unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
[ Home ]
Q) I bought M05 Standard because M04 Standard did everything I needed. Where's Forecast Cash Flow?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14), Money2006 (v.15)]
A) Microsoft removed Forecast Cash Flow from Standard. Apparently they didn't think forecasting cash flow was something the average user needed to do. The average user just needs to see ads.
The Microsoft marketing materials on the web indicate that M05 Deluxe adds "essential tools for improving credit and organizing taxes" to the tools in Standard. Microsoft must think that Forecast Cash Flow is a feature that makes it easier to organize taxes or improve credit. Shows how well they understand the problem.
M07 did away with Money Standard and replaced it with Money Essentials. There has been almost no feedback on Money Essentials in the newsgroup and few, if any, of the regular posters have tried it. It is surely less capable than M06 Standard.
Q) I just reloaded M05. Now it crashes when I start it. Why?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Additional forms of this question include:
- I just reloaded M05. Now it complains that my file is read-only. Why?
- I just moved my data file to another machine with M05. It refuses to open my data file. Why?
- Why does M05 on my new, or newly re-loaded, machine refuse to restore my M05 backup file?
- Why does M05 on my new, or newly re-loaded, machine ask for a password when I've never used one before?
- Why does M05 on my new, or newly re-loaded, machine reject my password?
The basic issue in all of these scenarios may be the same one: you are trying to open your data file on what is, effectively, the previous version of Money. As with opening an M05 file on an M04 system, this does not work. Some users have reported this only effects users who use Yodlee download or some other subset of users. FWIW, I duplicated this issue on my experimental M05 file which has no online services enabled. The workaround is to either:
a) open the sample file by navigating a Windows File Explorer to the Money installation directory (c:\Program Files\Microsoft Money 2005, typically) and double-click on the Sample.MNY data file.
b) temporarily relocate your data file, start Money, and let it create a new data file. Somewhere along the way you can skip the setup wizards.
Now you can do an Internet Update and Money will download the service updates to get the Money application software to the latest level that will deal with the "M05.1" data file format.
After completing the update, Help|About should report a version of 14.0.*.1105 or higher. Note that the originally shipped M05 CD installs 14.0.120.728 (for a US Deluxe edition, anyway).
In 12 prior versions, it's not clear Microsoft ever released a patch that broke intra-version compatibility. Problems in the initial release of M05 were so severe that they had to release, essentially, a version 14.1 file format. The really sad thing about this is that the chaos this will create--indeed, already is creating judging by newsgroup postings--will merely confirm in the Money team's minds the importance of moving this whole thing from a client computer hosted application to a web service where they control what version you are running, every time you open their web page. This way they won't have to bother worrying about the "dumb users" who dare to do things like reload the application from the CD whenever they feel like it and expect their original M05 to open their randomly up-level M05 data file.
References:
MSKB: 890393 There are two M05 file formats
Q) M05 always wants to connect to the Internet. Why?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) This is probably because M05 insists on getting Internet Updates including stock quotes every time you start it, even if you turn off the setting to update quotes automatically. Even the on-line help has moved to the Internet. Microsoft seems to be trying to desensitize Money users to Money and the Internet being tightly coupled. You could probably get around this with firewall settings, but you would surely have other side effects, given M05s dependence on the Internet.
It is not clear if this was fixed in M06. For this reason, I've referenced this answer to M06 until we know for sure that it's been fixed.
Q) M05 seems to have cut back on the on-line help resources. Doesn't this seem backwards?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) You'd like to think that keeping the help files on-net would enable Microsoft to fix errors and back-level information in them and respond to search terms to improve the help and so on. Given that some of the same errors and out-of-date information have been in the help file for several versions, this seems unlikely. Removing the audio help and most of the instructional videos is even more perplexing. Perhaps they've given up on improving "help" as a way to reduce support costs. Long time followers of the newsgroup certainly know that lots of users don't find the on-line help resources. Perhaps telling users that "most users prefer" the dumbed down version will keep them from doing anything even slightly complex. OTOH, maybe this is all about making the download smaller. Perhaps they are pushing so hard on the download installations to make a precious few bucks for themselves on the sale since they probably don't make more than $1 or $2 on the $23 copy at Sam's Club. And that's before we return it to Microsoft for retail+tax+shipping.
