SOLVED

significant shortcoming of Money in Excel

Silver Contributor

I noticed off to the side on the Excel community board an invitation to download a new master template called "Money in Excel"

 

Downloaded it, got it running. Connected with one of my most active credit card accounts fine.

The product looks impressive. Much much better than the typical templates that are offered for budget and personal tracking of expenses, income (not that that's saying much).

 

But a couple of shortcomings, one of which is pretty major in my book.

  1. A minor oversight: among the standard fixed Expense categories, one that I would expect virtually every user to have, you will not find Taxes.
  2. I would also, were I designing my own (which I've done) have fewer major expense categories and allow for sub-categories. Just as a quick example, a major category for "Fixed/Basic" and another for "Discretionary" allows some useful analyses once you connect them to the sub-categories that correspond to each. "Groceries" goes to the former (Basic) while "Restaurant/Dining" clearly belongs in the latter.  And "Shopping" is a category of its own?!  Surely there could have been somebody on the design team with more experience actually, you know, shopping...someone who would know that shopping for clothes doesn't fit next to shopping for, oh, jewelry, or a new phone.
  3. But here's the more significant shortcoming, which for all practical purposes precludes my using it: my main account for virtually everything is a major financial institution--the institution itself is supported, and I was able to log in with user name and password, but, in 2020, this institution and its security-conscious users, among whom I count myself, believe in dual factor authentication. Not supported.

 

So an appeal to Microsoft developers (or is it Plaid, the service through which you all make the connections to the financial institutions?): make Money in Excel useful by making it capable of handling dual factor authentication. I know it's possible (TurboTax manages)....

 

6 Replies
best response confirmed by mathetes (Silver Contributor)
Solution

@mathetes , thank you for the feedback. If you don't mind I forwarded the link on your post to MVP community.

Greetings. I am new to these forums, tempted here by discussion of Money in Excel. Is this the best place to discuss MIE or is there a more appropriate forum? Thanks.

@Sergei Baklan 

 

I don't mind. In fact, I'm glad you did it. I am curious about the connection between the MVP community and Money In Excel.

 

I had searched for a way to give the feedback directly (I really did think the Expense Categories" area was woefully deficient of creative thought on how such things could be organized for greater reporting utility. I have created my own, since the advent of Dynamic Arrays and their connection with Data Validation, categories and sub-categories that can grow when needed)....

 

Anyway, thank you!!

@Rocket_J_Squirrel 

 

I searched for a community dedicated to the MIE app before posting my comment here. So I think this is the place. Do start a new thread, though.

@mathetes 

Are you saying you have a work around to the Expense Category deficiencies in MIE? 

That's one of my main problems. Let me know if you can help. 

@Bruce_Gilbert 

 

You wrote:

Are you saying you have a work around to the Expense Category deficiencies in MIE?

That's one of my main problems. Let me know if you can help.

 

I had created my own budget and expense tracking spreadsheet, and in it I have categories and sub-categories. I take advantage of the newest version of Excel, with the Dynamic Array functions... notably UNIQUE, FILTER, SORT... I could make a copy of that sheet (it's on a tab of its own in my workbook). But I have no idea whether it would work with MIE. And I don't think it'd be all that easy to extend theirs. They just did a poor (as in short-sighted) job of coming up with that one aspect of what otherwise looks like a pretty useful app.

 

I do a lot of the same things they do; I just have to go download from my credit card and bank accounts rather than link directly through that service they use, but since my main account is with Fidelity and I have their dual-factor (Symantec) log-in, MIE is of no use to me anyway.

 

 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by mathetes (Silver Contributor)
Solution

@mathetes , thank you for the feedback. If you don't mind I forwarded the link on your post to MVP community.

View solution in original post