An update from our CEO, Eric Dunn

PhyllisE

When you first took over Quicken, the tech support was awesome! Your representatives were throughout, patient and you could understand their English. In the last two months when I have called in for support the personnel answering the phone are no where near as knowledgeable - indeed they made my problems worse instead of helping me! They also have thick accents and are very hard to understand over the phone. A huge disappointment and downgrade from what I have experienced with the new Quicken.

figsys

Your product has gone downhill especially for customers that have been using the product for over 20 years. I have a Bank of America connectivity issue that has not been resolved for over a year. And there are many others. Please invest some resources in software fixing legacy database issues or you will you lose your loyal clients.

Scooterlam

Barry Weintrob said:

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.

Hi Barry, 
Perhaps you can breakout and describe further your RMD (MRD) problem in a new thread.  That way, perhaps some of the community members can help troubleshoot the issue.

If you rely on LTP, then be sure to have a look at this thread and vote.  It is a compilation of bugs and enhancement requests to this important feature.  And, voting helps Quicken assess breadth and impact of bug fixes and enhancements.  Also, there is a number of RMD issues cited here as well. 

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7713110/lifetime-planner-bug-and-idea-list-make-yourself-heard

lablover57

In addition, please stop with the spam on our paid product. 

CarlaA

I am a long-time Quicken user. Can you please make the budget view window easier to use? I'd like to be able to adjust column width to be able to see the ENTIRE numeric value of what I enter across multiple months. Columns could auto-adjust.

The current format is unacceptable and totally unfriendly to users. Budgeting (and adjusting the budget along the way) is a basic aspect of financial management. The Quicken platform should facilitate this process--not hinder and frustrate users.

Thank you.

ageec

Appreciate the update from the CEO.
I have used Quicken exclusively for over a decade.
However, in the past few weeks, its utility has been severely diminished, because my bank implemented two factor authentication. As a result, I am unable to download my checking account, credit cards, or investments with that bank.

Chris Harris

Thank you Mr. Dunn.  While there will always be things I'd love to see improved, I acknowledge that Quicken is a vastly better product than when you and your team took it over from Intuit.  I just about bailed on Quicken, in late 2018, but decided to give you one more try; I'm so  glad I did.  I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Quicken!

LongTimeUser_SC

This is a very important problem to me. I love quicken and am a long time user. I still use the "start a new year" features in the program. The problem comes with syncing and the web. Start-a-new-year is essentially a copy, and copied files KEEP THE ORIGINAL Cloud Account Name. This is bad. We need the option to get a new Cloud Account Name WITHOUT it changing the original file's Cloud Account Name also changing.

Example. I copy my 2019 file into a 2020 file; meaning 2019 to ONLY have 2019 data and 2020 to ONLY have 2020 data. Since it's a copy, both are synced together, co-mingling on the web, and co-mingling when I sync. I do refer back to prior years' files frequently. Syncing the 2019 file will get 2020 data added to it. Syncing the 2020 file will get 2019 data added to it.

We can change the Cloud Account Name in the 2020 file. But *magic* - it is simultaneously updated in the 2019 file too. We need the OPTION to have a new clean synced file.

I went through days of testing/showing to your rep about a year+ ago. Just tested and it's still broken . Can you address this? I have had to turn off all syncing to keep my files from corrupting each other. I cannot use the web features at all. Wish I could....

jaarso

Please allow more beta testers in for Simplifi!! I have been waiting for the ability to break away from the desktop for years. I actually stopped using Quicken Mac desktop entirely a few months ago and started heavily using Mint but it sounds like Simplifi will be better. I am a long time Quicken user of several decades but definitely prefer to move all of my financial crap to a web-based solution. When are you guys going to allow for more Simplifi beta testers for those of us who have signed up for it?

Quicken Sarah

jaarso said:

Please allow more beta testers in for Simplifi!! I have been waiting for the ability to break away from the desktop for years. I actually stopped using Quicken Mac desktop entirely a few months ago and started heavily using Mint but it sounds like Simplifi will be better. I am a long time Quicken user of several decades but definitely prefer to move all of my financial crap to a web-based solution. When are you guys going to allow for more Simplifi beta testers for those of us who have signed up for it?