Q) My account numbers are alphanumeric. How come they display as XXXXXnnnn in the M05 Account List?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) This is nothing more than stupid knee jerk pseudo-security. R-click and go to the account settings and it will look correct. Some security, eh?
Q) My transaction data is only available via Yodlee. Why must I store my data on the web to download transactions?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) Only Microsoft knows why Yodlee transaction data download forces storing your account data on the MSN web servers. Some possibilities:
1) Not enough people were actually using the MSN Money access feature in previous versions to rapidly advance their plan. The plan is to wean us all from dependence on a locally installed licensed application ("Money") toward using a web based subscription service ("MSN Money") without our really noticing or caring. This helps move another large chunk of users in that direction.
2) They knew the coupling to Yodlee was going to be troublesome, and they wanted the Yodlee interface to be available to exclusive MSN Money users. So, in order to implement it once, do it in a way that they could easily keep tweaking it to get it right, and do it in a way that involved the least development for the (hopefully soon to go away) client side application software product called Money, they setup most of the Yodlee-to-Money stuff as server side Yodlee-to-MSN Money code and just hooked the existing sync with the web feature in Money to actually get the data into the client-stored file.
There's probably a third reason, but I'm just a skeptical curmudgeon and those are the only two I can think of.
No matter, if you want downloaded transaction data via Yodlee for even one account, your account data for all accounts is going to be stored on the web. As of M07, only data associated with the Yodlee accounts is stored on the web. If you don't want your account data stored on the web and Yodlee is the only mechanism for downloading transaction data from some account you want to download data for, you'll have to learn to enter transaction data the old-fashioned way. It's really not so bad.
Q) We had Transfer and Credit Card Payment in M04. What's with Credit Card Payments/Transfer added in M05?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) Microsoft added an expense category "Credit Card Payments/Transfer" to M05. Note that this is not the Transfer we are familiar with or the Credit Card Payment we are familiar with. It's a new expense category guaranteed to confuse further the meaning and rationale for the other two. That's REALLY BRILLIANT! Adding something that has a 100% probability of confusing new users. Way to go!
New users have enough trouble getting a grip on Transfer or Credit Card Payment. So now they add "Credit Card Payments/Transfer" just to mess with them and leave it to people like us newsgroup regulars to help explain all of this? What were they thinking?!?
Cal Learner--MVP wisely suggests just deleting this category.
See also "I've entered charges in my credit card account, when I pay the bill aren't I spending twice? Is my card a category or account?" for more information on Credit Card Payment and Transfer.
It could be worse: they also added an income category titled "Not an expense." Well, duh. Curiously, they didn't add the symmetric expense category "Not an income."
Q) What happened to Money Express in M05?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Microsoft sent it off to the same place they sent Money Side, the bin of long lost Money features. It didn't work right in M03 or M04 and apparently was easier to remove than fix.
Q) What happened to the option to see Single Category Lists? Now it's all I can see in M05.
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Microsoft removed the option, which had been available since maybe as far back as Mv1, to display categories in a single list. Instead they made it the only behavior available in the initial release of M05.
To ease the pain, once Money autocompletes the category, you can advance to the subcategory by hitting Shift+;. Tommy Becker pointed out--and a number of long time users learned a new trick--that autocomplete will complete a full category:subcategory if you just start to type an unambiguous subcategory name. For instance, if you want Food:Groceries, typing gro will work. Unless you never type a category name first, you will probably still have to type more for autocomplete to disambiguate your entry.
After about two months of very upset M05 customers breathing down their backs, Microsoft relented and made it possible to re-enable the dual category lists through a registry hack. Note that the implementation forces Dual Category and does not expose a Tools|Settings UI to change the choice. It's all reg hacking. For this hack to work, the second (presumably or subsequent) "QFE" must be downloaded and installed. ("QFE" stands for Quick Fix Engineering--Microsoft-eze for a service update. Perhaps if they were doing more engineering and less marketeering in the first place, they could avoid having to issue so many QFEs, but that's another subject.) Once this update is installed, you must add a specific key and value to the system registry. It is the policy of this unofficial FAQ not to aid people in hacking the registry on the theory that if readers know enough to be safe doing so, they can find the specific details on their own. In this case, the thread where this was discussed is referenced. Registry hacking can be completely benign or utterly disastrous. Be careful out there.
