Money Management Software?

Can either Quicken or MS Money handle accounts both in USD and GBP?  We'd like to put all our accounts together for easier money handling, and since we're keeping my USD account open, I really need something that can handle accounts in both currencies.

Any suggestions?

MS Money definitely does, as we use it. However, we have heard that Microsoft are going to stop supporting MS Money sometime soon, so might not have the support and growth it now has with Microsoft.  It will still work great if you already have it.  Looks like they might be phasing it out for some new product.

Not sure about Quiken/Quick Books as we don't use that one..

Best of luck.

Quicken does.  I think it is a fairly standard feature.

Hi there,

Depending on exacty how you want to pull in monitoring of all your accounts into 'one place' there's more to it than initially appears. I used to work at the UK office of Intuit and extensively covered all three of the products (at the time) including Quicken. Microsoft Money is very similar to Quicken with the general consensus being that Quicken had a few more features and was first choice for many running small businesses.

If you decide to use the US versions of Quicken or Money, they'll of course 'talk' to pretty much most of the US banks, they won't talk to the UK banks and it's the same vice versa. If you do plenty of internet banking, downloading of statements, reconciliations, then you'll need to do the 'other' countries banking monitoring manually. There's no software product aside from Quicken and MS Money that can cover UK and US banks.

If the above isn't so much of a concern, and you input data manually anyway, then pretty much you can choose any product. Quicken in the US continues to be developed and supported, MS Money is seemingly going to be pulled from Microsoft worldwide - although, I'd suggest they'll sell it off, so could be still available.

There are open source alternatives, again I'm 95% sure they don't offer full automation with US/UK banks.

There are also little 'tricks' which can be used to run say the UK and US version of Quicken and most likely MS Money as well!

PM if you'd like to know a little more about those !

Hope this helps
Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Yodlee MoneyCenter (Yodlee is the backend technology behind a lot of banks' online banking service, including Bank of America's) can connect to both your accounts in the US and the UK.  I use it mostly for seeing everything on one page, not really for budgeting, but I'm pretty sure it has some tools that can help with tracking spending as well.

It appears as though both programs (Quicken and MS Money) are no longer supported in the UK.  We'd want a program that can talk to the UK bank to pull the statements, as the US one is less likely to have any activity on it and can be added in manually if we need to. Heck, if we can't put the US account into the same financial program it wouldn't be a big deal.

Hi RJSC!

Even though the products are now non developed nor supported, the last versions released for the UK markets still work! it's what the user bases for each piece of software are doing! For the UK market, as well as for US banks, the protocol used is OFX, and so long as the banking institution porvides an output function of your statement in that format, they can be easily imported into Quicken or Money and indeed into some of the open source programs. Where 'customer knowledge' falls down is when they find their particular banks don't provide the output they want, sometimes not even Excel spreadsheet output ! - and there are some notable well known UK banks who provide nothing ! - Egg being one! for an 'Online' bank, I find it utterly mystifying that they dont provide a downloadable version of their statements for use in financial software. I first enquired in 2003, and up to about 6 months ago, they still didn't provide anything. I've since closed my account with them.
Pretty much all the open source programs will allow imports of UK bank outputs (OFX & Excel) just ensure you get the UK versions of the software if go go this route. Good going with inputting the US bank accounts you have manually as with less transactions, it'd be much easier to do this way.

Also, from experience, be careful on which Operating system you run the software on, if you are a MAC user, then Quicken and Money UK versions will not work, you'll have to go open source solution for that OS. If you are windows, I suggest quite strongly, that you run the last versions under Win XP as they were the last tested and certified OS's on which official testing was done. Anything else, will just potentially compromise your data.

Do let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help,

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Thanks Dennis!

Tim's desktop has Windows Vista, but both laptops run XP, so we can run it on one of the laptops if we need to.

Tim noticed both programs were around the £40 mark, even for the old versions, which is a bit of a pain. We also found a German version of Quicken 2008. I do speak German (and actually used to have my computer's language set to German to keep people from using my computer in college), so that's another option.

For now, I've got all our accounts into a huge Excel database. The only formulas I haven't worked out yet are the UK payroll ones for Tim's wages. I don't really want to be constantly coding by hand into Excel though, so I think we'll probably just bite the bullet and get an older version of Quicken.

I have been using one of the open source alternatives for a few years (GnuCash), but when I moved here, I could not find information for connecting it to our UK bank (Lloyds). On other forums, I had heard that UK banks tend to not offer as much in terms of this kind of online banking without manually downloading and importing data (all of our US banks have given us the information for GnuCash/Quicken to download directly and automatically).

Tim found a program called Personal Accountz at PCWorld.  I'm in the process of researching it, since I'm wary of software that replaces a 's' with a 'z(ed)', but all of the reviews I'm finding for it are pretty positive.

Tim found a program called Personal Accountz at PCWorld.  I'm in the process of researching it, since I'm wary of software that replaces a 'c' with a 'z(ed)', but all of the reviews I'm finding for it are pretty positive.

Don't you mean it replaces a 's' with a 'z'?

Hope that program works out for you!