Steve Ridges

Key Bank and MS Money

Hi. I'm shopping for a new bank and I'm looking at Key Bank but I'm unsure if it will solve a problem I have with MS Money. Here's the situation...

I curently use Bank of America. When you bank online thru their webpage and look at checking account debit card transactions (we use are debit card a lot so this is important), each transaction take 2 lines. The first line is a bunch of numbers followed by the amount. The second line is the name of the vendor.

I just purchased MS Money 2005 to help with budgeting etc. It has a feature where it will connect thru the internet to your bank and download / sync all your accounts. When it does this, Money only shows the first line of each transaction which just contains meaningless numbers instead of the vendors name. I contacted Microsoft about this and they said it's because my bank (Bank of America) is not fully co-operating with the data request and either not formating the data they return correctly or just not returning all the info.

Since I'm looking for another bank for other reasons, I thought I would take the opportunity to find one that is "compatable" with Money. Key Bank is close by and I'd like to try them out. When I asked if they were compatable with Money, they said sure. We're compatible with Money, Quicken, etc. I believe what they are refering to is that you can go to their website and output your account info into a Money or Quicken type file which you can then import. I don't want to do this as it adds an extra step.

Does anyone use the online features of Money with Key Bank? If so, how do they work?

Thanks,
Steve

Glenn Overholt

Not with Key, but I do use Money, and have been doing so for years. I go through the "extra" step and download it to my hard drive, and when Money is opened up, you can verify the transactions one by one.

That's really a good idea in case there was a typo somewhere, and you can also keep track of what checks haven't been paid.

I had "free" $2.99) DVD offer last year, and it took about 3 months before they even cashed the check! Even funnier, when I did get it one seam on the envelope had opened up, and I just got an empty package! I got a replacement within a week!

So, do the extra step. Go through the options too. I have disabled and/or removed quite a lot of the features I don't need.

Glenn