Sunday, September 2, 2007

Microsoft Money 2007 workarounds

Upgraded to the Microsoft Money 2007 earlier this summer. As much as I like the new features, it seems to lockup fairly regularly, which makes it very slow to accomplish things

I've developed the following workarounds to help me at least survive, but I'm hoping Microsoft will eventually release a fix for these.

Lockup while matching bank-downloaded transactions to manually or automatically-entered transaction.
  1. Select the Bank-downloaded transaction
  2. Select 'Change'
  3. Choose to 'Match' to an existing transaction.
  4. Choose the matching transaction
  5. Click Save
  6. {Money will lockup here}
  7. Close the application, then start it again
The Bank transaction is now matched to a manually entered one successfully.

Adding a check number to a transaction that was entered without one
(This occurs regularly for me when a bill is paid via my bank's online banking, but the payee has to receive a physical check, so the bank is assigning a check number, not myself)
  1. Select the transaction
  2. Enter the check number the bank used
  3. Save
  4. {Money will lockup here}
  5. Close the application, then start it again

After restarting, the check number will be properly reflected

Balancing an Account
  1. Click on 'Balance this account'
  2. Enter the Statement date, and ending balance
  3. {Money will lockup here}
  4. Close the application, then start it again
  5. Click on 'Balance this account'
  6. Complete the reconciliation, as appropriate
  7. Click 'Finish'
  8. {Money will lockup here}
  9. Close the application, then start it again
  10. Reopen Money (All of the transaction you cleared will be marked as reconciled, but the 'balanced As Of Date' will not be updated, not sure that this is important, but it seems to throw off the date of future attempts to balance, so...)
  11. Click on 'Balance this account' one more time
  12. Enter the same Statement date from before, but use the ending balance as both the starting and ending balance
  13. Click on Finish
Balance As Of Date will be updated.


I've contacted Microsoft's technical support about this issues, and they've pointed me the 'Repair' features, to no avail. Their next suggestions, unfortunately, are things such as 'delete all accounts' and recreate them, or 'delete all bills' and recreate them. Such steps seem to represent an huge amount of work without a lot of value added, when most people have limited time to manage their accounts and are looking to software to save them time.

Hope this may help someone running into the same issue.

1 comment:

Brian Graf said...

I created a brand new money file January 1st and carried over no data from the old file and I am already getting these same apphangs when balancing. Very frustrating - makes me want to go to quicken.