Hello @jaarso

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback and question

Simplifi by Quicken is brand new product and we want to be sure we've got it right and every feature/function is working as intended.

To ensure this, we are bringing in Users to Simplifi in waves.  The next wave should be soon, sometime within the next week to two weeks.

I hope this information is helpful and thank you again for sharing your question with the Community.

Thank you,

Sarah

jlweaver22

Eric ... All the new features are nice but if you don't fix the existing problems, the product is not worth the expense. It's getting to the point where I'm ready to bail on Quicken after being a customer for over 30 years. Never fixed is the interface with USAA accounts for Quicken Mobile or Quicken Web (officially reported three times, including when the release was in beta that caused the disconnect). The investment portfolio graphs are incorrect, and there's been many very useful features removed (like a simple key stoke to add sales tax to a transaction).

joh1135

I have been using Quicken since MYM went away. I been having quite a bit of problems with Quicken this year. It seem like almost every time when I download my Chase account and reconcile the account, the number are off. I have had numerous calls to the Help Desk, some of them for a LONG time and they fix the problem, but it keeps coming back.

I have gone through deleting my account information and reinstalling them, sometimes month by month, again the problem of my balance and the bank does not match the next time I reconcile the Chase account.

I would like to start over with Quicken, but there is no way to copy my re-occurring payments and renaming information which I have a lot of both.

Please provide a way to save the reoccurring and renaming information so that starting over would be an option.

Thank you

slhcrnp

As of my daily synch this am - Wells Fargo issue seems to be resolved. Continuing to appreciate Q for MAC. Thanks for all of the hard work.

j7an

I've been a previous Quicken user back in the v4 & v5 days. Then I switched to (removed) until they discontinued their product. I've just purchased the Mac subscription of Quicken. Unfortunately I'm already seeing several obvious bugs. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the software. Maybe there are other bugs I haven't noticed. These bugs should have been caught by Intuit's QA and engineering departments before release. It makes me wonder if there are security bugs in Intuit's infrastructure as well that could allow my data to be hacked which is why I've turned off the web/mobile sync feature.

Before introducing new features, please fix your bugs.

The Mac version's features are also quite lacking when compared to the 2009/2010 version of (removed) which is free now. I realize it is very expensive developing software for Windows and Mac. It's already showing with the feature disparity between the platforms. It would have been much better when introducing the Mac version to just create a Github Electron version which will work on both platforms with one code base. The consolidated code base would have allowed your engineering and QA departments to fix more bugs and introduce more features.

Please consider converting your application to Electron.

jacobs

@j7an you're asking Quicken to "fix your bugs" without mentioning any details about what you haver found that you believe to be bugs. I'm not suggesting that there aren't bugs in the software, but I know from spending a lot of time on this forum that many of the times a user cries "bug!" it turns out to be something that's not a bug -- problems with old data, placeholder transactions, connectivity issues, etc. My suggestion is to start a new thread and describe the issues you are experiencing if you're genuinely interested in getting them resolved.

You can likewise be concerned about data security, but it's worth noting there are zero known instances of Quicken user data being hacked.

As for the Mac version, Quicken has invested more than 6 years now in building a modern Mac application, utilizing the native SQL database and tools in the macOS and so your suggestion now that they scrap all their work to start over -- and start over with Quicken Windows, too -- to build a common code base seems unlikely.