It is not clear to us end users if they initially removed the feature from M05 for any reason but to annoy long time users who type in their data. Russ Paul-Jones, "MSN Money" development manager, was relentlessly pestered later in the thread announcing they'd relented and put it back, sort of, until he offered the following explanation [note this is extracted from a larger quote, see the whole thread if interested]:
"Very early on, we decided to settle on one version of the category combos for the new register, and a single combo was deemed better for the customers we thought would use it. It has been our default for new users for a few versions now, and it tests better with potential customers. … The team did look into the question of backwards compatibility, but convinced themselves that users didn't need both ways to accomplish the same task. This evaluation didn't take into account the attachment you naturally have to certain keystroke patterns or the seeming arbitrariness of the decision."
The good news is that this episode demonstrates the possibility of getting the development team's attention. The bad news is that it takes serious open revolt by the users, after the fact, to do so.
Cal Learner--MVP provided a pointer to an MSKB item that captures the workaround.
M06 put back the Tools|Settings user interface for controlling use of dual or single category lists.
References:
M05 UseDualCatMode reg hack
MSKB: 889931 dual list category key
Q) What happened to the register view spending thermometers and forecast cash flow in M05?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) Removing them was probably a secret performance enhancement since turning off the feedback was the #1 piece of advice to people complaining that the program was slow. Besides, Microsoft had to free up some screen real estate for all of the new UI clutter.
Q) What happened to version 13?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14)]
A) It's version 14's good twin. Apparently it died at birth. (That was just a guess.)
Q) Who/what is Yodlee that M05 keeps talking about?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) Yodlee is an Internet service company specializing in "aggregation" of your financial information from any financial institution (FI) that exposes any human-usable user interface (UI) to you via the web. You setup web accounts with all of your providers, then tell Yodlee about them and give them your account/password info. Yodlee systems then pretend to be you and login in and "skim" the information out of the resulting web pages ("screen scraping" is another term-of-art for this), reformat it, and present it to you in some aggregate form. This allows all of this data to be collected even if the bank doesn't want to expose an OFX or similar low-level interface. Since there are only a handful of UIs that these banks buy (written, one presumes, by Oracle, Sun, HP, Unisys, CA and similar players and then personalized by/for the individual FIs) and only the very largest players are developing their own from scratch, Yodlee only has to figure out how to fake out this handful and then figure out which FIs are built on which software. It is resold by some folks like Fidelity (as "Fidelity Full View") and, now, Microsoft Money.
For about a decade, Microsoft and Intuit have been trying to get the FIs to adopt low-level standard interfaces designed exclusively to let some application ware like Money or Quicken interchange data with the FIs. For lots of reasons, some to be discussed shortly, a decade later relatively few FIs have adopted these interfaces. This has prevented Quicken and, to a larger degree owing to its smaller market share and the threat the FIs consider Microsoft, Money, from providing a seamless uniform interface to all of your FIs.
With Money 2005, Microsoft threw in the towel and decided that integrating with Yodlee (and, presumably, paying Yodlee real money) was the only way to get lots of FIs integrated with Money. They claimed to have added thousands of institutions not previously supported for data downloads to Money in M05. Yodlee is how they did it. If the banks uniformly supported something like OFX well, Money could readily do what Yodlee is offering to do with good results, ease of use, and broad support from the FIs. Microsoft encapsulating Yodlee under Money is essentially a concession that a decade of futzing with QIF and OFC and OFX has failed because they could only add thousands of institutions at this late date by going the Yodlee route. The FIs couldn't be made to care about supporting OFX.
Why didn't the banks support the low-level interface? Apparently they couldn't make a business case to do so. Another reason is probably that they didn't want some other entity, much less Microsoft, "owning" the interaction with the customer. This is probably why Money found it necessary to include hooks for all of the branding support to make sure you see the FIs logo on the account register and so on. The FIs don't want Intuit, or, probably especially, Microsoft, getting in the middle of their customer relationship. Another reason is probably that they can't see any way to make more money off their customers by supporting the low-level interfaces. People won't pay extra for it, relatively few people use them, and relatively few of these people consider failure to support these interfaces cause to move their money to another FI.
