Comparison from '2000' versions:

DRIP Wizard 2000 vs Quicken Deluxe 2000 &  MS Money Deluxe 2000:  A Comparison

Price:  All three products are similarly priced.  Quicken 2000 Deluxe is $49.95--the same as DRIP Wizard 2000.  MS Money 2000 Deluxe is $64.95, currently with a $20 rebate available.  DRIP Wizard offers a 30-day unconditional money back guarantee.

Straightforward Investment Account Set-up:  DRIP Wizard makes it easy to set-up investments.  Each investment is its own account.  Investment accounts are always easy to view, access, and modify.  Quicken & Money complicate investment accounts by:  forcing cash account association, grouping multiple investments in single accounts, incorporating way too much extraneous information.

Free Upgrades:  While Quicken and Money may offer free patches to fix bugs, they never give out free upgrades to new versions.  With DRIP Wizard, on the other hand, you can expect free upgrades as new features and enhancements are added.  We are a much smaller company trying to build a loyal customer base . . . as opposed to a multibillion (Intuit is 9 billion, Microsoft 400+ billion) dollar company that's trying to squeeze extra profits from their customers each year with new versions.

Customer Support:  If you have questions about using DRIP Wizard, questions/suggestion for the product, or questions about general investing and tracking, you can always send an e-mail to contactus@dripwizard.com.  You'll get a quick and complete response from a trained expert on the software and on investment tracking.  Quicken and Money are too big of companies to offer this.  If you want customer support, you'll be lucky to get any.  If you do, you'll be very lucky to get a response from someone with appropriate training.

Ease-of-Use:  For investment tracking, MS Money seems slightly easier to use than Quicken.  But if you are used to one product it will certainly seem more natural to use.  DRIP Wizard, on the other hand, is natural for anyone to use.  Because DW2000 was specifically designed to be intuitive for all people, whether you're generally uncomfortable using your computer or you're a computer guru, you'll be able to appreciate the straightforward software design.

Point-and-Click Design:  With DW2000, information about all your investments is right in front of you from the time you run the program.  To view more information, add transactions, etc., all you have to do is click on the investment.  Everything in the program is simple point-and-click...the appropriate features are always in front of you all the time.  Quicken and Money, on the other hand, use a menu-driven/hyperlink design.  As a result, it can be challenging to access the features and information you want.

Return on Investment:  Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the most important gauges for the success of your investments.  Keeping track of ROI appropriately can be particularly challenging--especially for DRIPs.  Currently, all three software products (DW2000, Money, Quicken) use Time-Value-of-Money (TVM) formulas to give the most accurate ROI possible.  Earlier versions of Money and Quicken did not.  But when it comes to ROI, DW2000 goes much further.  DW2000 lets you graph historical ROI performance over any time-frame, for any of your investments.  You can also graph comparisons of historical ROI for different investments, different industries, and different investment classes.  DW2000 also calculates ROI and today's value for each individual purchase.  This requires complex analysis, taking into account that a purchase will result in additional reinvestments, and its portion of those reinvestments will lead to additional reinvestments, . . .

Commissions, Fees, Discounts:  Quicken and Money allow you to enter an amount for commission with any transaction.  They do not allow you to specify who paid for it.  They do not allow fees or discounts (some DRIPs actually give you a discount on reinvestments or purchases).  DRIP Wizard 2000 allows you to have commissions, fees, and discounts associated with each transaction.  With commissions and fees, you can specify whether it was paid by you or by the company.  For accurate tracking of DRIP investments, this makes DW2000 the clear choice.  DW2000 also uses this fee and commission information (including who paid for it) to give accurate information in its tax reports.

