Personal or corporate?
I used to download all my transactions from the bank to Microsoft Money a couple years ago, and then one of the freeware ones more recently.
And then I stopped, for a couple reasons:
1) it became a chore – download the data every week. Not that it was difficult, but it became a hassle. And I ended up needing to upload every couple of days which was more of a hassle.
2) For expense tracking, it was useless. My bank account shows a payment of $450 to Bank of America Visa Card, so the transaction that got downloaded was $450 – Credit cards.
The problem was that the $450 was itself made up of two restaurant meals, three gas fillups, a new shirt, batteries, jumper cables, and two new books. (and so on). So if I am serious about budgeting, I would have had to break the $450 payment into a dozen or more granular transactions. And that just became too much effort.
So I said the heck with it and only use my checkbook, and don’t really track payments by category.