Monthly Personal Budget, information?
I've just converted to Money98 after using Money 3.0 for over three years.
With Money 3.0 I tracked two budgets: 1) my personal budget; and 2) a
household budget.
I did this by setting up parallel sets of categories and then reporting on
each with distinct, customized reports.
In addition, "Household Income" was actually made up of "fake transactions"
(drawn on a "fake account", of course) that were the totals of household
transactions made from personal accounts and transfers from personal to
household accounts
Sounds confusing, but, again, with customized reports (filtering out
"personal" categories for the "household budget" and vice versa) I was able
to make sense of things.
With Money98 and its "Monthly Report" feature, however, I get a combined
snapshot of both category types which creates many problems, not the least
of which is double counting of income (e.g. my actual income plus the
"household" income)
Two questions (for now):
1) Is there any practical to keep two budgets with Money98?
2) Is there any way to customize the Monthly Report feature to filter out
certain categories?
I love the new Money98 interface, but I don't want to give up over three
years of data to make it work,
The Monthly Report, like the "My Budget" report, can't be filtered or
customized. If you're happy with the structure of your Money file, and don't
want to reorganize your data, perhaps you should just ignore the Monthly
Report.
The Income vs. Expenses part of the Monthly Report, however, does ignore
transfers. If you can think of a way to handle the second budget with
accounts rather than categories, perhaps you could get the monthly report
you want.
Devotees of Quicken sometimes cite its support of multiple budgets as a
major advantage over Money. You might consider trying that program, but be
prepared for a massive conversion effort. Quicken imports QIF files, but
can't open a Money file directly.