I haven't spoken to a single person at PC Financial who understands what Quicken files do... and thus their importance to us.
No one understands that Quicken files automatically enter and reconcile transactions. It's a huge time saver.
Each time I inquire when Quicken downloads will return I'm told to use CSV files...
CSV files are compatible with Excel, Open Office, and Google Docs.
I try to explain that CSV files are little more than up-to-date statements and do not provide the same functionality.
Why would they direct me to use Excel, Open Office, or Google Docs when I enquire about Quicken? It's maddening.
P.S. But that doesn't mean there is zero cost since they have to support both in software and in customer support areas. And I definitely agree that they are most likely did a price to number of customer evaluation.
I haven't spoken to a single person at PC Financial who understands what Quicken files do... and thus their importance to us.
No one understands that Quicken files automatically enter and reconcile transactions. It's a huge time saver.
Each time I inquire when Quicken downloads will return I'm told to use CSV files...
CSV files are compatible with Excel, Open Office, and Google Docs.
I try to explain that CSV files are little more than up-to-date statements and do not provide the same functionality.
Why would they direct me to use Excel, Open Office, or Google Docs when I enquire about Quicken? It's maddening.
I consciously elected not to get into breaking the costs down into contract costs, infrastructure costs, and support labour costs as this is more detail than would be of interest to most people. The point was, really, that the termination of Quicken support was likely a calculated decision, not a naive, knee jerk avoidance of a bit of extra work.
In my view, by not including Quicken support PC MasterCard has abandoned a large number of customers.
Every other card that I hold offers Quicken downloads. PC MasterCard is the first that doesn't.
I'm going to evaluate how many points I receive from my PC MasterCard. If I receive the same or more monetary value with another credit card I'll switch.
I haven't spoken to a single person at PC Financial who understands what Quicken files do... and thus their importance to us.
No one understands that Quicken files automatically enter and reconcile transactions. It's a huge time saver.
Each time I inquire when Quicken downloads will return I'm told to use CSV files...
CSV files are compatible with Excel, Open Office, and Google Docs.
I try to explain that CSV files are little more than up-to-date statements and do not provide the same functionality.
Why would they direct me to use Excel, Open Office, or Google Docs when I enquire about Quicken? It's maddening.
I know this started as a Windows thread but this issue affects Mac users too, so note that ImportQIF will not help Mac users since you need Windows to run it.
(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)
I was also gob-smacked to see their fluffy new website dropped support for Quicken/Money/OFX compatible downloads. That fakakta .CSV format is an empty suit. Thanks for nothing, PCF!
Since that download feature is such a huge time-saver, I'm switching back to my standby BMO MasterCard immediately, even though those tasty PC Points were ultimately edible.
Well played PCFinancial. What a spectacular sales-prevention strategy. Gah!
I too sent a message about the unannounced deprecation of the Download to Quicken feature, and got the much the same response as everyone else mentioned here, although the response that Chris Bright got was a bit more informative than most in that it spoke to prioritizing and re-evaluating based on customer feedback. That, at least, is a hopeful sign.
I should have checked this site before sending off a letter to them this morning. I would have included some information about this Community page and the number of complaints. The PC Financial web team could benefit from information on the users of this feature.
I would urge anyone reading this thread and who will miss this feature to send their own feedback to PC Financial. The more feedback they get, the more likely they are to restore the feature.
Here's the text of a letter I sent to PC Financial this morning ...
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this to provide feedback regarding the recent changes to the PC Financial Mastercard website.
While some of the recent website changes are useful, and the site now looks prettier, I find that overall it is less functional than the old site.
The most grievous change, for me, is the removal of the transaction Download to Quicken feature. When I asked via the website message feature what happened to this feature, the answer I got back was simply that it was no longer available. I was told there is a Download to .CSV option, but that is of no use to Quicken users.
I worked in the software industry for over 35 years, and one rule we always followed was to avoid taking features away from our users unless there was a damn good reason to do so.
So I ask, what was your reason for removing this feature? Revamping the website look and feel or replacing its underlying technology are not reasons to remove a feature. Did anyone survey the user base to see what the impact of this would be? Did anyone do a usability study to determine how much work this would impose upon Quicken users?
Here's the impact on me. Every month I generate about 60 transactions on my PC Mastercard. Where before I could simply download those within 30 seconds, now I have to enter each one manually. But worse than that, as it happens I often enter transactions manually in order to capture certain details I want to track. With the QFX download previously available, I could download the transactions that have arrived since the last time I downloaded, and it would merge anything new in with my manual entries. That meant I didn't have to enter every transaction, and I didn't have to figure out which ones I entered manually and which ones I skipped.
Each month, I reconcile my Quicken account to my paper statement. This involves first downloading transactions to QFX in order to ensure I have all the transactions for the month. Without that step, I will now spend more time reconciling the statement because of transactions I might have neglected to enter manually.
