Introduction

Introduction

This wiki is ostensibly about PalOMoney development, but it is also about alternatives to Microsoft Money.

If you haven't heard, Microsoft Money was discontinued in 2010, and its online servers stopped in 2011. This presented a big problem for users who depended on downloading bank, credit card, and investment information. Anyway, there has been a search for alternatives, and regrettably, the general consensus is that there are no alternatives that satisfy the needs of the existing Money users.

After a few years of some progress here and there, the results are still not entirely satisfactory. Instead, users are making do with a variety of workarounds to restore the most essential online capabilities to MS Money. However, a huge problem has remained unsolved: how to restore the online quote functions so that Money can be updated during the day with real time quotes.

PalOMoney was developed specifically to download delayed or real time online quotes from a variety of sources and enter them directly into the existing MS Money accounts. This is a "nights and weekends" project, and, besides restoring the offline quotes functionality, it serves as a proof of concept for add-ons to Microsoft Money.

A related project seeks to explore providing an alternative to the Microsoft online servers that supported the non-sunset Money versions. The idea is that those versions could be reconfigured to point to this or another site for quotes, etc. And yet another project is to explore substituting the closed MS Money database with an open database for increased performance, increased opportunity for community development of add-ons and accessories, and as a hedge against obsolescence.

It is unknown how many Money users might be interested in these products, or whether there is any commercially viable opportunity to market them, and funding sources to finance future development.

Accordingly, the purpose of this site is to investigate these issues and figure out what to do. It will be driven by interested parties, users, partners, vendors, etc., so hence the wiki.