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Intuit played its millennium card early and jumped straight from Quicken 98 to Quicken 2000 last summer. So does Microsoft's own millennial upgrade fall short, catch up or leapfrog?
One obvious change is that Money 2000 now comes in three versions. The generously featured Money 2000 Standard should satisfy most users. It includes basic features for personal account management plus a full range of online facilities. For another £20, Money 2000 Financial Suite adds financial planning and investing tools, such as loan planning and forecasting.
These can be used independently, but the real intention is to encourage you to integrate short-term activities with long-term planning. Change your salary, standing orders, house valuation and so on and the program automatically updates other relevant sections. However, even the less ambitious application of budgeting is criticised by many Money users, so we're cautious about placing too much reliance on lifetime planning features.
A further £20 will provide you with Money 2000 Personal and Business, the product we installed.
It adds tools aimed at sole traders, such as simple invoicing and VAT accounting, now removed from Financial Suite. Although it offers several improvements over Money 99's business facilities, such as euro currency support and company logos, it compares unfavourably with the established US product. For example, invoice customising is limited and features such as a built-in expense mileage log are absent.
Installation revealed a snag that Microsoft was investigating at the time of writing. Our Internet Explorer 5.01 was over-written by version 5.0. Otherwise, setup is easy, and Quicken 99 or 98 (but not Quicken 2000) files can be automatically converted to Money 2000. By default, the program starts up in its well designed Home Page, where those upgrading will find familiar surroundings and newcomers will find simple and intuitive navigation.
All functions are quickly accessible via 10 menu entries: Home, Accounts, Bills, Business, Investing, Planner, Money Manager, Reports, Tax and Categories/Payees.
There's a Help frame on the right, for which the accompanying audio is excellent. Testing Help's search feature showed improvements over Money 99, but there are still too many flaws. For example, seeking the facility to add logos to invoices, we found no useful hits using 'customise', 'invoice', 'logo' or 'template'.
Online banking support is a relative strength of Money 2000, but there's a lack of practical information about what services are available and how you set up and use them - not even an up-to-date list of relevant banking services on the Money Web site. It's also disappointing that Money 2000 still can't handle unit trust online updates.
Taking a broader perspective, however, Money 2000 Personal and Business is still great value. It has some attractive new features too, such as a Company Car Calculator to assess the tax liability of your company car, a basic will maker, improvements in investment views, continuing improvements to UK localisation, and others. But most features claimed as being 'exclusively developed for Money 2000' turn out to be in Money 99 too, reinforcing our impression that this is a relatively lean update.Prices are £29.99 (Standard), £49.99 (Financial Suite) and £69.99 (Personal and Business)
Specifications
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- Customisable home page Setup Assistant
- Savings Centre
- Will maker worksheet
- Expert Assistant
- Company car worksheet
- Online banking support
- Invoicing (Personal and Business version).
Contact Microsoft 0345 002000
See also:
All Finance & Accounts
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