An update from our CEO, Eric Dunn

Marketing Guru

A few quick thoughts:

1. An interface / code overhaul would be nice. But at least I've noticed Quicken has improved a bit in reliability over the past year. As others have mentioned, MS Money was headed in the right direction until MS pulled the plug.

2. Would like better investment analysis tools.

3. Quicken often has a hard time with downloaded brokerage transaction. Some work needs to be done with online brokerages to clean up and standardize how transactions are categorized.

4. Auto categorization of banking transactions is very problematic. I do NOT like how Quicken thinks it's categories are better than mine or how it completely gets them wrong. There is no easy and direct way to manage this as there should be. The rename feature is also buggy.

5. Can we please get some sort of more intelligent year end closeout / archiving feature for Q HBR? Would love to shrink the size of my Q database but am afraid to mess with it for fear of screwing up historical transaction-based data.

6. Some vestige products like Home Inventory and the Retirement Planning tools need updating.

7. Quicken is supposed to integrate with MS Outlook for calendar functions (bill pay stuff). It doesn't work with 64-bit Outlook (even though the website implies it does).

--TG

jacobs

SewingDaisy said:

Two things - The calendar needs improvement. I receive deposits on the second and third Wednesdays of each month. Now I have to go in manually and edit the dates of these deposits.

@SewingDaisy Why not make these two separate recurring transactions: one on the second Wednesday of each month, and one on the third Wednesday of each month? Then the deposit will show up automatically and on-time for you.

CV

Many good comments. I agree with a simple Quicken. I like the idea of a PC program and the option of a cloud based program. I left Quicken due to problems syncing to Wells Fargo.

lablover57

Long time Quicken user, since the DOS days (both Windows and MAC). Stop adding the fluff, fix the basics (like category on the MAC), importing seamlessly from previous years and fix that annoying fonts  whenever you need to add an account. 

joebarryphd

QUICKEN 2007 was a user friendly
application. Bring it back in 64 bit
so it can be run on Mac OS Catalina.
QUICKEN DELUXE is way too complicated

jacobs

@joebarryphd Quicken 2007 cannot (and will not) be "brought back in 64 bit." It was built around core technologies that just no longer exist in the Mac operating system. The entire program has to be rewritten -- and it has been. I don't believe that Quicken 2019 is any more complicated than Quicken 2007 -- but many of us have had a decade, or two decades, using the interface of the legacy programs, so we can do things without thinking. Quicken 2019's interface is different, and it takes time to get used to because the muscle memory isn't there. But after you use it for awhile and it begins to feel comfortable and second nature, I think you'll find it really isn't more complicated -- just different. 

mistertheplague

@nporter4: Since QW17, the tax planner does calculate QDI

Johnweller

Eric, please read some of the comments regarding connection issues (Prudential comments recently for one). Quicken has become much more unreliable in recent years. Although DirectConnect may be the FI's problem many times, there seems to be little ownership from Quicken to make sure problems get resolved. Too many times Quicken helps desk says' "call the FI". And the FI says "call Quicken". It is a waste of your customers time.

Also there needs to be better, more transparent communication when there are problems to your customers. In my business if this happened you would loose customers, which is what I think will happen with quicken.

have been a customer since day 1 but the end is coming, I can feel it....

Roy Pemberton

I would like to see the ability to see projected balances on future dates based on future transactions entered up in the mobile app.
Also, if possible, it would be good to be able to include foreign currency/ accounts in the cloud, for inclusion on the mobile app.
I must also say that I disagree strongly with one previous contributor, if you were to introduce a new file format/ file extension, for me it would be hugely important that I would be able to convert my existing file to the new format, I don't see that as optional/ non- essential at all as it's very important to me that I can view my past history.
Will Simplifi use a new file format, and if so, will it be possible to import/ convert existing Quicken files?

Roy Pemberton

Also, I agree with @Jacobs, I've been a long time user of Quicken, so have used many of the previous versions, including Quicken 2007, and I don't find Quicken Deluxe any more complicated to use, and it has some nice additional features.