You might wonder why I bother with all this. The answer is that the benefits outweigh the effort. Quicken provides me with budgeting, transaction history, and an overall snapshot of all my account balances, my net worth, and my net worth trend year over year. I can tell you when and where I bought my five year old BBQ, and how much I paid for it. I can tell you how much I spent on groceries this month, last month, this quarter, this year, and every year this century. Quicken gives me complete financial control.
There are thousands of Quicken users in Canada. I don't know how many use PC Mastercard, but you risk alienating all of them be eliminating the feature – even more so, by doing it without notice or consultation or even a decent explanation. There’s not even a mention of Quicken in the FAQ.
As for the rest of the website revamp, my synopsis would be: pretty, with a few new bells and whistles, but not better. The Dashboard is pretty, and the Current/Available Balance chart is nice, but the bar chart showing transaction amounts by day is of very little use.
The new transaction list has some nice filtering options. But the old transaction list was far more dense and compact, allowing me to see many transactions at once. The new list is sparse, with a lot of empty whitespace. There are pretty icon beside each transaction that provide no real value. Where I could once see 20 or more transactions at a time without scrolling, now I can only see a handful. All this will make monthly reconciliation more painstaking.
The Trends feature may be, for those who don’t use Quicken, a nice option. For me, it’s simply not flexible enough. The category bar graph uses categories that are based on merchant industry, which works to a limited extent but breaks down pretty rapidly with multi-category vendors like Shoppers Drug Mart, the grocery store (where I can also get wine, beer, household products, clothing etc.), Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. A single large transaction in the month, such as buying a travel package, can make one bar very tall and the rest nearly invisible. There is no provision for drilling into the Other category.
The transaction view of the Trends feature provides a bar graph of the daily transaction total for the selected time period. What is the use case for this? Why would anyone care if they had more transactions on Tuesday than on Wednesday? If the point is to highlight large transactions, a top 10 list on the dashboard would be more useful. And you can always sort the transaction list by amount. (Although, I’m not even sure what it means to sort by Highest Date when no date range is selected. What is the default date range?)
Here’s the bottom line for me. PC Mastercard has been my primary-use card for many years now. I have it for the PC Points it generates, and use those points to offset my grocery expenses. That’s the value it provides to me. But my time is valuable too. Now, as a result of these website changes, it’s going to cost me more time to track my expenses on this card. The value it provides has been diminished. So, in response, I will shift my transactions over to another card, one where I will spend less time tracking transactions and still get points benefits. One that has a Download to Quicken option.
Please forward this letter to your website management team. I’m sure they will want to hear this feedback.
Here's the text of a letter I sent to PC Financial this morning ...
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this to provide feedback regarding the recent changes to the PC Financial Mastercard website.
While some of the recent website changes are useful, and the site now looks prettier, I find that overall it is less functional than the old site.
The most grievous change, for me, is the removal of the transaction Download to Quicken feature. When I asked via the website message feature what happened to this feature, the answer I got back was simply that it was no longer available. I was told there is a Download to .CSV option, but that is of no use to Quicken users.
I worked in the software industry for over 35 years, and one rule we always followed was to avoid taking features away from our users unless there was a damn good reason to do so.
So I ask, what was your reason for removing this feature? Revamping the website look and feel or replacing its underlying technology are not reasons to remove a feature. Did anyone survey the user base to see what the impact of this would be? Did anyone do a usability study to determine how much work this would impose upon Quicken users?
Here's the impact on me. Every month I generate about 60 transactions on my PC Mastercard. Where before I could simply download those within 30 seconds, now I have to enter each one manually. But worse than that, as it happens I often enter transactions manually in order to capture certain details I want to track. With the QFX download previously available, I could download the transactions that have arrived since the last time I downloaded, and it would merge anything new in with my manual entries. That meant I didn't have to enter every transaction, and I didn't have to figure out which ones I entered manually and which ones I skipped.
Each month, I reconcile my Quicken account to my paper statement. This involves first downloading transactions to QFX in order to ensure I have all the transactions for the month. Without that step, I will now spend more time reconciling the statement because of transactions I might have neglected to enter manually.
You might wonder why I bother with all this. The answer is that the benefits outweigh the effort. Quicken provides me with budgeting, transaction history, and an overall snapshot of all my account balances, my net worth, and my net worth trend year over year. I can tell you when and where I bought my five year old BBQ, and how much I paid for it. I can tell you how much I spent on groceries this month, last month, this quarter, this year, and every year this century. Quicken gives me complete financial control.
There are thousands of Quicken users in Canada. I don't know how many use PC Mastercard, but you risk alienating all of them be eliminating the feature – even more so, by doing it without notice or consultation or even a decent explanation. There’s not even a mention of Quicken in the FAQ.
As for the rest of the website revamp, my synopsis would be: pretty, with a few new bells and whistles, but not better. The Dashboard is pretty, and the Current/Available Balance chart is nice, but the bar chart showing transaction amounts by day is of very little use.
