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?
July 13th, 2009 at 12:54
I have been a Quicken user ever since I worked at Intuit back in 1995 (so 15 years now). I’m configuring a new
Windows 7 machine though, and I can’t get my Quicken Deluxe 2005 CD to install. It’s probably some kind of path
issue (since Win7 changed all the default locations vs. WinXP), but even if I figure all that out, I’ll have a
hobbled program that can’t do anything online (thanks to Intuit’s asinine “sunsetting” policy). So I’ve been
researching alternatives….
(1) What about upgrading to Quicken 2009? Everything I’ve read (on Amazon and other websites) says that the program
is an unmitigated disaster, with constant crashes, data corruption, and nonexistent support. Moreover, Quicken has
made rumblings that Quicken 2009 might be its last version anyway, and you know that means that they’ll turn it off
three years from now. In truth, Intuit seems to have abandoned the program several years ago, employing their
“sunsetting” policy to milk their remaining customers dry with little attempt to add any value or even stabilize
the product.
(2) What about Microsoft Money 2009? Well, Microsoft has already announced that it’s going to turn off support for
that software in just TWO years. And all the reviews show it worse than Quicken in terms of features and support.
(3) What about Mint? It’s getting great reviews, but I can’t get comfortable with the idea of putting all my
financial data online. Call me old school. What happens if they go bankrupt?
(4) What about MoneyDance? It’s also getting great reviews, and it seems to have many of the features that we
Quicken users have come to expect…. EXCEPT that their UI is plain (bordering on ugly), and they only have a
handful of equally-plain reports. If you spend all the time to enter your data, the least you can hope for in terms
of payout is some fancy graphs.
(5) What about AceMoney? There’s actually a completely FREE “Lite” version of this software available on
Download.com, and it’s the most popular package in the “personal finance” section. It only supports ONE account,
though, and I have about 50 in Quicken (including the retired ones), so I’m considering the full (pay) version
instead. It can’t download data directly from financial institutions (via OFX), so you have to export your
financial data and then import it into AceMoney (how retro!). No ability to download stock quotes either. Moreover,
reporting in this software is even more limited than MoneyDance.
(6) What about “You Need a Budget Pro”? This is a very popular package on Download.com, but it’s actually just a glorified Excel spreadsheet — great for budgeting, but not really the full-featured personal finance package that we Quicken users have come to expect.
I found two recent comparison reviews, and they both put Quicken, MOneyDance, and AceMoney at the top:
http://personal-finance-software-review.toptenreviews.com/
http://www.isoftwarereviews.com/personal-finance-software-reviews-ratings-and-voting/
So it appears that there really is NO “best” solution here. You just have to pick the program that annoys you the least. Don’t mind crashes and time-bombed functionality? Use Quicken. Don’t mind having all your financial information online? Use Mint. Don’t mind a lame UI and lame reporting? Use MoneyDance. Just want to manage your budget? Use “You Need a Budget Pro”.
In my case, I’ll probably just try once more to install Quicken 2005 on Windows 7 (since I bought a license for it and all). If I can’t get that to work, I’ll give MoneyDance a try. I’ll sure miss the reports, though.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:59
I’m in the UK and faced with a similar dilemma. I’m running Quicken 2002 (!!!) on Windows XP and it gives me everything
I need (which is different from what I want). I am upgrading my OS to Vista (hardware change dictates) and will further
upgrade (for free) to Windows 7 in a couple of months. I am pinning my hopes on the new Windows XP mode feature of Windows 7
that allows you to run XP compatible programs on Windows 7. That sounds neat. Of course you need to have eiher the
Professional or Ultimate editions of Windows 7.
August 22nd, 2009 at 17:34
I have quicken basic 2007, it stopped downloading updates from my bank and no one seems to know how to fix it. I was looking for Microsoft money but unable to find it in stores. I have used quicken for years and this is the first version I have had Real problems with. it doesn’t want to retrieve back up file either, and I lost a lot of my 2009 transactions.
August 24th, 2009 at 7:39
As an update to my previous post, I DID manage to get Quicken 2005 installed on Windows 7, but it was a hack. Moreover, you need access to your old Windows XP machine. Here’s how I did it:
(1) Make sure that you have symbolic links from “C:\Documents and Settings\YourName” to “C:\Users\YourName”. On my Win7 RC install, these weren’t set up correctly by default.
(2) Install Quicken 2005 directly on Windows 7, but choose the “Custom” install and override the install directory to match whatever you used on Windows XP. In particular, I had to remove the ” (x86)” that Windows 7 appends to the “Program Files” path. I can’t recall if I had to run the install in WinXP compatibility mode or not. Regardless of how you run it, it will NOT run cleanly (see below).
(3) After the install completes (mostly, with some griping), COPY the ENTIRE Quicken install directory from the old machine to the new one, overriding everything that you just installed. Yeah, that’s a complete hack, but there’s stuff that the Quicken installer just won’t install correctly on Win7.
When you first run Quicken on the new machine, it will gripe about something (I forget what), but after that it will run just fine as it did under Windows XP. Of course, Quicken long ago sunsetted the online features, so none of that will work, but it doesn’t work on XP anyway.
August 28th, 2009 at 9:05
I have owned 3 versions of Quicken. Quicken 2007 was my last previous. Files are not “backward compatible, so never mind going back to 2007 which always served me well. Quicken 2009 is undoubtedly the most aggravating, frustrating, time wasting bit of softwar I have ever seen. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles but like reporting and ability to unload directly from my bank. The problem has been 8 or 10 crashes (have lost count) where it comes up and asks “Are y0u a new Quicken User?”. It can’t EVER remember where it stored my files. In self-defense I have resorted to backing up my files to a memory stick EVERY time I exit Quicken. It doesn’t like that either. Then I have to Copy my files to the Desktop; then it will open them. Maybe tomorrow it will open with my designated files, maybe not. Buy it again? Not on your life! Their HELP is useless within the program and unavailable on line.
March 12th, 2010 at 9:21
I’ve been using Quicken since my bank forced me into using it which was way back in 1997 or something like that. Before that I was quite happy just using the Online MAC system to pay my bills which were ALL done electronically the day I told it to pay them. So if it were 4/1/1996 and I told it to pay it on 4/2/1996, the monies were deducted from my account on 4/2/1996! With Quicken (and I assume Money as well) you have to schedule the payment, which is usually 7 days ahead of today’s date. Then they print a paper check and they mail it! What a waste! I think they might have gotten better, but it is disturbing that in this age of technology that these companies cannot do e-payments. Instead they waste lots of time, resources and money to basically do a payment they way payments have been done for decades!
My real reason for commenting here was about the Quicken 2009 (and previous versions) help system. I agree totally that it is completely useless. There hasn’t been a time that I’ve used it where I actually found an answer to my question. I’ve had to just grin a bear it with my choices for fields where there is no help or inaccurate help. I just don’t think they care and are not willing to hire Americans to actually document the program.