Microsoft Money Plus Home and Business Edition
Microsoft Money is the software giant's answer to the more popular financial accounting software and personal money management software offered by Intuit called Quicken and QuickBooks. In the grand Microsoft business strategy tradition, Microsoft designed MS Money primarily as a knock-off of Quicken and Quicken Home and Business with a few interface tweaks and a handful of feature additions that are mostly tangential.
However, Microsoft Money Plus is a good money management suite and offers most of the same functionality as Quicken does for budgeting, checkbook balancing, account management, and so on. For users who find Quicken too difficult to work with, or for those people who find a great deal on Money Plus, this financial management package works just as good as Quicken. Parsing through the details of a Microsoft Money versus Quicken comparison probably isn't worth it for the average user who won't end up using anything beyond the core functionality.
Microsoft Money Plus Sunset Edition
Microsoft has decided to no longer develop and support Microsoft Money Plus.
This is a good news, bad news situation for Microsoft Money users. The good news is that you can download the latest MS Money Plus update from Microsoft for free without having to pay for any upgrade. Also, it means that Microsoft Money Plus will never expire, so once you have it setup you can use it the way you want to for as long as you like.
As a double bonus, you can get any edition of Microsoft Money Plus that you want to have for free. My advice is to get the Microsoft Money Plus Sunset Home and Business edition. It has the extra functionality of easy small business accounting software for free. If you don't need the business functionality, just don't set up a business account with Microsoft Money Home and Business and it functions just like the basic MS Money Home edition.
The bad news is that as a way of tying off the product cycle and providing support for Money, the finance software suite has been re-coded as a completely standalone product. That means that it does not connect automatically to your bank accounts or brokerage accounts and download your financial data anymore. However, you can still manually download MS Money files from your bank and load them directly into Money.
Interested in more information about financial software or Microsoft Money directions or tutorials? Let us know and we'll try and get you what you need.
For now, go download your free copy of Microsoft Money before it goes away and disappears off of Microsoft's website.
Although Microsoft changes its website structure on a regular basis, as of this posting, this link to download Money Home and Business Sunset Edition is correct. Otherwise, you'll need to search for it.
