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financial management
Microsoft Money 2002 Deluxe
Rating:
By Joel Shore
Does anybody with a computer write
checks anymore? If you do, it’s time to join the twenty-first century.
Ten years after releasing Money 1.0,
Microsoft Money 2002 is the most polished, sophisticated platform for
personal financial management that we’ve seen. You can your handle
personal finances, pay bills, manage investments, and plan for
retirement without ever being made to feel inadequate or stupid. In
fact, it’s a darn good teacher.
Sporting an elegant design that looks
more like a glossy lifestyle magazine than an accountant’s ledger pad,
Money 2002 is full of new features that puts it ahead of arch rival
Intuit’s Quicken—at least for the moment.
BUILT FOR THE
INTERNET
No doubt about it,
Microsoft Money is at its best when it has a high-speed, always-on
Internet connection available. Your cable modem or DSL connection are
perfect. Sure, your old dial-up connection will work, but like we
said, this is the 21st century! Check out some of what’s
new:
Background
Banking
automatically connects to your financial institutions and updates your
Money data files—even when the program isn’t running.
Online Banking
has gotten a whole lot easier. With new simplified procedures to
configure your online accounts, you’ll be up and running in
practically no time. Money supports nearly a thousand banks and adds a
few more every month.
The Login Lockbox
is a safe place to store the different IDs and passwords for all the
different banks and investment sites you connect to. And if you want
to change the passwords at all your institutions, you can do it
through the lockbox instead of going to each of those sites. The
lockbox, in turn, updates the individual sites. That’s a real time
saver.
MoneySide is totally new. Working
through the Internet, MoneySide provides secure, instant access to
information from your Money files. You can be anywhere. Want to know
if you can afford that new Dolby Digital surround-sound system? Log
into MoneySide from the home theater store and check your balances.
Account reconciliation has gotten
a lot easier. Downloaded transactions are incorporated directly into
the account register where you can accept, reject, or modify them.
Previously, you had to do this on a different screen.
To make the most of its online features,
Money requires you to have a Passport account. If you already have a
HotMail account, that’ll do just fine. Your Passport screen name lets
you use Microsoft’s updated MSN Messenger service, a direct competitor
to rival AOL’s Instant Messenger.
Historically, Money’s planning features
have always been extensive; this year’s version is no exception.
Tucked among the college savings, retirement, and debt reduction
planners is the purchase planner. Choose various items from a list
(buy a boat, remodel the house, etc.), enter a price, select a payment
method, and Money 2002 calculates different financing scenarios. It’s
smart, but wasn’t smart enough to tell me that buying a $6 million
yacht would be a dumb idea.
Come tax time, you’ll find that Money
2002 is tightly coupled with the H&R Block’s Kiplinger Tax Cut
program. Good thing, too: Microsoft killed its own tax-preparation
package after just one year. And like we said, Microsoft and Intuit
aren’t exactly buddies. That means a few extra steps if you use
Intuit’s TurboTax.
Money 2002’s combination of fit and
finish, online sophistication, interactive audio help, and way of
being the user’s friend instead of professor, add up to a package that
leaps to the head of the class.< |