Share-Tracking, Cost-Basis:  All three products have the basic share-tracking capabilities.  When you sell shares, you can select from which purchases you'll be selling shares.  All three products also can accurately track cost-basis and associated capital gains when selling shares (though without proper tracking for commissions, fees, and discounts, Quicken and Money can be inaccurate).  But in this area, again DW2000 takes information and power to the next level.  DW2000 makes share-tracking easy.  When you sell shares, you can select whether they are sold FIFO (first-in first-out), or you can hand-select the shares from your transactions.  DW2000 also will automatically choose the shares to minimize or maximize your capital gains, if you choose.  The biggest benefit of DW2000, though, is its ability to give you all the information.  Because DW2000 shows analysis for each transaction, it is able to show you the cost-basis for any purchase, it is able to offer complete details (capital gains breakdown) for individual sell transactions, and it shows you how many shares still remain (not sold yet) for each purchase.

Tax Report:  All three products offer some features to help you calculate your taxes.  Quicken and Money differ from DW2000, because they offer tax analysis designed to be integrated into their tax tracking packages.  DRIP Wizard takes a different approach.  DW2000 generates tax reports that put the raw information right into your hands.  DW2000 allows you to generate a tax report for any given time-frame, either for all your investments, for groups of investments, or for individual investments.  The report contains sections.  Each section has a total and is followed by an itemized list that makes up the total.  As a result, you know totals and the make-up of those totals for Dividend Income, Capital Gains (separated by holding period 0-12, 12-18, and 18+ months), Itemized Deductions.  After some amount of confusing work, Quicken and Money will give you some of this information.  But since they don't show you the itemized breakdown, you are forced to take the information on blind-faith.  Whether doing taxes yourself, using a product like Turbo Tax, or using an accountant, tracking taxes will be easier if you use the DRIP Wizard.   

Dollar Cost Averaging Advantage:  One of the biggest benefits of DRIP investing is Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA).  By purchasing the same security repeatedly over a period of time, you gain a statistical advantage (DCA Advantage) likely to increase your return on investment.  With a proprietary analysis algorithm, the DRIP Wizard actually calculates your DCA Advantage for all your investments.

OCP Dates and other 'DRIP' Features:  DRIP Wizard helps DRIP investors deal with some of the special challenges of DRIP investing.  One challenge is keeping track of dates companies allow optional cash purchases (OCPs).  DW2000 allows you to add recurring investment dates in the account set-up.  Once you've done this, DW2000 will always let you know the next OCP date for each of your DRIPs.  And once you've sent an order to buy or sell shares, DW2000 allows you to keep track of the 'pending' order.  This way there's no confusion about which orders you've made.

Diversification and Portfolio Management:  Quicken offers some features that allow you to try to manage your portfolio and its diversification, like asset classes and goals.  But the features are not customizable, the analysis is confusing, and they serve to confuse rather than empower.  MS Money doesn't have anything.  DRIP Wizard, on the other hand, has set-up a couple of simple, yet powerful, tools to help you control your investments.  First, DW2000 has 'Categories' with targets for each.  So, for example, when you set-up your investment portfolio initially, you could set set it up so your target is 25% assets in Technology, 30% in Healthcare, etc.  You can then graph your 'Category Balance'.  The Suggest Buy/Sell feature also uses Categories and their targets as one of its criteria for helping you to decide where to put your money next.  There are other features that also help put you in control.  One statistic, calculated for each of your investments, shows you how much you've put into (or taken out of) the investment for the year.  DW2000 also has investment classes--which you can use to help segregate your investment analysis in any number of ways.

Fee Disadvantage:  All investors should be concerned about how much of their money is lost to fees and commissions.  DW2000 calculates this statistic for each of your accounts, both total and as a percentage of principal investment.

Internet Connectivity:  All three products offer one-touch price updates over the internet.  DRIP Wizard also updates earnings-per-share over the internet.

Mergers/Acquisitions/Spin-offs:  Structural changes, like mergers and spin-offs, are not supported by Quicken and Money.  DRIP Wizard offers a straightforward way to accurately account for these changes in structure.  In this era of corporate mergers and takeovers, this feature is needed more and more often.