7 ms·
I don't know whether this is just nostalgia, or maybe my finances used to be less complicated, but nothing beats the experience I had with the Microsoft Money d
by mherdeg 7y ago
I don't know whether this is just nostalgia, or maybe my finances used to be less complicated, but nothing beats the experience I had with the Microsoft Money desktop app.
It was easy to download transactions from participating banks (I think in OFX format?) and it was easy to see the last successful sync date per account. The UI made it straightforward to categorize my transactions and dead-simple to compare monthly spend against an easily mutable budget.
In fact it was so easy to use that for a good long while I found myself manually entering cash receipts and even tracking my cash purchases. And it cost $0. It felt better than Quicken for personal finance.
Maybe I have missed some major innovation in personal finance software -- I largely use Mint and home-grown spreadsheets now, and I keep hearing that people use paid tools like YNAB or free complementary-to-the-company's-real-job tools like the Personal Capital suite -- but this all feels like it's worse now.
- epanchin 7y agoI agree. I tried GNU cash afterwards but it wasn’t the same. Some early Microsoft products were so good - I was once lost in the middle of the Netherlands, typed a nearby company name in Microsoft Autoroute and got directions to my destination. All offline. Nowadays, I’m can’t even get Windows 10 to navigate me to the correct program from the start menu search.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoTotally agree. Microsoft Money was close to perfect sometime in the 2000s. I am really sad that it got abandoned.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoPresumably it still runs, do the integrations with banks no longer work?
- Ididntdothis 7y agoLast time I tried no. If I remember correctly one bank after the other abandoned OFX.
- Chirael 7y agoWhat did they abandon it for, QBO?
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI think for nothing. Are there any desktop programs that allow you to pull bank data without scraping?
- robpegoraro 7y agoFun alternate history: Microsoft wins government approval of its Intuit purchase and spins off Money to Novell as promised, Novell handles Money as well as it did WordPerfect, and then nobody wants to challenge Microsoft-owned Quicken.