Today’s bitches with Money 2003
I’ve been playing with Quicken 2003 and Money 2003 lately. I’m trying to use Money 2003 currently. Don’t get me wrong, though: both packages suck, though Money 2003 might suck a little bit less. Slightly. It’s close.
Today I’ve got three problems with Money 2003, and one slightly nicer thing. I’ll start with the good part. I downloaded four transactions to my checking (debit card) and one to my credit card. One of these transactions for a sushi place was an amount that was without about $0.04 of my scheduled phone bill which hadn’t cleared yet. Money decided to match this to my phone bill. (Personally I think this is a little dense, since the payment to BellSouth was sent electronically, and it has a check number, whereas the sushi restaurant was with my debit card and so did not have a check number. I’ve grown used to this annoyance though.) In Money 2002 when this happened I’d have to click the “Change” (as opposed to “Accept”) button on the transaction, then select “you fucked up, this is a new transaction ass magnet.” Then I think it wouldn’t fill in the category correctly. Plus the selection wasn’t quite as clear in Money 2003, it was a little less clear if the “you fucked up” selection would leave my non-cleared transaction alone and just make a new entry for the downloaded one. In Money 2003 it’s like “do not match and create a new transaction,” or something that really says “I do what you want fucktard.” Plus the new transaction’s category was set properly. Hooray.
Now the bad. First, two of my transactions that were for 6/30 got stuck up around 6/15. It is entirely and totally unclear why this would ever happen. I resorted eventually and they went where they should go.
Second, the Advisor FYI notices are apparently generated by Microsoft for someone else’s accounts in another dimension. A few days ago it was saying something to the effect of, “your cash flow will be negative in checking according to the graph on 8/15.” I look at the graph, the checking is positive — not even at its lowest point — on 8/15. Today it tells me “you are over-budget on several categories.” Hi, this is July 1st. I’m not over budget on anything. In fact, I don’t even have any transactions for July 1st yet. Maybe I should just turn that off. Shame it can’t be useful.
Third, and my biggest gripe. My deposits are done manually. I’ve got the deposit set up as a paycheck with the withholding amounts all set up. However, that deposit is set up with my employer’s name as the payee. The deposit is downloaded with the bank’s information, like “Central Plaza Deposit” (where “Central Plaza”) is the location of the bank. When this happened it categorized it as “Wages : Net Salary” instead of “Paycheck” and doesn’t recognize it as the overdue scheduled deposit for my paycheck. Hey, Money, you’re so eager to match stuff when the amount is close, why not match it when the amount is dead fucking on! So then I change the payee to my employer’s name as it appears in the scheduled deposit. In Money 2002 this would cause it to say, “hey, is this the overdue scheduled deposit?” Not so in Money 2003. It did nothing at all. Life would be pretty fucking easy if they’d just let you right click a transaction and let you match it to a scheduled bill/deposit instance, or right click a bill and let you match a scheduled instance there to something in the register. That’d be way too easy though. So I change the category on the downloaded transaction to “Paycheck.” Now it wants me to enter all my withholding information again! Grr! So I enter it all, hoping that it’ll say “hey, this has the exact same withholdings as the other paycheck… in fact it’s identical. Say, is this the overdue instance perhaps?” No. You are denied. It just says, “OK, thanks for entering that.” Now I have to go change the payee name to something sort of like the payee on my scheduled deposit and then it finally says, “heeeeeeey, is this the overdue scheduled deposit?” Fuckers. How can Money’s matching be so fucking useless?
I suspect that the solution to this might be to set up a “Preferred Payee Name” for “Central Plaza Deposit” to be my employer’s name. I tried to create one of these but found that “Central Plaza Deposit” was “already a payee” so I have to go delete it first I guess? And if there are transactions with that payee in the register (from when I was using Money 2002) I suppose that’ll fuck them up too? We’ll see.