Money

Employee stock options, because they include grants from the company as well as deeply-discounted purchase prices, are set up somewhat differently than the standard investment accounts.

With Money 2003 you can now track your equity and index options. When an option you own expires, Money alerts you so you can enter an expiration transaction and close your option holding.

One of the easiest financial management activities you can do with Money is track your retirement account using the 401(k) Manager. Because of the special tax protection of a 401(k) account.....

With your investment accounts now in place, you are ready to add individual investments. Transactions such as buys, sells, splits, and options can be manually entered for an investment or, if your brokerage firm supports online banking, you can download this information directly into Money.

Naturally, most people do not have the time to constantly keep tabs on all of their investments. To make things easier, Money includes investment alerts to notify you when your investments reach a particular price and to alert you on a date to buy or sell a specific stock.

Microsoft Money maintains a set of very detailed data on each of your investments.

Many investors may not have their investment portfolio properly balanced to their financial goals. Microsoft Money’s asset allocation feature can help you target portions of your portfolio that should be divested from or invested in other more suitable investment products, based on your personal financial objectives.

Now that you have worked so diligently to enter, track, and monitor your investments, it is time to sum it all up. Money can review your entire investment portfolio for performance, risk, tax liability, asset allocation, and more in the portfolio review. To begin the review, select Portfolio Analysis from the Investing menu.

Like any good financial manager, Money can create reports on practically any topic you can imagine. Reports can be created with pie charts, bar graphs, or line charts. And with sections on income and expenses, assets, debts, investments, taxes and much more, plus the ability to customize each report, there is no end to the different ways to generate reports on the information in your Money file.

Now that you have become familiar with the basics of reports in Microsoft Money, it is time to move on to the main repository of reports, the Money Reports Gallery. Split up into categories, the Reports Gallery contains seven different types of reports....