Last month, I wrote about some frustrations I had with Microsoft Money. I am pleased to report that everything has been resolved and I want to take the time to thank members of the Microsoft Money team.

It turns out that the Microsoft Money group is more accessible than I thought. It is unfortunate that the Microsoft website doesn’t highlight this more, but there is an active community that participates in the microsoft.public.money newsgroup. One customer also maintains a FAQ.

It turned out that the password character length in Microsoft’s records varied with those given by the bank a while ago. Russ on the Money team was able to confirm this and a patch was out in a matter of days. The final trick to getting it to work was I needed to refresh the online service setup. I was given the following instructions.

  1. Open Money.
  2. Select Account List.
  3. Select the financial institution you want to re-brand in the Account List.
  4. Under Common Tasks click Connect to bank and click the institution’s services link.
  5. Select For Financial Institution Name under View contact information.
  6. Select Update advanced Web settings on the left navigation bar.
  7. Hold down ctrl + shift and then click Restore Defaults.
  8. Click OK and then click Done.
  9. Select the New online services are now available link.
  10. Select the Update Services link to the left of your financial institution name.
  11. Continue through the rest of the Update Services screens.

So now Money is happily integrated with my online broker. Money rules!

P.S. I probably shouldn’t have made that crack about switching back to Quicken. Word on the street (and in my comments) is that Intuit engages in some underhanded practices with their software and that Money is much better than Quicken. I can’t corroborate the underhanded practices, but I did switch to Money from Quicken many years ago and haven’t regretted it.