I will not defend Budget Planner. It does some strange things
in some strange and unstable way.

<anonymous[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:04a701c3d187$b4aafa00$a301280a[at]phx.gbl...
- quote -

I agree with the other posts... this makes this product
unusable. I have read in various groups how users would
like to have a 'envelope budgeting' type feature, which
has not been addressed by MS in all of the iterations of
this product. So someone posts some half-baked hack about
how to accomlish the same result, and it includes using
the budgeting. Now that doesn't work. There are no
subcategories, no linked accounts, and now, no budgeting
capability. Unless you want a glorified picture of how
much money you have in your savings account, MS Money
2004 "Deluxe" serves no useful purpose for home finance
in my opinion.


- quote -

I think you may be referring to the 'autobudget' feature
to initially set up a budget. Well when I create a new
budget I turn the autobudget feature off, and then input
my exact salary, and still the software reports a
strangely inflated salary figure, and some
unknown 'transfer out of budget' amount which I've never
heard of.

Nowhere in the helpfiles or software literature can I find
a reference to a 'baselined plan.' What exactly to you
mean by that? I've created a new plan, and deleted all
the income and expense budget groups and categories and
still had it mysteriously come up with numbers where none
previously existed. Also, under 'income' it won't let me
delete 'transfers into budget accounts', and
under 'expenses' it won't let me delete 'debt'
or 'transfers out of budget accounts'.

And what good is a budget if its not going to accurately
reflect my income? 'baselined' or not, its not even close
to giving me useful information when it can't even
regurgitate the inputs I've given it. If I made decisions
based on this budget, I'd be SOL! This product stinks-
- quote -

I think what you are missing is that in Money the budget is a baselined
plan. Changes going forward change the variances. They don't change the
baselined plan. Want a new plan? Make one. Personally, I think the whole
notion of scheduled items being in the budget--when the budget is
baselined--by definition, is a bit hokey.

"William Blaster" <anonymous[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:010001c3d156$c4bdedc0$a301280a[at]phx.gbl...
- quote -

I've read about this all over the board. The budgeting
feature does not accurately reflect the scheduled bills
and deposits. For me this is most evident under 'income'
where previously edited or deleted deposits continue to
show up like ghosts in the budget, even after they've been
deleted altogether.

my rant - don't read if you don't care: Workaround
accounting with oppositive entries is not the way I want
to manage my finances. Therefore until microsoft
acknowledges this problem and isues a fix, Money 2003
Deluxe will continue to lack a budget feature at all. This
was a major selling point for me and has become a
disappointment. I guess I'll have to do my budget the old
fashioned way, using Excel. Oh well, I guess microsoft
gets 'my money' either way.