Product Reviews

Between them, Microsoft's Money and Intuit's Quicken (version 2000 reviewed issue 59, p198) have defined and dominated the UK personal finance software market since 1998. This date is most pertinent as both brought out versions with an assortment of features that elevated them above the rest of the field. Ever since, there has been an annual battle for supremacy, with each leapfrogging the other to claim the crown until its rival overtook it again. This year may see Microsoft consolidate its lead with a mixture of features in Money 2001 that will be hard to beat.

There are three versions of Money 2001: Standard at £26; Financial Suite at £43 (or £26 as an upgrade from any previous version); and Personal and Business at £60. Microsoft asserts that the Standard edition is for first-time users as well as for those who don't need sophisticated investment and financial planning facilities; the Financial Suite is for those that do; whereas the Personal and Business edition is aimed at those who need to keep simple business accounting records as well as maintaining their personal accounts separately, using all the facilities in the Financial Suite.

Features common to all versions include tracking your income and expenditure; balancing your chequebooks; preparing budgets; monitoring your savings and investments; and working out your total worth including listing and valuing your house contents. Dependent on which bank you use, you can also download bank statements, forecast future cash flow and plan how to reduce your debts.

Probably the version with the widest appeal, Money 2001 Financial Suite, adds some refined financial planning facilities like investment management; company car calculator; and capital gains assessment. You also get access to MoneyCentral, Microsoft's financial information Web site which you can use to research potential investments and plan your financial future.

Money is a browser, so you can't collapse, tile or cascade windows, limiting you to viewing one page at a time. Apart from using the menu bar, navigation is by a series of tabs giving access to 'Centres' (screens that bring related information together). There's a Centre each for Accounts and Bills, Investing, Planning, Worksheets and Reports. Your home page is also a Centre, offering customisable summaries of your financial position. These can include the latest balances of all your bank accounts, a note of forthcoming and overdue bills, an at-a-glance graph of your income and expense totals and links to some things you might need to do, like paying bills, reviewing your budget, or gloating (or lamenting) over your projected pension. If you prefer, you can set Money 2001 to open in a different Centre, such as Accounts and Bills say. Money's interface is less convenient than Quicken's, which has the appearance of being a standard Windows application, so you can manipulate window positions and size. You also get a proper button bar with Quicken that makes navigation easier and much quicker.

You'll probably spend most time in Money's Accounts and Bills Centre, which is where you make your entries of daily expenditure and income. Each account has its own data entry screen, similar to a sophisticated spreadsheet, with default activities based on previous entries and lots of context help. Although slick and easy, data entry doesn't feel quite so comfortable or intuitive in use as Quicken's Register. You can save yourself some time by setting up recurring transactions like your salary or mortgage payments. You can also schedule a reminder of a single important transaction, such as the maturity date of a bond.

It's in the Accounts and Bills Centre that you can set up on-line banking, providing your bank offers a compatible service. Among those who do, are Barclays Bank, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest Bank and The Royal Bank of Scotland (at the last count, Quicken could only muster NatWest). The principal advantage is in being able to download statement details directly into Money, saving all that keying. Dependent on your banks' services, you should also be able to check your current or savings accounts, make payments, change or cancel standing orders, view direct debits and transfer money between eligible accounts.

Other things you can do in the Accounts and Bills Centre include reviewing your cash flow over time using live data from your accounts. You have a limited choice over the forecast period - one or two 'payslip' periods, next month or the next three months - but it might be enough to keep you out of Carey Street. You can look at longer periods, of course, by setting

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up a budget. There's a useful, though not unique, calendar view for a more graphic scrutiny of your bills and deposits. You can even set up an account dedicated to monitoring your Air Miles or other points. You could, of course, allocate an account category for this in other accounting software too, but Money 2001 makes it particularly easy. If you suffer from the dreaded self-assessment, you'll be interested to know that you can 'tag' tax-related expenditure and then export the figures for use in a tax-calculating package like Tax Calc or Tax Kit.

The Investing Centre is where you manage all your savings and investments, including ISAs, TESSAs, PEPs and many other UK plans. The Portfolio screen gives you various standpoints, like performance, valuation, holdings, or prices, from which to view your holdings. Whichever investment angle you're interested in, Money 2001 probably has it covered. If not, you can customise your own view, picking from the 75 columns of financial data that Money 2001 can display.

One of the most useful features is Investments to Watch, which lets you actively follow investments you don't actually own, looking up or downloading price data to help you decide whether you want to buy it for your portfolio. You can get on-line through the Markets, Shares and Funds tabs, which take you to the relevant specialist MoneyCentral pages. Here, you can get information on price history, basic analysis data, and details such as ticker symbol, cost basis and tax status. The dedicated MoneyCentral link provides much of the enhanced functionality of the Financial Suite edition and may well influence your decision to buy Money in the first place. Fortunately, MoneyCentral is not restricted to Money users, which means that you can access it directly (http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.asp) to evaluate its service for yourself before investing in Money 2001.

Last November, the Share Price download feature generated a frisson of excitement when financial news media reported users' complaints that Money 2001 was revaluing their shares upwards by a factor of 100 without explanation. This was not strictly true: the discrepancy was only in the historical price data. The reason is that Money - probably uniquely - calculates its shares in pounds and not in pence like almost everybody else and it does this because of overwhelming lobbying by its user groups. So Money downloads share prices and divides them by 100. But it wasn't doing this for the newly available historical data, hence the divergence. Microsoft says that all versions of the program from Money 98 on will be patched to take this into account automatically on first accessing MoneyCentral. The patch will also convert the pence history prices in your Money file into pounds

The Planning Centre is where you prepare and maintain your budget, manage your debt, forecast cash flow and create your lifetime plan. The latter's long-term goals might include, for example, retirement, paying for your child's education, taking a year out from work, or similar events. These facilities are also available in Quicken as well as some other standalone financial software.

One of the tabs along the top of your screen introduces you to a collection of worksheets, subdivided into the Worksheet Centre and the Tax Centre. Mostly, the worksheets are those you may have used already in the Planning Centre. From the worksheets available you can work out your options for a mortgage, pension, loans and company car. One particularly useful feature lets you list and value your worldly goods or home inventory. Against each item you can record not only the price you paid, but its current and replacement value too. You can also add scanned images, useful for insurance and giving Money an edge over Quicken. The total value of your inventory can be included in your Net Worth calculation, which adds all your assets and deducts your liabilities to show how little you've got.

There's also a Will Creator, so you can decide who gets your worldly goods when you've gone. You can also compile a set of 'important records', which, as in Quicken, lets you record contact details for people (relatives, doctors, solicitors), papers (insurance policies, savings books, powers of attorney) and principal assets (houses, cars, antiques). The idea is that you give copies to your heirs or executors. And if all this leaves you cold, there's also a Debt Reduction facility too.

The final tab takes you to the Reports Gallery where you can view and print out data, organised into reports or charts. Preset categories cover your spending habits, what you have and what you owe, investments and tax; and there are several report formats within each category. You can also customise reports to show or hide particular data.

Money 2001 Financial Suite gives you your own virtual personal financial assistant, managing your day-to-day personal accounting, bill paying and budgeting. Add to this its on-line banking and financial facilities and it becomes your own bank manager too. The Will Creator, home inventory and important records list are useful adjuncts, and the worksheets make estimating your financial options very easy indeed.