Given all of this, improvements to make OFX work better are probably unlikely and so is increased adoption of OFX-like interfaces by the FIs. The FIs don't see a need to spend a dime in this direction. Yodlee wouldn't exist if the banks and so forth were stepping up to the plate. Yodlee couldn't do what they are doing without the FIs tacit acceptance--since it would be very easy for the FIs to play with their web sites enough to wreak havoc on Yodlee. But the FIs don't add their own low-level interfaces and do tolerate Yodlee; they apparently don't see a business case for doing anything else.
So what's wrong with Yodlee? Several things come to mind.
First, it's inherently an unstable technology. Yodlee's entire Reason for Being is that the FIs have not broadly supported a uniform low-level interface--e.g., OFX or similar--for transport of data to the customer, which would enable Money or Quicken to be the interface and tool for aggregation. Yodlee's entire model is to get around this by exploiting the high-level interfaces the FIs have supported to collect the same data. It's a fake-job. Because of this, it is less reliable than a purpose-built interface designed to do what Money is trying to do. As Joe Guidera posted, "the upside of [Money's integration of Yodlee] is that many institutions not previously available for use with Money are now available. The downside is, that from experience the technology is unreliable (at best). While I can't say this is necessarily the fault of Yodlee (it can easily be issues with the target web site), nevertheless it's much less reliable than the 'direct connect' (read custom) technology prior versions of Money used."
Second, when it doesn't work, there's much less chance of getting a resolution. Before Money+Yodlee, if you had a problem with downloaded data, the problem was either your FI's or Microsoft's. Maybe you could get your bank to care. Maybe. Add Yodlee to the equation, and, if you're an FI, you disown the whole thing if the data looks right on the human-readable web site Yodlee is skimming. That leaves you with Microsoft--Yodlee isn't working for you in this scenario, they're working for Microsoft. So now Microsoft owns 100% of the problem and your only hope is working any problems through MS Money Support. Good luck.
For the third concern over the Money+Yodlee integration we come fill circle back to the customer management issue. Yodlee views their value-add in terms of enabling FIs (not Microsoft or Quicken) to capture the entire customer interaction with them and with their competitors. It's all about "customer retention and cross-sell marketing, [so] aggregation can significantly increase an institution's per customer profitability" and "significant opportunity to use aggregated data to grow customer relationships through offers tailored to meet particular customer needs". Translated from marketing-speak, this means the FIs can monopolize you as a customer and mine all of your data to find more ways to transfer money from your pocket to theirs. This is certainly consistent with everything else about M05 that tries, first and foremost, to monetize your relationship with Microsoft and the MSN properties instead of just providing a tool you can use to manage your finances.
Some research after a posting by William R. Wood put me onto another example, referenced below and discussed in better words than mine in a newsgroup posting, demonstrative of Yodlee's "value proposition" to its customers--not you, by the way. They are there to help the FIs find ways to drain more money from your wallet into theirs based on things they can learn from data about your financial activity you let them handle. If you read these and then think Yodlee is doing anything that's in your best interest, then by all means sign up today.
Note that somewhere along the way Microsoft added a second "third party download" service named CashEdge. They may be better or worse in terms of stability and underlying motive than Yodlee.
References:
What's wrong with Yodlee
Yodlee describes what they offer to FIs
Yodlee does it again
Q) Why did the upgrade to M05 mangle Food:Groceries to Groceries? How do I undo this?
[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]
A) After a decade of upgrades without mangled categories, M05 just had to be different. Only Microsoft knows for sure why this had to be.
To fix it, go to the categories page and Move Groceries to a category named Food:Groceries and move Dining Out to a NEW category named Food:Dining Out. Money will ask if you want to create these new subcategories. You do. Please do this as I wrote it. Do not Move Groceries to Food thinking you will end up with Food:Groceries. You won't. If there's any doubt you understand these instructions, post a question in the newsgroup asking for clarification or do it in a copy of your data file first.
Despite the relatively large number of postings complaining about this after M05 was released, M06/7/Plus still does it when upgrading M04 and earlier files. If you upgraded to M05/6/7 and undid this damage, M06/7/Plus leaves it as Food:Groceries and Food:Dining Out. Go figure.
Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.
| ← Previous | |
| Complaint Department: Help me! Help me! |
|
Last update: 10 December 2006 |
If this kind of stuff is important to you:
