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An improved portfolio manager assists with long-term financial choices.

And if you want financial advice, on things like mortgages or pensions, you’re whisked away to pages on. Another tool tracks the daily status of problem spending categories and alerts you to overspending. A new Bills Wizard helps set up and track recurring payments, whether fixed or variable. There are more changes under the bonnet too, and the new version simplifies much of the drudgery associated with bookkeeping.

The 2005 interface has had a lick of paint and its new, blue, less-cluttered appearance bears an uncanny resemblance to an MSN website. For example, setup doesn’t force you to enter each and every account you can just jump in and start using Money 2005 from the off, though spending time on tasks such as categorising spending will let you get more out of the software. Money 2005 closely resembles last year’s model in many respects, but it’s been made somewhat more user-friendly. Don’t worry too much about TaxSaver being a year out of kilter with Money – remember your current tax year ends on April 5th 2005.

This costs more than double but comes with TaxSaver 2004, which not only helps you complete your annual tax return but can actually submit it online as well. Over here, we’re restricted to just two: the standard version plus the Money Financial Suite. When all’s said and done, however, Money doesn’t offer anywhere near the sophistication and power of Quicken, which remains our accounting software of choice.On the other side of the pond there are no less than four versions of Money available. That may seem restrictive, but for an application costing £21 it’s not an incredible imposition. You will, however, still be able to download and import your bank statement data into Money 2005.

After this, its ability to directly interface with online financial institutions ends and you’ll need to type it in manually if you want to update your share portfolio. Money 2005 is a time-limited program – its Internet-based services are available for two years after activation, or 1 September 2007, whichever is earlier. So-called screen-scraping or scrubbing technology would extend this facility to a wider range of sites, but Money 2005 lacks this feature. Money 2005 can pull this type of data down all by itself but thus far only the Nationwide Building Society site lets you do this. Pulling data from your online bank is relatively straightforward, and we had no problems importing first direct statement data straight into Money 2005, although it did involve a visit to the first direct website.