Sad: Microsoft Money bye bye….

Today www.bink.nu posted news that Microsoft are pulling the plug on Microsoft Money – a software product which helps small businesses and individuals manage their finances!!…….and I was one of those individuals who really makes use of this software. Of course this is a sad post to be writing, as I grew to depend on the abilities of this software, and was really looking forward to future developments on it.

I really loved the way it allowed me to gain visibility into my expenses – past/present and allowed me to gain visibility to how my future plans (e.g. travels, holidays, gadgets and whatever you can think of……) would affect my overall cash flow…..

So this throws me into the world of deciding what to use way forward. I can actually stick to my existing installation but I know that I will be re-installaling my systems several times more as I test several platforms, and this product is activation based. The problem is that Microsoft also made clear that all installations have to be activated by January 2011, so time to start evaluationg my optoins again………..

I spent over 5 hours going through sites, options, solutions with various value propositions and hands on evaluated as many as I could. To my amazement, NONE managed to meet or beat at least one fifth of the ease of configuration of the scheduled transactions and forecasting abilities which Microsoft Money had. I am really ticked off:

• Intuit: This is the main competitor. Unfortunately visual forecasting abilities are so simple, that it does not give anything meaningful for e.g. the ability to see the history of transactions which are leading to that graph to be forecasted, and I also found the management of scheduled transactions to be clunky after their creation…..either this is the next best option, but with serious caveats and limitations.
• Mint.com : could not even evaluate as it is 100% driven by connecting to online bank services. It is only aimed for the American market and from what I saw from their sites, their forecasting abilities are weak too. Gee wiz……so now it just has to be fully automated, what if I want to monitor cash flow….no way that can be automated……
• Mvelopes.com : This was the strongest of all options, but still their visual forecasting is bad/non-existent.
• YouNeedABudget.com – no forecasting which I could make use of.
• Wesabe.com – similar disappointment.
• Rudder.com – similar disappointment.
• Various other too small products – similar disappointment.

This is the greatest weakness of these products. They all do a pretty good job of keeping track of the NOW and the PAST, but all really do a poor job at the projecting the future in a graphical manner based on what they know (i.e. scheduled recurring payments) .

End to end, seems I have no real alternative……….The forecasting approach of Microsoft Money got it right…………..really right and I have no real alternative yet.

To the development team : whoever you are : Thank you!. Your software was really useful to me. If anyone can forward me, or get me in contact with anyone of that development team, please do email me on andre@andremuscat.com.

To Microsoft, at least leave the activation on your side so that anyone who wants to re-install does not have any troubles…………just put it to infinite activations………or always return ok…………or issue a patch for us!