Apr 06 2008
Quicken 2008 versus Money Plus 2008: Quicken is not the worst
I spent a good chunk of my weekend figuring out what program to use to track personal finances, and was that a painful exercise! You would think that in 2008, with Money and Quicken around for about 20 years, you were going to be blown away by those programs. You could not be more wrong.
I decided to give Money a try, as we had a Money 2007 around. The problem is that I couldn’t find my Money 2007 CD, so I went online and downloaded a free 60-day Microsoft Money Plus 2008 Deluxe trial, until I locate our copy.
Since I’m a newbie, I was after something fairly basic: have Money download my statements from the banks’ Web sites, and have the transactions categorized to have a vision of what where our money is spent, projections for the future, etc. Nothing really fancy, but that was way too much for Money.
First, Money gives you the choice to store passwords locally, or in the Windows Live vault. I chose to do this locally, even though it promised me a pessimal experience. It quickly took a stronger tone while I was setting up one of my accounts by telling me that if I wanted to download transactions automatically, I had to use Windows Live. That was the first turn off for me.
But the next one was even stronger. Money can consolidate transactions based on variations of the name of the payee. However, it does not support any kind of wildcarding. Let’s take an example. I have auto bill pay at my bank. Those get reported as: Payee Date Time
. So, I get:
JOHN SMITH FEB 28 21:03:02 JOHN SMITH MAR 28 21:06:43 …
I couldn’t figure out how to tell it that all of those ought to be in a specific category. Actually, it was not obvious how to assign default categories to transactions. The combination of all that made me reconsider using Quicken.
I read a few more bad Quicken reviews on Amazon
I gave it a try, and Quicken looks much better than Money. First, all the account information is kept locally. It doesn’t seem to support as money banks as Money, but it’s pretty good at giving instructions when it fails. Second, it’s really easy to set up automatic categories for transactions. Not only that, but in my example above, Quicken automatically recognizes that all those transactions are for JOHN SMITH.
So, for now, I’m pretty happy with Quicken, and I’ll order the full version
That being said, I’m enthusiastic about the basic functionality, when I was looking forward to being blown away. Reading the various reviews, all those new versions of Money and Quicken are barely fixing bugs, and that’s very disappointing. It seems that people who invested in one solution are stuck with it, and they seem to be very little incentive for Microsoft and Intuit to innovate; it’s sufficiently bad that You Need A Budget
So Quicken is not the loser of the game, but there’s no winner.
April 8th, 2008 at 5:02
as long as you’re a gullton for punishment, you might as well try gnucash. i’ve known a lot of people to get badly boned when doing a quicken version upgrade, so be on guard at upgrade time if you stay with them.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:19
Thanks for the tip. I thought of using GnuCash (I did use it a few years ago), but it doesn’t allow to download statements from banks automatically unless you’re German:
June 24th, 2008 at 11:15
newest quicken no longer allows you to use .PIF imports from checking/savings accounts only investment account. My bank is not listed with quicken, and the only option I have is to import PIF
September 28th, 2008 at 10:04
MS Money . . . grrrrrr. I downloaded the trail version of MS Money Home & Business, and after 2-3 days of figuring it out and getting all the connections made to my bank, I decided to buy it. Filled out the form and got a “We are unable to process your order. Please verify your information and try again.” After checking and rechecking I called MS support. The tech said that wasn’t the right number and had me call another. That tech said that wasn’t the right number and had me call another. That tech said that wasn’t the right number and had me call another. That tech refered me back to the second tec. That tech again refered me to another number. By now I’m getting a little irate, but still managed to be pleasant. “Sara,” said that yes, she saw that my order had been placed, and they would get back to me in 1-2 days. A week — and severl e-mails later — I’m still waiting. So, lessons learned are 1) don’t waste a tremendous amount of time getting your trial version set up. Give it a light test and if you like it then see if you can buy it. Or as I am going to do #2 buy Quicken.
October 4th, 2008 at 16:15
I came online to do research in hopes that MS Money would be better than Quicken. I had a major problem
when upgrading from Quicken 2005 to 2006. It scrambled my files (twice)so badly it took me 36 hours to
accomplish the upgrade. Now I need to buy Quicken 2009 or MS Money Plus. They both scare me!
January 4th, 2009 at 6:56
Have you tried Mint? Mint.com is getting better every day. All information is stored online so you can access your accounts from any computer. And they are releasing mobile versions and an iPhone app. Only problem is that you can’t transfer your data from Money or Quicken very easily and you can’t set up cash accounts or asset accounts, so if you track your net worth, you’re out of luck. Hopefully it will improve over time.
February 2nd, 2009 at 14:35
I thought about Mint, but I don’t want to give my bank information and password to another website.
February 16th, 2009 at 15:26
Dody – don’t upgrade to Quicken 2009 too fast. I upgraded to 2009 a few months ago to “fix” a bug in an older Quicken. It turned out it didn’t fix that bug and I still had to spend hours online to figure it out. After all that and I THINK I have things working smoothly I bought a new computer with Vista. Now it doesn’t work at all, with some sort of bug in the launcher. Everything I’ve read on the net so far says there’s no fix for this bug, and Quicken has been aware of it for some time now. There has to be a fix out there somewhere (or is no computer with Vista running Quicken?), but I’m tired of digging through internet chatrooms to find it. Quicken help is no help at all.
I’m so fed up with Quicken just NOT working I’m ready to switch to MS Money, but now I’m reading just as many bad reviews about it too. Surely some software company could pull their head out and make a decent program that just plain works…
February 26th, 2009 at 10:20
Yea, it’s an ugly world out there in the land of personal finance software. It really makes you wonder. Intuit has such a huge market share you would think that they would continue to improve their product and offer neat new features and better functionality. Apparently, they seemed to have hit a wall somewhere back in 2006 and every version release since then has been pure **@#$^&%$ — just a way to milk more money out of their LOYAL customers while not really putting in the required QA time to get a solid, dependable product where ALL the features WORK WELL.
They miss some of the obvious low-hanging fruit, such as offering a wide, all-fields-on-one-line register display. My screen doesn’t have 800×600 resolution anymore, but Intuit seems to think they can’t fit any more information into a single line on these modern monitors; maybe people’s heads will blow up from the overload or something?
I’ve been a loyal customer since 1995 and now I’m being forced to upgrade. I just bought a new machine with Vista on it, and I still have my old machine with XP and Quicken. That latter machine will become useless for Quicken in April (it will deactivate itself for all online backing purposes; yech!) and now I’m concerned that Quicken 2009 isn’t Vista compatible!
As far as MS Money is concerned, I just have too many reservations about it. Windows Live Vault for all my passwords? I don’t think so! What a juicy target for financial hackers! If you think Windows is buggy and a hackers dream come true, wait until they seriously try to steal a financial database from a Windows server that’s very publicly visible. It’s only a matter of time… I wouldn’t be surprised if someone hijacks Folding At Home to use it to crack encryption for these things.
No sir, any financial software is going to store my password information right here, on my local drive.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:36
I have been a MS Money user for many years. Sunday, I purchased (online) the current Money Plus Deluxe to continue using my data file from Money 2006. The new version would not open the file. I then spent a couple hours with Microsoft Tech Support trying to get the program to work. Finally, we were both out of ideas of how to get the program to work properly and Microsoft agreed to refund my money for the program. Still using Money 2006, just without transaction downloads until I can find a better program. Quicken isn’t sounding much better.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:24
Its pretty sad. I’d *definitely* upgrade off the ancient versions of Quicken as the “security” of the early 2000s versions is crackable in seconds. Even with the newer versions, I wouldn’t save passwords, even if that means you can’t auto-download.
Quicken 2009 still requires PC (no viable Mac alternative) and still carries along code that clearly hasn’t been touched since the Win98 days, or before. There is still no “undo” and no way to lock transactions that have been completed (independent of reconciling, which still lets you type into them and, with no undo, have to exit carefully). There is no transaction integrity (Quicken is a fancy spreadsheet, not an accounting program that you can “balance the books” in), though transfers are a little better than they were 10-ish years ago.
The auto-fill of downloaded transactions is painfully stupid, with no control — every time I go to Costco it wants to believe the split I used last time is what I want this time. Turning it “partially” off apparently isn’t possible.
Mint is the only real contender out there, but the flexibility isn’t there for handling custom categories in a way that lets us collect the information we need for our taxes, or even easily track reimbursable business (travel) expenses. They seem to be a good company and team (and the passwords are stored by Yodlee, not Mint), so might be worth looking at for simpler applications.
No good answers I know of for personal finance management software unless you file 1040EZ, unfortunately.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:54
It appears that Microsoft has solved the problem for us. I was frustrated to see that all support for on-line services will cease no later than January 2011, or when your subscription ends. It’s a shame, since I have liked the Money family of programs for years. OK, what are the alternatives?