Overall, I've not experienced many problems, and am quite surprised at the issues a number of other people have experienced, which I've not encountered. The only problem I had for a while was with sync between PC & Cloud after one of the updates earlier this year, this caused me to have to exit and re- sign in repeatedly because it wouldn't sync, which then caused the data in the cloud to be lost, meaning transactions I'd entered using the mobile app were lost, but it got corrected at the next update.

WildBillLyle

What's the current status of the failure of Quicken to connect with credit unions. Haven't been able to download transactions for many days now. Using the latest version.

Marshall A

> @NittanyJim said:
> When is the Chrome OS version coming? I am getting further and further away from PC and Mac OS every day.

My "guess" would be that once Simplifi is launched, if it IS 100% web-based with no sync required back to a desktop version, you could use this on a Chromebook.

crossra

my employer has two benefits that are matched. My 401k has an employee contribution and an employer match as well as the Health Savings Account (HSA) that has both an employee contribution and an employer match. Quicken Deluxe 2018 version R22.17 and all previous versions of Quicken that we have used allow for only ONE item to be entered into a deposit transaction of a paycheck stub for pre-tax deductions and employer matches. Without a second option to enter a pre-tax deduction and employer match the work to reconcile a paycheck deposit is doubled, because the second benefit has to be entered into the second account by hand every two weeks/pay period.
Please add the option to add more than one pre-tax deduction that has an employer match to be applied to a paycheck into the register.

tony@alarcon

On the Property & Debt page, add a total balance at the bottom of the columns.

davidrupert10553

Well Mr Dunn, after what is supposedly the most recent update - Quicken now lost over 2 years of data - the last entries are from May 2017. What about that?

jacobs

@davidrupert10553 I'm sorry to hear about your problem, but whatever happened with your update is not a widespread Quicken problem affecting everyone. I'd suggest you start a new topic thread and provide more information about what version of Quicken you're using and exactly what happened, so others here might be able to offer suggestions to help you.

1991_Adopter

> @"Barbara Brown" said:
> I have been a long time user. I wish the program would work offline. I really dislike that I have to be connected to use the program. There are times I just want a quick look at an account or balance. I am on version 2017 because I won't go to a complete cloud based program. I never store anything there.

Exactly. One of the "upgrades" was a fail every time you try to use without an internet connection. You would think the private equity owners would fly, take a train, or be places without consistent web service.

Frank15

> @warners5 said:
> Is there some reason why Quicken, with all of its user-friendly feature, seems to make no provision for distinguishing "reimbursements" from "income"?

I use reimbursements to offset the original expense

Frank15

> @Greg_the_Geek said:
> @FBoro, I don't know where you got your information but it's incorrect. The working copy of your Quicken data file should be on the local hard drive but there's no problem using either an external drive or cloud drive for backup. I switch between my desktop and laptop by using Dropbox. Whenever I exit Quicken, I have it set to make a backup in a Dropbox folder. When I want to switch computers, I just restore from the Dropbox folder and backup again when I exit.

I'd love to have it save to Dropbox but haven't figured out how to do that. It saves to Desktop and then I have to transfer to Dropbox.

mar27

I am a long time Quicken user and while I have the latest version I have to keep an OLD Mac so I also have access to my 2007 Quicken because of the lack of reporting. 1. Please make it so we can do a report based on a memo field. We do not all use tags and they weren't around before. While you can search an account on a memo field you have to know what account. So if I want to see when I purchased an item (like an oven) I use to be able to create a report across all accounts on the memo field and find this. Now I have to go into each account to search. We have multiple checking and other accounts and who knows what I bought it out of years later! 2. PLEASE bring back the ability to run month and year to date reports on budget and actuals where we can specify a date range. The budget tab gives you ytd but to the current day. If it's Nov. 2 I want to run ytd as of October month end! I have to extract to excel and create my own report while Quicken 2007 did this for me. Budgeting and actuals are key. Not all the other stuff. We are the base that kept you going - give us back what we had in 2007 please.

Greg_the_Geek

Frank said:

> @Greg_the_Geek said:
> @FBoro, I don't know where you got your information but it's incorrect. The working copy of your Quicken data file should be on the local hard drive but there's no problem using either an external drive or cloud drive for backup. I switch between my desktop and laptop by using Dropbox. Whenever I exit Quicken, I have it set to make a backup in a Dropbox folder. When I want to switch computers, I just restore from the Dropbox folder and backup again when I exit.

