Microsoft Money Plus Premium 2008

Microsoft Money Plus Premium 2008 is a strong personal finance application overall. The interface is well laid out and it's packed with features that are particularly useful for people already comfortable with online banking. However, Money does not offer a compelling reason to upgrade over its predecessor. Nor do we recommend switching from Intuit Quicken if that program already pleases you.

That said, users love to hate both Money and Quicken for a variety of reasons, and we can understand why. For instance, Microsoft has not improved Money's capability to juggle and eliminate duplicate accounts, and its many tie-ins to Web-based information can be an impediment for those hoping to use the program offline. Nevertheless, we found Money useful for displaying our bank and credit card information in one place, as well as for producing reports and charts that helped us understand how much we were spending and earning.

We tested the $49 Microsoft Money Plus Premium, which is geared for users who want to juggle accounts and bills as well as long-term planning tools. Money 2008 also comes in three other editions: the $19 Essentials to keep track of bills and investments, the $29 Plus Deluxe that includes tax support, and the $59 Plus Home & Business that adds help with business taxes, online payroll, and inventory tracking in addition to planning tools.

You'll need a Windows XP SP2 or Vista computer to run Money 2008, as well as Internet connectivity to use all the features. Microsoft recommends 1GB of RAM and 1GHz processor for Vista users. We like that Money comes on a CD for those who don't yet have a DVD drive.

The look and feel of Microsoft Money Plus 2008 haven't changed much since the 2007 version, which is good.

Installation took about five minutes in our tests on both Windows XP and Vista PCs. You must enter the product key immediately, so don't throw away the box. Once open, the application looked no different on the surface than did its predecessor. Overall, we like Money's calm, collected look and feel--except for an ad for Experian that immediately popped up.

If you're using Microsoft Money for the first time, it will ask you to establish a Windows Live ID that will tuck your personal data behind Microsoft's servers. If you consent to this, you might be wise to establish a Windows Live ID separate from any others that you may use casually, such as for Hotmail e-mail.

Upgrading our old file from Money Home & Business 2007 took a couple of quick minutes. If you upgrade, you might want to keep the same edition you had in the past, or better, if you don't want to lose information. We had to consent to lose all our business data, such as Accounts Receivable.

We were frustrated by the inability to delete duplicate accounts.

Since we hadn't been budgeting in Money for many months, we had to reenter login details for our various bank accounts to update them. Luckily, when we installed Money later on a new laptop that didn't have our personal data file, Money retrieved our historical data from Microsoft's servers once we signed in with our Windows Live ID.

Like Intuit Quicken, Money will display in one place your account details from thousands of supporting banks, brokerages, and credit cards. Unfortunately, we wound up with duplicate accounts in Money more than a year ago and never had the patience to merge them. We were able to deactivate, but not delete, defunct accounts. The result was a cluttered main page with a jumble of identical-looking accounts.

Money 2008's most notable new offering is the Insights feature. Insights are quick snapshots of bills, cash flow, and spending that you can customize. They also let you set alerts that will trigger if, for instance, your clothing expenses surpass your budget. You can open Insights separately from Money from the Windows Programs menu. This frustrated us, however, because Money told us Insights was already open. It told us to click the Insights icon (what does that look like?) in the Windows notification area (where's that?) at the far right of the taskbar (what's a taskbar?). My mother would have asked for a refund at this point.

However, once you know that the Insights icon is simply the letter "M," you can pull it up easily. We found the feature more helpful than getting similar information from Money's many drop-down menus. Another new feature within Money 2008 is the capability to attach account transactions to images of your checks and receipts. A similar feature exists within Intuit Quicken.

Money now includes Insights, which are little customizable windows to display information about bills, cash flow, and expenses.

As with older iterations of the software, you can use Money to track and pay bills to accounts that enable online payments, which can spare you from jumping around among the Web pages of several different creditors. We also like the depth of Money's customizable reports. From a monthly expense report, you can double-click any section of the automated pie chart to edit the expenses. Money and Quicken are supposed to learn to describe, say, any incoming Trader Joe's expenses as groceries once you've assigned them that way. In practice, however, we wound up with a huge lump of Uncategorized expenses that force us to label expenses from that store as groceries over and over again.

The copious tie-ins to MSN Money sometimes made us feel as if the application were an advertisement for Microsoft's financial Web sites. Then again, we didn't need to use those articles and tips for our personal finances (we're partial to Yahoo Finance), but others might find them useful. Microsoft is throwing in what it touts as $450 worth of additional services from third parties such as Experian, which we did not use.

Money 2008's inline, searchable Help topics appear only if you're online--one more thing that made us wish we could do more with Money without an Internet connection, especially when we were surfing with unsecured Wi-Fi access. That said, they were pretty helpful, as were videos and the user's guide. You can access help within a browser via the Money Support Center as well as user newsgroups.

Free support is available by toll-free telephone number, which used to cost $35 per incident. There's also free chat. But it's annoying that you have to locate the product identification number to access these resources. Microsoft should save us the hassle and just accept the Windows Live ID sign-in.