What are Money Insights

Starting with Money Plus, a feature called 'Insights' was added to the product. The marketing material says that these are tools to quickly allow you to get an overview of your spending, cash flow and bills. Basically it is an umbrella for these individual overviews to run in a single, more compact environment.

The information shown in the insights program also contains a number of built in shortcuts directly to the Money program, so clicking on them take you to the relevant part of the main program (starting it if necessary).

Insights runs as a separate task to that of running the main Money program, and can be configured to start running when you log into Windows, so you do not need to have Money running to view your financial information.

Insights can be started for the first time from the Start Menu (found under All Programs -> Microsoft Money Plus -> Insights). When running for the first time, you may see the following dialog box:



In the system tray (bottom right corner) on your machine, you will get an icon informing you of the current status of insights

- a blue Money-like icon which is the default, unless one of the two following icons needs to be shown

- the alert icon indicates there is an alert to view

- an error has occured

In Money Plus, three insights were provided

1. Bills Insight (Article 511)
2. Cash Flow Insight (Article 505)
3. Spending Insight (Article 510)

One feature about insights is that they update automatically if the base data changes, without requiring you to click any buttons to update etc - so if you change data in your Money file, you should see the insight information change soon after