The new transaction list has some nice filtering options. But the old transaction list was far more dense and compact, allowing me to see many transactions at once. The new list is sparse, with a lot of empty whitespace. There are pretty icon beside each transaction that provide no real value. Where I could once see 20 or more transactions at a time without scrolling, now I can only see a handful. All this will make monthly reconciliation more painstaking.
The Trends feature may be, for those who don’t use Quicken, a nice option. For me, it’s simply not flexible enough. The category bar graph uses categories that are based on merchant industry, which works to a limited extent but breaks down pretty rapidly with multi-category vendors like Shoppers Drug Mart, the grocery store (where I can also get wine, beer, household products, clothing etc.), Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. A single large transaction in the month, such as buying a travel package, can make one bar very tall and the rest nearly invisible. There is no provision for drilling into the Other category.
The transaction view of the Trends feature provides a bar graph of the daily transaction total for the selected time period. What is the use case for this? Why would anyone care if they had more transactions on Tuesday than on Wednesday? If the point is to highlight large transactions, a top 10 list on the dashboard would be more useful. And you can always sort the transaction list by amount. (Although, I’m not even sure what it means to sort by Highest Date when no date range is selected. What is the default date range?)
Here’s the bottom line for me. PC Mastercard has been my primary-use card for many years now. I have it for the PC Points it generates, and use those points to offset my grocery expenses. That’s the value it provides to me. But my time is valuable too. Now, as a result of these website changes, it’s going to cost me more time to track my expenses on this card. The value it provides has been diminished. So, in response, I will shift my transactions over to another card, one where I will spend less time tracking transactions and still get points benefits. One that has a Download to Quicken option.
Please forward this letter to your website management team. I’m sure they will want to hear this feedback.
Sincerely,
Gary Puckering
FWIW: it would probably be more effective to send more concise feedback to the marketing folks at PCG. The decision not to renew the contract with Quicken would have been a business decision, not a technical one.
Cannot believe that PC Financial won't allow this feature anymore ... it is unbelievable ... I guess for small businesses using Quickbooks it will also be a problem.. PC Financial new website is also a step back in many ways. I will probably also change my MasterCard to something more useful that includes download to Quicken. I have used Quicken for at least 20 years now! Can someone suggest a good alternative that includes the download to Quicken? ..
Cannot believe that PC Financial won't allow this feature anymore ... it is unbelievable ... I guess for small businesses using Quickbooks it will also be a problem.. PC Financial new website is also a step back in many ways. I will probably also change my MasterCard to something more useful that includes download to Quicken. I have used Quicken for at least 20 years now! Can someone suggest a good alternative that includes the download to Quicken? ..
Yes. BMO Cashback World MasterCard has great benefits and works well with Quicken; the transactions tend to flow through faster than with other cards; on occasion they download later the sam day.
I also spoke to support person who you could tell had no idea what I was talking about. She kept trying to tell me how to download the app to my phone and then after she figured out I wanted to download the transactions she showed me how to download my statement into a .pdf and said I could convert it whatever other format I wanted. LOL
When I used the online message I got pretty much the same answer everyone else has received. I will be changing cards shortly if there is no indication that this will be fixed quickly.
Here's the text of a letter I sent to PC Financial this morning ...
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this to provide feedback regarding the recent changes to the PC Financial Mastercard website.
While some of the recent website changes are useful, and the site now looks prettier, I find that overall it is less functional than the old site.
The most grievous change, for me, is the removal of the transaction Download to Quicken feature. When I asked via the website message feature what happened to this feature, the answer I got back was simply that it was no longer available. I was told there is a Download to .CSV option, but that is of no use to Quicken users.
I worked in the software industry for over 35 years, and one rule we always followed was to avoid taking features away from our users unless there was a damn good reason to do so.
So I ask, what was your reason for removing this feature? Revamping the website look and feel or replacing its underlying technology are not reasons to remove a feature. Did anyone survey the user base to see what the impact of this would be? Did anyone do a usability study to determine how much work this would impose upon Quicken users?
Here's the impact on me. Every month I generate about 60 transactions on my PC Mastercard. Where before I could simply download those within 30 seconds, now I have to enter each one manually. But worse than that, as it happens I often enter transactions manually in order to capture certain details I want to track. With the QFX download previously available, I could download the transactions that have arrived since the last time I downloaded, and it would merge anything new in with my manual entries. That meant I didn't have to enter every transaction, and I didn't have to figure out which ones I entered manually and which ones I skipped.
Each month, I reconcile my Quicken account to my paper statement. This involves first downloading transactions to QFX in order to ensure I have all the transactions for the month. Without that step, I will now spend more time reconciling the statement because of transactions I might have neglected to enter manually.
You might wonder why I bother with all this. The answer is that the benefits outweigh the effort. Quicken provides me with budgeting, transaction history, and an overall snapshot of all my account balances, my net worth, and my net worth trend year over year. I can tell you when and where I bought my five year old BBQ, and how much I paid for it. I can tell you how much I spent on groceries this month, last month, this quarter, this year, and every year this century. Quicken gives me complete financial control.
There are thousands of Quicken users in Canada. I don't know how many use PC Mastercard, but you risk alienating all of them be eliminating the feature – even more so, by doing it without notice or consultation or even a decent explanation. There’s not even a mention of Quicken in the FAQ.
As for the rest of the website revamp, my synopsis would be: pretty, with a few new bells and whistles, but not better. The Dashboard is pretty, and the Current/Available Balance chart is nice, but the bar chart showing transaction amounts by day is of very little use.
The new transaction list has some nice filtering options. But the old transaction list was far more dense and compact, allowing me to see many transactions at once. The new list is sparse, with a lot of empty whitespace. There are pretty icon beside each transaction that provide no real value. Where I could once see 20 or more transactions at a time without scrolling, now I can only see a handful. All this will make monthly reconciliation more painstaking.
The Trends feature may be, for those who don’t use Quicken, a nice option. For me, it’s simply not flexible enough. The category bar graph uses categories that are based on merchant industry, which works to a limited extent but breaks down pretty rapidly with multi-category vendors like Shoppers Drug Mart, the grocery store (where I can also get wine, beer, household products, clothing etc.), Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. A single large transaction in the month, such as buying a travel package, can make one bar very tall and the rest nearly invisible. There is no provision for drilling into the Other category.
The transaction view of the Trends feature provides a bar graph of the daily transaction total for the selected time period. What is the use case for this? Why would anyone care if they had more transactions on Tuesday than on Wednesday? If the point is to highlight large transactions, a top 10 list on the dashboard would be more useful. And you can always sort the transaction list by amount. (Although, I’m not even sure what it means to sort by Highest Date when no date range is selected. What is the default date range?)
Here’s the bottom line for me. PC Mastercard has been my primary-use card for many years now. I have it for the PC Points it generates, and use those points to offset my grocery expenses. That’s the value it provides to me. But my time is valuable too. Now, as a result of these website changes, it’s going to cost me more time to track my expenses on this card. The value it provides has been diminished. So, in response, I will shift my transactions over to another card, one where I will spend less time tracking transactions and still get points benefits. One that has a Download to Quicken option.
Please forward this letter to your website management team. I’m sure they will want to hear this feedback.
Sincerely,
Gary Puckering
Well, I can't make the business case -- except to point to the Quicken Community discussion on this topic to illustrate that many users are upset about it, and I did that in the message which I sent.
After receiving the concise but unhelpful answer to my original query, my goal with the letter was threefold.
One goal was to explain the burden which deprecating the Quicken download feature imposes upon Quicken users. The reply I received demonstrated no understanding of the difference between CSV and QFX capabilities from the user perspective.
The second goal was to provide detailed feedback on the new website features. It's all well and good to revamp a website and give it a better look and feel. It's not ok to do that at the expensive of functionality and utility.
My third goal was to point out that my request to add Quicken as a topic in the FAQ went unaddressed in their response. It would be better to have a single consistent statement addressing Quicken than several different answers to different users.
Since QFX is a proprietary format for which institutions pay a license fee, the next step for us Quicken users might be to start lobbying PCG to either drop that fee, or to support OFX, or both. Otherwise, they may continue to lose the interest of customers who rely on QFX for reliable and accurate transaction download.
Here's the text of a letter I sent to PC Financial this morning ...
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this to provide feedback regarding the recent changes to the PC Financial Mastercard website.
While some of the recent website changes are useful, and the site now looks prettier, I find that overall it is less functional than the old site.
The most grievous change, for me, is the removal of the transaction Download to Quicken feature. When I asked via the website message feature what happened to this feature, the answer I got back was simply that it was no longer available. I was told there is a Download to .CSV option, but that is of no use to Quicken users.
I worked in the software industry for over 35 years, and one rule we always followed was to avoid taking features away from our users unless there was a damn good reason to do so.
So I ask, what was your reason for removing this feature? Revamping the website look and feel or replacing its underlying technology are not reasons to remove a feature. Did anyone survey the user base to see what the impact of this would be? Did anyone do a usability study to determine how much work this would impose upon Quicken users?
Here's the impact on me. Every month I generate about 60 transactions on my PC Mastercard. Where before I could simply download those within 30 seconds, now I have to enter each one manually. But worse than that, as it happens I often enter transactions manually in order to capture certain details I want to track. With the QFX download previously available, I could download the transactions that have arrived since the last time I downloaded, and it would merge anything new in with my manual entries. That meant I didn't have to enter every transaction, and I didn't have to figure out which ones I entered manually and which ones I skipped.
Each month, I reconcile my Quicken account to my paper statement. This involves first downloading transactions to QFX in order to ensure I have all the transactions for the month. Without that step, I will now spend more time reconciling the statement because of transactions I might have neglected to enter manually.
