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In this year's parade of personal finance software upgrades, Microsoft's package is first to appear: Money 2006 should be in stores in a week or two. I looked at a shipping copy of Money 2006 Premium, and found little about it to excite people who already own a recent version of Money--especially those who are being forced to upgrade in order to continue getting automatic downloads of bank and brokerage transaction information.

At $80, Money 2006 Premium is one of the higher-end versions in the product line. The baseline Standard version costs $30; the $60 Deluxe adds tools for improving credit, organizing taxes, and consolidating online banking and credit card information; Premium adds more tools for investments; and Small Business, a $90 package, features tools for managing both a small business and a household.

Minor Evolution

Unfortunately, Money 2006's improvements over last year's version--which actually did introduce some significant new features--are minimal. You can now pay multiple bills from different bank accounts, as long as the accounts have been enabled for online bill pay (for example, a spouse's personal account and a joint housekeeping account); you do so via a single screen after selecting the bills from the Bill Calendar (previous versions required handling bills paid from different accounts on different screens).

You can also now identify an unlimited number of budget items to track on the home screen, under the heading of Spending Trackers. (These used to be called Favorite Categories, and you could track only three categories.) The Spending Trackers show you visually how close you are to (or how much you're exceeding) the spending limit you've set for the category. In addition, you can choose between essential and advanced views of these trackers; the essential view provides basic information; the advanced view has more details.

One new convenience: Prices for stocks you track in Money can now be automatically updated when you enter transactions into the Investment Register. New to the program is a center for Exchange Traded Funds, a type of investment that has been gaining in popularity. The program's Investment Home page has a couple of minor upgrades, including an Advisor FYI module focusing on investment-related alerts.

Perhaps the most welcome change isn't the software itself, but rather that Money's round-the-clock telephone support is now toll-free. (Last year the support itself was free, but you had to pony up for long-distance charges.) Like previous editions, Money 2006 Premium includes offers from a number of Microsoft's partners: This year, the various offers from five different companies are worth $249.

Forced Upgrades

If you bought Money 2005, the new version gives you no real reason to upgrade. But if you're still using older editions and want to keep using online services--including automatic downloads of transactions from banks and brokerages--you may have to upgrade no matter how little you care about the software's actual improvements.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has begun withdrawing support for its online features after two years. If you want the automated data downloads, you have to upgrade, period. Microsoft says this is because it can't guarantee the security of server connections made by older editions--although I can't help but wonder: Why not simply charge people for a decent service rather than force them to upgrade completely?

At least Money continues to give you the option of downloading and manually importing banking and brokerage transaction data in .qif files. The latest version of archrival Quicken, Intuit's flagship personal finance package, has cut off that workaround. Intuit has also shortened the window of support for automated transaction downloads: Last year it limited support to the 2003, 2004, and 2005 versions. No word yet on this year's changes, if any.

Money 2006 isn't anything close to an important upgrade, and people who are happy with earlier versions of Money won't be missing much by standing pat. But it seems fairly obvious that, having run out of compelling new features (as opposed to pleasant but nonessential ones) for its personal finance software package, Microsoft has decided to give up on the carrot and go with the stick--in this case, loss of online banking support in editions that are only a few years old.

This approach is bound to create dissatisfaction among users who are content with the older versions and don't want the hassle of learning a new product. It would behoove the Redmond, Washington, behemoth to at least consider letting owners of older versions of Money pay an annual service cost to defray the expense of supporting transaction downloads: In the long run, it's less likely to anger customers than if it coerces them to buy a product they might not want.

Microsoft Money 2006 Premium

This upgrade makes minor tweaks to Money 2005, but users of Money 2004 or earlier will need it to continue getting Internet-based updates (including downloads of bank transactions).
$30 (Standard), $60 (Deluxe), $80 (Premium), $90 (Small Business)
www.microsoft.com/money/default.mspx