I'd love to have it save to Dropbox but haven't figured out how to do that. It saves to Desktop and then I have to transfer to Dropbox.

You can set the path when you manually backup your Quicken data file.

jacobs

mar27 said:

Please make it so we can do a report based on a memo field. While you can search an account on a memo field you have to know what account. So if I want to see when I purchased an item (like an oven) I use to be able to create a report across all accounts on the memo field and find this. Now I have to go into each account to search. We have multiple checking and other accounts and who knows what I bought it out of years later! 

@mar27 Actually, it's much easier than this. Instead of opening each account individually to search, you should click on one of the main group or sub-group headings in the left sidebar. You can click on All Transactions, but for the type of transactions you're describing, I generally click on the Banking heading. Make sure you configure this group register to display the Memo/Notes column. Now you can use the Search box to search for the memo item you want (such as "oven") and it will search all* your checking and credit card accounts at once. This is very similar to a Quicken 2007 Quick Report on the Memo field.

*One limitation is that Search does not search hidden accounts. If you have hidden some accounts which you no longer use, and you want to search them, you need to unhide them before you search. Users have asked for the ability to optionally search hidden accounts, as you can do with reports -- and the developers have marked this idea as "Planned" for a future release.

mar27 said:

We do not all use tags and they weren't around before.

Tags are simply a newer implementation of "Classes" from Quicken 2007. Unlike the old Classes, in modern Quicken Mac, multiple Tags can be applied to a single transaction.

Diane Forster-Dennis

[removed - violation of community guidelines]

Diane Forster-Dennis

[removed - violation of community guidelines]

jacobs

@Diane Forster-Dennis For better or worse, since this forum is paid for by Quicken, one of their rules is that the forum cannot be used to explore alternatives/competitors to Quicken. 

jk5711

Hi. Much as I appreciate the optimism and upbeat "everything is great and getting better" tone of this and the previous CEO letter, as a 20+ year user of Quicken, I have a somewhat different take. In my view, which seems to parallel that of some others, the product has deteriorated significantly over the last couple of years. I understand the motivation to add new features but, if you can't fix bugs and keep long-term functionality working, the long-term future is grim. The most significant issues I see are listed below, not necessarily in order. Several of them overlap with comments made by others but, in at least some of those cases, their descriptions are enough different from mine to lead me to believe that there are actually multiple problems (i.e., that fixing one of them won't do the job).

(1) The product is badly optimized for long-term retention of data, even long enough to comply with record-keeping requirements for tax purposes. In addition to the slow performance mentioned by others, the scrolling functions become nearly useless when there are many years of historical data in the program. That is especially bad when one has just downloaded transactions -- the main transaction frame can easy be reduced to one or two transactions when Quicken is not being run full-screen (running it full-screen is impractical for me and probably others). In theory, the ability to create a new Quicken file and archive older ones should be at least a workaround for this, but absent the ability to merge older/archived Quicken files and a firm and believable commitment from you that it will be possible to open files in older formats forever, that is not really a useful option.

(2) Scheduled "one step" updates have basically stopped working. If one does any local updating (e.g., with the "update" settings pull-down on a particular account), it seems to shut down the schedule. So does manual one-step update. If I have Quicken open during the period of a scheduled update, the update is not run when I close Quicken nor to I get a notification and question about whether it should be run any more. All of that worked a couple of years ago although I think it has been broken and partially fixed a few times in the interim. In addition, if there is a problem with a particular financial institution and One-step update (it does run when started manually or the first time after I reboot a computer if Quicken is not run in the interim), the "troubleshoot" and "fix it" options just seem to lead me around in circles and, if I conclude that the only option is to remove the institution from the update list and deal with it manually, there appears to be no way to dismiss the problem announcement.