You might wonder why I bother with all this. The answer is that the benefits outweigh the effort. Quicken provides me with budgeting, transaction history, and an overall snapshot of all my account balances, my net worth, and my net worth trend year over year. I can tell you when and where I bought my five year old BBQ, and how much I paid for it. I can tell you how much I spent on groceries this month, last month, this quarter, this year, and every year this century. Quicken gives me complete financial control.
There are thousands of Quicken users in Canada. I don't know how many use PC Mastercard, but you risk alienating all of them be eliminating the feature – even more so, by doing it without notice or consultation or even a decent explanation. There’s not even a mention of Quicken in the FAQ.
As for the rest of the website revamp, my synopsis would be: pretty, with a few new bells and whistles, but not better. The Dashboard is pretty, and the Current/Available Balance chart is nice, but the bar chart showing transaction amounts by day is of very little use.
The new transaction list has some nice filtering options. But the old transaction list was far more dense and compact, allowing me to see many transactions at once. The new list is sparse, with a lot of empty whitespace. There are pretty icon beside each transaction that provide no real value. Where I could once see 20 or more transactions at a time without scrolling, now I can only see a handful. All this will make monthly reconciliation more painstaking.
The Trends feature may be, for those who don’t use Quicken, a nice option. For me, it’s simply not flexible enough. The category bar graph uses categories that are based on merchant industry, which works to a limited extent but breaks down pretty rapidly with multi-category vendors like Shoppers Drug Mart, the grocery store (where I can also get wine, beer, household products, clothing etc.), Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. A single large transaction in the month, such as buying a travel package, can make one bar very tall and the rest nearly invisible. There is no provision for drilling into the Other category.
The transaction view of the Trends feature provides a bar graph of the daily transaction total for the selected time period. What is the use case for this? Why would anyone care if they had more transactions on Tuesday than on Wednesday? If the point is to highlight large transactions, a top 10 list on the dashboard would be more useful. And you can always sort the transaction list by amount. (Although, I’m not even sure what it means to sort by Highest Date when no date range is selected. What is the default date range?)
Here’s the bottom line for me. PC Mastercard has been my primary-use card for many years now. I have it for the PC Points it generates, and use those points to offset my grocery expenses. That’s the value it provides to me. But my time is valuable too. Now, as a result of these website changes, it’s going to cost me more time to track my expenses on this card. The value it provides has been diminished. So, in response, I will shift my transactions over to another card, one where I will spend less time tracking transactions and still get points benefits. One that has a Download to Quicken option.
Please forward this letter to your website management team. I’m sure they will want to hear this feedback.
Sincerely,
Gary Puckering
Good luck with that idea. Quicken has contracts with thousands of financial institutions. Clearly, the fee for supporting EWC is part of Quicken’s revenue model. In fact, I would assert that Intuit created the QFX variant specifically to create a revenue model.
Here's the text of a letter I sent to PC Financial this morning ...
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this to provide feedback regarding the recent changes to the PC Financial Mastercard website.
While some of the recent website changes are useful, and the site now looks prettier, I find that overall it is less functional than the old site.
The most grievous change, for me, is the removal of the transaction Download to Quicken feature. When I asked via the website message feature what happened to this feature, the answer I got back was simply that it was no longer available. I was told there is a Download to .CSV option, but that is of no use to Quicken users.
I worked in the software industry for over 35 years, and one rule we always followed was to avoid taking features away from our users unless there was a damn good reason to do so.
So I ask, what was your reason for removing this feature? Revamping the website look and feel or replacing its underlying technology are not reasons to remove a feature. Did anyone survey the user base to see what the impact of this would be? Did anyone do a usability study to determine how much work this would impose upon Quicken users?
Here's the impact on me. Every month I generate about 60 transactions on my PC Mastercard. Where before I could simply download those within 30 seconds, now I have to enter each one manually. But worse than that, as it happens I often enter transactions manually in order to capture certain details I want to track. With the QFX download previously available, I could download the transactions that have arrived since the last time I downloaded, and it would merge anything new in with my manual entries. That meant I didn't have to enter every transaction, and I didn't have to figure out which ones I entered manually and which ones I skipped.
Each month, I reconcile my Quicken account to my paper statement. This involves first downloading transactions to QFX in order to ensure I have all the transactions for the month. Without that step, I will now spend more time reconciling the statement because of transactions I might have neglected to enter manually.
You might wonder why I bother with all this. The answer is that the benefits outweigh the effort. Quicken provides me with budgeting, transaction history, and an overall snapshot of all my account balances, my net worth, and my net worth trend year over year. I can tell you when and where I bought my five year old BBQ, and how much I paid for it. I can tell you how much I spent on groceries this month, last month, this quarter, this year, and every year this century. Quicken gives me complete financial control.
There are thousands of Quicken users in Canada. I don't know how many use PC Mastercard, but you risk alienating all of them be eliminating the feature – even more so, by doing it without notice or consultation or even a decent explanation. There’s not even a mention of Quicken in the FAQ.
