MS Money

I currently use MS Money 2001 to manage our personal finances. But now we are trying to manage our small farm as a business. Which leads me to looking at business financial management software. Quickbooks seems to have the best reputation, but is not cheap. So I'm looking at MS Money for Small Business. It turns out that I can buy last year's version, MS Money 2003 Deluxe & Business, for $25 vs. the 2004 version for $50.

Does anyone on this forum use the small business version of Money? Do you have any input on buying last years version for half the price of this years? Any negatives when using this software for a small business?

Thanks.....

I use it, but my needs are really simple. If you do much more than simple cash accounting, you should look elsewhere.

Thanks, Andy. That's pretty much what we need, other than I want to track my hours of labor to help understand the real cost of goods. I know that MS offers some payroll activities through a third party. But does the software at least track hours worked?

The program isn't really set up to track hours of labor directly. You can export to Excel though, so you could set up a spreadsheet for tracking labor hours and then import all of your expenses for your COGS calculations.

I'm not sure what type of farming you are doing, but there are several extension websites and the ATTRA website which have some nice example enterprise budgets in excel format which you can use for calculating costs.