 [Larger view] | Microsoft Money 2004 Small Business
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Average user rating:  | |
| MS Money Small Business 2004 - | |
| Was I excited that "MONEY" was finally going to make the transition to the Small Business Community? Absolutely! I have been too busy to want to learn a REAL Accounting program. And I have been using "Money" since the early 90's to balance my checkbook and surely one of the first to use online banking; so the idea that I could integrate invoicing was icing on my cake. Now for the disappointing reality. While you can make and email invoices and they will be tracked in a receivables account, you will need to create a cash account to receive the money into and then transfer that amount into the account that you download your banking transactions into if you deposit more than one check at a time. Otherwise, you will have double entries in your account. This makes for many extra steps, shuffeling payments here and there. I would have appreciated this information prior to purchasing yet another version of Money, I could have done this without the Small Business edition. (I think this puts me in the position of Beta testor, and I had to pay for the job.) The help from Microsoft was indeed good. But, I was required to sign up for a "PassPort Account" to communicate with them (not opting for the toll call). They indicated that it was indeed a problem, and they are working hard to fix it. My wish is that the repair is not a "version upgrade" as this is a definite flaw to a Business package. Effectively, the only thing that was added to the previous version of Money (I was using Deluxe) was an invoice template, and the ability to change your fiscal year end. (This is something I complained about in Money in the 2002 version.) I will, of course, continue to use it and I am quite sure that eventually it will be a great ENTIRE solution for a small business, since it already integrates with Excell and TaxCut. It just needs to do it sooner... | |
 needs a little help | |
| I've been using MS Money for my personal accounts for years. I like it, and now after starting my own business, I especially like the price of Money Small Business compared to alternatives. The user from Western North Carolina (mmj...) pointed out correctly that the except for printing, the Invoices are not very professionally looking. He's absolutely correct unless you have the FREE PrimoPDF (from download.com) utility installed. This extremly handy utility (did I mention it is free!) allows you to save your invoice as a PDF file, that looks just the way you layed it out! Just select PrimoPDF as your printer, select the name and location of your desired output file, screen or file quality option and you're ready to rock and roll! This just made my day!!! | |
 "Report" functionality sucks | |
| The reporting feature does not always reflect accurate information. Say, I selected ALL categories to be reported on my Monthly Income and Expense Report, the report came out missing including several categories, and so the total on the report were all screwed-up. If I were not paying attention to that details, I would have been sued by clients for inaccurate billing. |