As for the rest of the website revamp, my synopsis would be: pretty, with a few new bells and whistles, but not better. The Dashboard is pretty, and the Current/Available Balance chart is nice, but the bar chart showing transaction amounts by day is of very little use.
The new transaction list has some nice filtering options. But the old transaction list was far more dense and compact, allowing me to see many transactions at once. The new list is sparse, with a lot of empty whitespace. There are pretty icon beside each transaction that provide no real value. Where I could once see 20 or more transactions at a time without scrolling, now I can only see a handful. All this will make monthly reconciliation more painstaking.
The Trends feature may be, for those who don’t use Quicken, a nice option. For me, it’s simply not flexible enough. The category bar graph uses categories that are based on merchant industry, which works to a limited extent but breaks down pretty rapidly with multi-category vendors like Shoppers Drug Mart, the grocery store (where I can also get wine, beer, household products, clothing etc.), Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. A single large transaction in the month, such as buying a travel package, can make one bar very tall and the rest nearly invisible. There is no provision for drilling into the Other category.
The transaction view of the Trends feature provides a bar graph of the daily transaction total for the selected time period. What is the use case for this? Why would anyone care if they had more transactions on Tuesday than on Wednesday? If the point is to highlight large transactions, a top 10 list on the dashboard would be more useful. And you can always sort the transaction list by amount. (Although, I’m not even sure what it means to sort by Highest Date when no date range is selected. What is the default date range?)
Here’s the bottom line for me. PC Mastercard has been my primary-use card for many years now. I have it for the PC Points it generates, and use those points to offset my grocery expenses. That’s the value it provides to me. But my time is valuable too. Now, as a result of these website changes, it’s going to cost me more time to track my expenses on this card. The value it provides has been diminished. So, in response, I will shift my transactions over to another card, one where I will spend less time tracking transactions and still get points benefits. One that has a Download to Quicken option.
Please forward this letter to your website management team. I’m sure they will want to hear this feedback.
Sincerely,
Gary Puckering
I would assert that Intuit created the QFX variant specifically to create a revenue model.
I would too, especially since Microsoft went with straight OFX (free since it is an open standard), and MS Money was dropped years ago because it wasn't profitable enough for them.
Note there are only a few keys different between QFX and OFX.
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
Quicken doesn’t permit direct import of CSV files for at least three good reasons: 1) it would be in conflict with the revenue model; 2) CSV files do not provide a means to avoid duplicate transactions, and 3) it would be a support nightmare.
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
BTW I think there are few reason why Quicken Inc doesn't support CSV.
All the standard describes is how to separate the columns of data. It doesn't define what data is in what columns. Therefore there is always "mapping" that has to be done because each financial institution will do it differently. This in turn implies more support costs for the users that can't get the mapping correct for a given financial institution.
Note that most of these decisions were made by Intuit, and you might think that now Quicken Inc is a separate company they might change these things, it isn't likely in my opinion.
Quicken Inc contracts with Intuit to provide the downloading of transactions. And Intuit is still very much in control of such matters (they get the licensing/support fees, not Quicken Inc)
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
CSV files do not provide a means to avoid duplicate transactions
Note neither does the QIF format. And in the past the matching has been pretty terrible, but now with the subscription version of Quicken's downgrading of QIF support, it doesn't even try, transactions go straight into the register.
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
Arctic Hare: Not sure why from a Quicken customer's perspective a "good reason" is that supporting csv imports is in "in conflict with the revenue model". It may be a "reason" but certainly not a "good" reason.
I used the utility that you suggested and quite easily imported the PC Financial csv transactions into Quicken. Thank you.
It's just a reality that not all financial institutions will export in Quicken format. Therefore it's incumbent on Quicken to address this gap.
Quicken should not be the tail wagging the dog and "dictating" to its users to change financial service providers just because a provider does not support the "Quicken format" !
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
Quicken needs to generate sufficient revenue to stay in business. MS Money used the open format and couldn’t generate enough revenue to stay in business. Quicken is the only full feature program of its kind left. Personally, i’d Like it to remain financially viable.
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
It's just a reality that not all financial institutions will export in Quicken format. Therefore it's incumbent on Quicken to address this gap.
Not necessarily.
Customers request tons of features all the time.
Quicken Inc has to evaluate where they should put their resources. They are going to be doing that based on the number of users that need a feature. The impact on the users. The likelihood that that will get more users to purchase Quicken. The difficulty of implementing it. The difficulty of supporting it.
And BTW that evaluation might be completely different for different companies supporting personal finance software.
For instance a company based in Canada might look at this different than one in the US, because more of their customers are based there.
And a smaller player that doesn't have as many customers might be willing to support it because they need to have a feature that the "big guy" doesn't have to attract customers.
