Financial Software - Eating my words-Rant!

[Anonymous]

A while ago someone asked which financial software anyone would reccommend.  I have been a Money fan forever.  Simply open up the program and your accounts balances etc are updated on a daily basis.  I am eating my words on this issue today.  For the past two months, I have been having difficulty getting updated account info.  Not such a big deal on the credit cards since I am not close to being maxed and my payments are scheduled in money but I have several different accounts of different types at different institutions.

The thing that made Money so appealing is that it was one stop and offered downloads for more FIs than Quicken.  However, I have recently found that this is only if the total number of accounts is equal to or less than X (whatever X may be).  I have been attempting to update my info on a daily basis and can get no further than 'Update in progress'.  I find that it is now taking as long as 3 days to get my updated account info.  Have been working with their tech support followed all their reccommendations and have had to kill my past transactions more times that you can imagine....not good for tax records.

Today however, and the main reason I am posting this, is that after being unable to successfully download my info, I decide to go to the web and check balances as I have had to more times than I would care to admit over the past month and get the following message:

---

We are detecting an unusual number of requests for information from your computer at this time, which will affect the availability of our site for all users.

MSN Money does not support automated routines that repeatedly request information from our site. If you are using such an automated routine, please discontinue.

If you received this message in error, we apologize for the inconvenience.

______________________________________________________________________

Anyone care to guess what happened next?  I cannot log into my accounts on the website now...lol!!!!

Why do I say that its okay to us money as lng as the number of accounts are not greater than X?  As soon as I changed my account settings not to update daily on several accounts and only left my daily account update set for my checking and investment accounts, it updated with no problem.  BUT I don't appreciate such a minute amount of server space being allocated to each subscriber that I feel my acces to account info is hamstrung as to what I can see daily.  I guess going to the website to view it is not an option either

Message Edited by Brammy on 11-24-2007 11:30 AM

[dizzier]

sounds like a pain in the rearend

[haulingthescoreup]

Brammy, what's your next step? Can you do a non-automated update of your accounts? (sorry, I know my terminology is pretty vague.) That sounds like a pain right there.

I didn't realize that these programs are storing info on a server somewhere. Silly me, I thought it was all right here on the Toshiba. Or will be, if I ever get Quicken set up!

[Anonymous]

Yeah but that was the whole point of getting the software was to save time and not have to run to every website and manually download the transaction history.  At least thats what they promise.  With my workday, I really don't have the time to manually dowload over 20 accounts.  Luckily some accounts are more dormant than others but I reall have to be able to access my more active accounts, especially my stock accounts daily, sometimes multiple times daily depending on what I'm doing that day. 

[Cooneyca]

An app that does what you need that a lot of people talk about is Yodlee.  I believe it's free.  I use this service through my BoA account - called My Profile - and love it.

http://corporate.yodlee.com/solutions/personal_finance/personal_finance.htm

[Anonymous]

---

Cooneyca wrote:

An app that does what you need that a lot of people talk about is Yodlee.  I believe it's free.  I use this service through my BoA account - called My Profile - and love it.

http://corporate.yodlee.com/solutions/personal_finance/personal_finance.htm

---

Actually both Money and Quicken udate through Yodlee as well.  Thanks for the suggestion but this doesn;t solve my problem.  What would is if they made their software work as promiseed.  I like to keep an eye on my cash flow as well. There are some planning features that work in Money that are absolutely useless witot the updates.

[Anonymous]

I did just get am email suggestin that somehoe my file was corrupt cause it seems that my accounts are still update.  I was like ;'Uh NO!' your last uggestion started with a fresh file that downloaded all info directly from your service and I haven't imported any transactions frommy backup since then.  Its the info I am getting from them.  Still can't log into the website to see crap.

[Anonymous]

So Brammy what do you suggest? I was thinking of starting the year off w/ a good financial planner, i.e. MS Money, or Quicken (MS Money was first) and then last was "mycreditkeeper"- remember seeing and hearing good things about it- but I don't know if it updates like MS Mon.

I don't have a ton of stocks to keep track off- but that is part of the plan- to keep track off ALL

[Anonymous]

So Brammy what do you suggest? I was thinking of starting the year off w/ a good financial planner, i.e. MS Money, or Quicken (MS Money was first) and then last was "mycreditkeeper"- remember seeing and hearing good things about it- but I don't know if it updates like MS Mon.

I don't have a ton of stocks to keep track off- but that is part of the plan- to keep track off ALL my accounts and DH business account- so including CC's it would be about 12- plus our 401K's, plus some extra saving accounts, -see what I mean- we have a lot of accounts and I was wanting to really go into next year w/ the goal of paying off our heloc, loc, half my student loans and going w/ an investment service plus maybe doing sharebuilder.

So what are you going to do? What do you suggest? I might not do daily updates, but I def. can see to where I might need to.

Message Edited by netpanther on 11-24-2007 07:39 PM

[Anonymous]

I'm not crazy about Quicken  Doesn't give the range thatMoney does but hey something is better than nothing and taking three days to update is pretty dang useless.  I thin I got the above message cause I use my laptop to update and it takes sos danged long that everytime I log onto my laptop, Money is still straining to update.  If you don't have a lot of accounts to update, I would still reccommend Money but not if you have 20+ like I do.  That seems to be the only logical explaination since when I decreased the number of accounts to be updated, it updated fine.  Going to be heck to pay when they all meet up to be updated on the same day.