Its tax time again, which means that I am once again struggling with my various bank accounts, IRA's, 410k's. I expect to struggle with this, I'm no financial wizard and the tax laws were evidently written by people who were doped out of their collective minds. What I don’t expect to struggle with, is the downloading my accounts into MS-MONEY.
Believe me this has not been easy. Lets take American Express for example, I have an AMEX card, an IRA and I use their online bank. The card and brokerage account I can set up from within Money, the online bank requires me to log into my bank account and download a file which is subsequently imported in. In fact their online bank does not even exist in the list of Financial Institutions. Fidelity for some reason allows you to download their brokerage accounts into MS-Money or Quicken, but for some reason thinks you have no need to be able to download your 401K. My favorite however is Legg Mason. I couldn’t find any documentation on how to download my 401K into MS-Money but I did find this gem about Quicken on their FAQ
How do I set up and download my account into Quicken?
Click on Section Guide called TRANSACTION HISTORY. Once there you will have an option to "Download Transaction History File" and by selecting that option you can download your selected range of 401(k) account transactions to wherever you want.
You need to download and save it as a text file. Then you can open it in Excel, set the column parameters and then upload it into Quicken.
Quicken has accepted Excel files in the past as some of us have used Quicken before and as far as we know it should still do so. However, their specs might have changed. We will try to locate a copy of Quicken and check on that further.
What strikes me as being truly sad, is how easy it to write this code. Not doing it, or providing this half-baked solution which may or may not work 'cos we're just too damn lazy to find out' shows not only total disregard for the user, but a lack of pride in your work, and a lack of professionalism.
And we wonder why software developers have a bad reputation.