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
BTW on MS Money and them not charging the financial institutions. It was speculated that it wasn't that Microsoft didn't want go charge them, but it basically couldn't. It was trying to compete with Quicken and getting the financial institutions to support it was key, and not charging help get that support.
Basically the same can be said of Express Web Connect. There isn't a charge to the financial institution for that connection method. 15,000+ on Express Web Connect, 2,500 on Direct Connect (down from 4,500) {zero in Canada}.
Cannot believe that PC Financial won't allow this feature anymore ... it is unbelievable ... I guess for small businesses using Quickbooks it will also be a problem.. PC Financial new website is also a step back in many ways. I will probably also change my MasterCard to something more useful that includes download to Quicken. I have used Quicken for at least 20 years now! Can someone suggest a good alternative that includes the download to Quicken? ..
Just checked .. Unfortunately, there is a minimum yearly income for this and I don't qualify .. however, do all of the BMO Mastercards work with Quicken ? there are others with no annual fee too...
Comments
Every other card that I hold offers Quicken downloads. PC MasterCard is the first that doesn't.
I'm going to evaluate how many points I receive from my PC MasterCard. If I receive the same or more monetary value with another credit card I'll switch.
(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)
P.S. I updated the thread to reflect this.
- Where to find a Help Guide for Quicken for Mac?
- Quicken Mac FAQ list
- Quicken Windows FAQ list
- Help Guide and FAQs for Quicken Mobile
COMPLETE list of Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac to VOTE onObject to Quicken's business model, using up 25% of your screen? Add your vote here:
Quicken should eliminate the LARGE Ad space when a subscription expires
(Canadian Q user since '92, STILL using QM2007)
Since that download feature is such a huge time-saver, I'm switching back to my standby BMO MasterCard immediately, even though those tasty PC Points were ultimately edible.
Well played PCFinancial. What a spectacular sales-prevention strategy. Gah!
I should have checked this site before sending off a letter to them this morning. I would have included some information about this Community page and the number of complaints. The PC Financial web team could benefit from information on the users of this feature.
I would urge anyone reading this thread and who will miss this feature to send their own feedback to PC Financial. The more feedback they get, the more likely they are to restore the feature.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this to provide
feedback regarding the recent changes to the PC Financial Mastercard
website.
While some of the recent website
changes are useful, and the site now looks prettier, I find that overall it is
less functional than the old site.
The most grievous change, for me, is the removal of the
transaction Download to Quicken feature.
When I asked via the website message feature what happened to this
feature, the answer I got back was simply that it was no longer available. I was told there is a Download to .CSV
option, but that is of no use to Quicken users.
I worked in the software industry for over 35 years, and one
rule we always followed was to avoid taking features away from our users unless
there was a damn good reason to do so.
So I ask, what was your reason for removing this
feature? Revamping the website look and
feel or replacing its underlying technology are not reasons to remove a
feature. Did anyone survey the user base
to see what the impact of this would be?
Did anyone do a usability study to determine how much work this would
impose upon Quicken users?
Here's the impact on me.
Every month I generate about 60 transactions on my PC Mastercard. Where before I could simply download those
within 30 seconds, now I have to enter each one manually. But worse than that, as it happens I often
enter transactions manually in order to capture certain details I want to
track. With the QFX download previously
available, I could download the transactions that have arrived since the last
time I downloaded, and it would merge anything new in with my manual entries. That meant I didn't have to enter every
transaction, and I didn't have to figure out which ones I entered manually and
which ones I skipped.
Each month, I reconcile my Quicken account to my paper
statement. This involves first
downloading transactions to QFX in order to ensure I have all the transactions
for the month. Without that step, I will
now spend more time reconciling the statement because of transactions I might
have neglected to enter manually.
You might wonder why I bother with all this. The answer is that the benefits outweigh the
effort. Quicken provides me with
budgeting, transaction history, and an overall snapshot of all my account
balances, my net worth, and my net worth trend year over year. I can tell you
when and where I bought my five year old BBQ, and how much I paid for it. I can tell you how much I spent on groceries
this month, last month, this quarter, this year, and every year this
century. Quicken gives me complete
financial control.
There are thousands of Quicken users in Canada. I don't know how many use PC Mastercard, but
you risk alienating all of them be eliminating the feature – even more so, by
doing it without notice or consultation or even a decent explanation. There’s not even a mention of Quicken in the
FAQ.
As for the rest of the website revamp, my synopsis would
be: pretty, with a few new bells and
whistles, but not better. The Dashboard
is pretty, and the Current/Available Balance chart is nice, but the bar chart
showing transaction amounts by day is of very little use.
The new transaction list has some nice filtering options. But the old transaction list was far more
dense and compact, allowing me to see many transactions at once. The new list is sparse, with a lot of empty
whitespace. There are pretty icon beside
each transaction that provide no real value.
Where I could once see 20 or more transactions at a time without
scrolling, now I can only see a handful.
All this will make monthly
reconciliation more painstaking.
