Money can handle equity and index options, unlike Quicken. also, i have had bad luck with the past two or three Quicken versions in that the quote downloads are very buggy. if i manually enter a quote in Portfolio View, subsequently Quicken won't download prices for that security any more. Quicken tech support said this was a bug and the only way to fix it was to delete a price history file. now i forget which file it is and i don't feel like paying Intuit 50 bucks to have them help me work around their stupid bug again.
in contrast, MS Money seems to have a lot of free tech support (phone based, which imo is the only useful kind). this figures, as MSFT has so much money they can just throw at programs like this until they run the competition into the ground. as a user, i might as well ride on their gravy train.
so i have one feature-based reason (Money's support for equity options), one service-based reason (free tech support), and one emotional reason (mad at Quicken for too many stupid bugs which seem to persist from one version to the next).
i imagine i am not the kind of customer Intuit likes to lose since i am one of those "automatic upgraders", which is like an annuity to Intuit.
the irony of my situation, though, is that my automatic loyalty to Intuit is now impeding my leaving their program: i cannot convert my Quicken 2003 data to Money 2003. (i of course got Quicken 2003 as soon as the new version came out as always.) according to MSFT tech support, their program can only convert the previous year's and earlier versions of Quicken. there is a way to work around this by exporting individual acct files from Quicken to Money, but that is incomplete and a pain in the ash. so i decided i will just wait till money 2004 comes out and then ditch Quicken.
as for working w/TurboTax, i believe Money works with it and other tax programs (i think i read this on the box, and it is hardly surprising). however, i don't have any direct experience with this because i have an accountant do my taxes. however, i have always found quicken's tax planner useful for estimated taxes, and usually pretty close to what my accountant comes up with. the tax planner in Quicken 2003 is a vast improvement over earlier versions. |