(3) More and more financial institution downloads have just stopped working and communication between those institutions, Quicken, and the customers of both seem to be very poor. The American Express problem started to appear almost two weeks before you made an announcement. Your support organization staff claimed for a while that it was an Amex problem and they needed to fix it; Amex staff (even after escalation at the super-premium level) claimed that they had tried to contact Quicken to work the problem but that it had been impossible to get through to anyone with both knowledge and authority to do anything. They are not the only ones -- I'm still having problems because a major bank (one of the four largest in the US) decided to change credit card numbers over a month ago on what was essentially the same account. Such changes used to be easy in Quicken -- I took the account out of online systems, changed the account number, put it back into the online setup, and then answered the question about whether the "new" account should be associated with the old one. Now... well, about six weeks later, things are still not updating properly even when a manual update from their website works fine. And I haven't had time to try to track it down with you (see last comment below). Noting another comment in this thread, none of this is about two-factor authentication although I assume those problems are in my future.

(4) Bill and Income Reminders have deteriorated too. Once upon a time, I used to be able to set up automatic payments through my bank or regular direct withdrawals, have the bill and income reminder process make actual entries on the relevant dates, and then have them matched when the bank actually posted the transaction and I downloaded it. But, now, after not working at all for a while, things have been "improved" so that all those reminders are good for is recording the fact that they payment (or whatever) was made, and then only if I download the transaction record, figure out exactly what it should be called, type the entry in, clear it, save it, and then respond to the "is this the scheduled payment for..." pop-up. In general, I cannot import exact payee names, categories, or memo descriptions from the reminders. I assume this would all work better if I were using Quicken to pay those bills rather than the bank, but that isn't going to happen (nor is any use of your cloud) unless my confidence in your security mechanisms improves considerably. And the latter isn't going to happen until well after it is clear that you can stay on top of bugs and related issues with the base software.

(5) At least with the way my accounts are organized, transferring data to TurboTax didn't work really well when you were part of Intuit. In particular, if I initialized TurboTax for year N with information from year N-1 and then moved information in from Quicken, I ended up with a lot of duplicate entries and no reasonable way to merge them. At least in the 2018 tax year, things had gotten worse - to the point that it was lots easier to manually copy information from Quicken to TurboTax, one entry or category at a time, than to try to sort out the mess trying to do anything automatic resulted in.

(6) When a bug or other obvious problem is found, I wish I could just report it, e.g., by email and have someone look into it and, one hopes, see that it gets fixed. Instead, one gets to get on chat with agents who are very nice and apologetic but not very informed, get run around in circles for a half hour or more, and then get told things like "yes, the problem is known but is still being researched and we have no information about when a fix will be available" even when the problem was first reported months ago (something the chat agents generally don't know or are not allowed to report). A public list of known issues might be helpful to users, if only to convince us that you were not in denial about the problems and might actually get to them. When one release and then another appear after problems are reported, touting new features but making no comments about those reported problems, it is not encouraging and may discourage reporting.

bradster62

> @jeremyvanek said:
> Quicken needs a true cloud version, not a desktop app with a web extension. I am not planning to upgrade Quicken until it has this capability.

Read the memo from Eric, "we are working on a new product, Simplifi by Quicken, intended for people who are looking for an easy but complete personal financial solution on mobile and the web."

Rosanne134

I was so disappointed to see that there is still no rollover feature for MAC users. I don't understand why not - what is the problem?

Barry Weintrob

I have many concerns about the Quicken program, but the most important involves the "Lifetime Planner". I put a lot of reliance on this data in making spending and gift decisions. Lately, I see things in the data that causes me to question the accuracy of the computations. For example, MRD numbers show up suddenly during the current year in significant numbers. Can someone check the algorithms for Lifetime Planner from scratch before the next updating.

I also use Quicken for windows on my Mac computer by installing a partition. Last I checked, the Mac version of Quicken still did not track investments by tax lot, which is one of the more valuable features of Quicken.

There are so so many comments and suggestions in response to your letter. How do you respond to this? As you can see, your customer base is frustrated but has no alternative at this time.

I honestly believe Quicken was better 20 years ago than it is now. One small change for the worse was we used to be able to work in Quicken while the accounts were downloading. Now we must wait idly for the downloading to finish. This takes several minutes for me each day.

I've been using Quicken for over 20 years, ever since Managing Your Money stopped. If another program came along with the functionality I need, I would switch to it in a heartbeat.

jacobs

Barry Weintrob said:

Last I checked, the Mac version of Quicken still did not track investments by tax lot, which is one of the more valuable features of Quicken.

It does now.

(But it still only supports FIFO and LIFO, not average cost, for calculating gains and basis.)