The Trends feature may be, for those who don’t use Quicken,
a nice option. For me, it’s simply not
flexible enough. The category bar graph
uses categories that are based on merchant industry, which works to a limited
extent but breaks down pretty rapidly with multi-category vendors like Shoppers
Drug Mart, the grocery store (where I can also get wine, beer, household
products, clothing etc.), Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc. A single large transaction in the month, such
as buying a travel package, can make one bar very tall and the rest nearly
invisible. There is no provision for
drilling into the Other category.
The transaction view of the Trends feature provides a bar
graph of the daily transaction total for the selected time period. What is the use case for this? Why would anyone care if they had more
transactions on Tuesday than on Wednesday?
If the point is to highlight large transactions, a top 10 list on the
dashboard would be more useful. And you
can always sort the transaction list by amount.
(Although, I’m not even sure what it means to sort by Highest Date when
no date range is selected. What is the
default date range?)
Here’s the bottom line for me. PC Mastercard has been my primary-use card for
many years now. I have it for the PC
Points it generates, and use those points to offset my grocery expenses. That’s the value it provides to me. But my time is valuable too. Now, as a result of these website changes,
it’s going to cost me more time to track my expenses on this card. The value it provides has been
diminished. So, in response, I will
shift my transactions over to another card, one where I will spend less time
tracking transactions and still get points benefits. One that has a Download to Quicken option.
Please forward this letter to your website management
team. I’m sure they will want to hear
this feedback.
Sincerely,
Gary Puckering
When I used the online message I got pretty much the same answer everyone else has received.
I will be changing cards shortly if there is no indication that this will be fixed quickly.
Very poor decision PC Mastercard.
http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/
After receiving the concise but unhelpful answer to my original query, my goal with the letter was threefold.
One goal was to explain the burden which deprecating the Quicken download feature imposes upon Quicken users. The reply I received demonstrated no understanding of the difference between CSV and QFX capabilities from the user perspective.
The second goal was to provide detailed feedback on the new website features. It's all well and good to revamp a website and give it a better look and feel. It's not ok to do that at the expensive of functionality and utility.
My third goal was to point out that my request to add Quicken as a topic in the FAQ went unaddressed in their response. It would be better to have a single consistent statement addressing Quicken than several different answers to different users.
Since QFX is a proprietary format for which institutions pay a license fee, the next step for us Quicken users might be to start lobbying PCG to either drop that fee, or to support OFX, or both. Otherwise, they may continue to lose the interest of customers who rely on QFX for reliable and accurate transaction download.
I agree it's a shame that PC Financial has removed this functionality. I suspect it is because very few customers actually use it.
Having said that PC Financial does offer a CSV file export.
At the very least Quicken should be able to support importing the CSV file without forcing people to purchase a third party utility.
It's Quicken's responsibility to import a variety of formats. (even if this means that certain functionality is lost depending on the type of import)
I'm sure we have more influence with Quicken than we will ever have with a financial institution.
Note there are only a few keys different between QFX and OFX.
- All the standard describes is how to separate the columns of data. It doesn't define what data is in what columns. Therefore there is always "mapping" that has to be done because each financial institution will do it differently. This in turn implies more support costs for the users that can't get the mapping correct for a given financial institution.
- They already have QIF format and have tried to get away from it pushing QFX instead. Which I think was done for two reasons. One is they didn't want to continue to support two formats (even though they ended up doing that, but not they have "degraded" that support with the subscription Quicken { https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/qif-importing-into-quicken-windows-2018-is-broken-in-the-r2-3-patch-update }). And the second is of course getting revenue from users.
Note that most of these decisions were made by Intuit, and you might think that now Quicken Inc is a separate company they might change these things, it isn't likely in my opinion.Quicken Inc contracts with Intuit to provide the downloading of transactions. And Intuit is still very much in control of such matters (they get the licensing/support fees, not Quicken Inc)
I used the utility that you suggested and quite easily imported the PC Financial csv transactions into Quicken. Thank you.
It's just a reality that not all financial institutions will export in Quicken format. Therefore it's incumbent on Quicken to address this gap.
Quicken should not be the tail wagging the dog and "dictating" to its users to change financial service providers just because a provider does not support the "Quicken format" !
Customers request tons of features all the time.
Quicken Inc has to evaluate where they should put their resources.
They are going to be doing that based on the number of users that need a feature.
The impact on the users.
The likelihood that that will get more users to purchase Quicken.
The difficulty of implementing it.
The difficulty of supporting it.
And BTW that evaluation might be completely different for different companies supporting personal finance software.
For instance a company based in Canada might look at this different than one in the US, because more of their customers are based there.
And a smaller player that doesn't have as many customers might be willing to support it because they need to have a feature that the "big guy" doesn't have to attract customers.
Basically the same can be said of Express Web Connect. There isn't a charge to the financial institution for that connection method. 15,000+ on Express Web Connect, 2,500 on Direct Connect (down from 4,500) {zero in Canada}.