StillHereInKy

I have been using Quicken since the mid-'80's when Wells Fargo gave it away to help people balance their checkbooks. Since then, I have been a regular user/many files and large ones - and of course endured the zillions (or so it seems) of issues that seem to occur on a regular basis. When you think about it, all of my data is already in the Cloud - on my banks' and brokers' and IRA and 401(k)'s servers, I just don't feel comfortable agglomerating it with anyone because I just can't be sure it won't be analyzed. No worries, Quicken for PC does my combining for me - even though I realize I don't really have a choice absent an Excel spreadsheet (which would never have all the transactions right.)) I spend an inordinate amount of time on the software, but it helps me keep on top of our family's financial life and if it were perfect, that probably wouldn't happen. Maybe all the bugs are for a reason! Ha ha. I think the arrogance of the previous owners' has finally moved on to a bunch of earnest techies led by yourself who are trying to protect their company, their jobs, and the trust that the customer base has in the product. Oh and find a way to grow and remain relevant. You'll never get it right. You are "victims" of MS and Apple and the Financial Institutions ("FI's"). The world is not getting less complex. But somehow you meander through. An earlier poster talked about a "potential bug" tool. That would be awesome. It's really hard to determine how to either report or get help when a user is in need. This forum has gotten much better for searching out solutions, now Q could act by making it easier to directly place bug requests, like Google Chrome used to do (or maybe still does.) Thank you for saving Quicken, I understand why you had to move to a subscription model, and in fact I hope you are making lots of money for your owners so you will stay in business. Finally I hope you hear us dinosaur users that to abandon the Windows PC platform for the Cloud or for Apple might be a death-knell. I would love to move over to Apple but at what cost (benefit?) to your company and my time? I don't think it's worth it. Better keep fixing what you have created. (Both platforms.) Good luck and thank you very much.

Antonio A.

> @dgibbs415 said:
> FIX DISPLAY AND RESOLUTION INCOMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS !!! This is not just a font issue as I have tried to correct with Quicken staff several times. For all the new features, Quicken needs to tackle this problem: Users being able to actually use Quicken...without frustration...what a concept. For the last couple of years, 1) icons keep becoming more microscopic, 2) windows, tabs OVERLAP and cannot be read (literally only the top black lines or maybe the top of a letter of the tabs are visible) , 3) some message boxes are so large that you cannot even reach a button such as done or cancel at the bottom since it is off the screen 4) some message boxes are too small and only a few large letters are displayed.
> I have used Quicken for many years so I have been able to guess where tabs and icons are. I must approximate where I think cancel/done button is located. I have been waiting for news of this new release to address such basic problems. I have been dreading restarting and relearning a new software....but....

What you can try if your using QWIN is to use your Graphic Card manufacturer drivers. vs the Windows generic ones. That will improve dramatically your display settings. not just in Quicken. But in your whole system.

Steven Wetterling

Eric: I like Quicken very much and have used it for very many years on Windows machines. I would like for Quicken to continue to be a viable product for you to continue to support. I think that you would sell more new Quicken for Windows copies now and into the future if you can fix all of the new-install and upgrade-install problems that are continually reported on Amazon.com leading to 1 & 2 star negative reviews resulting in the 3 to 3 1/2 star "average" score that turns off many potential users. I understand the negative reviews resulting from moving from the "buy the disk" to the "subscribe by the year / 2 years" model but having a user's data crash upgrading from Quicken 2016 is really not nice.

BrianMonkelban

(Removed-Sarcastic), this is now the 4th time in a week i have to completely redo my budget because quicken continues to change the amounts to match next years budget

SteveU75

I agree with GGlondon. I don't want any new features until you get the program working. I have been using Quicken since it first came out. I know how to use it but it just keeps getting worse. I am a former Microsoft Certified System Engineer and I have an MBA.

Setting up home loans baffles me.

Entries downloaded from my bank going into the wrong account baffles me.

I am just doing reporting. I download from my bank and the accounts all of a sudden don't balance. WTF. I started with a clean file at the start of 2019.

How can you not keep in Sync with my Bank. I am not making any entries, just putting payees in after downloading.

I hope you can salvage this product but after several years of hearing promises I cringe at the effort required to keep this running.

From my point of view it just keeps getting worse. While I appreciate the ability to call support you need to invest in training as way too many of the techs are not experts in their own product.

Can this product be salvaged, based on recent experience, I honestly don't know.

SteveU75

While looking for a Quicken replacement I saw this video from another long time user.

His frustration whenever he had to go into quicken, resonated with me whenever I have to go and try and reconcile my accounts. It should not be this hard.

He went to [removed] and says he is not looking back.

[removed - off-topic]

jdfite

Agreed. Wish I could immediately scan my receipts with Quicken phone app at the time of payment, and now I have a transaction that can be matched later when the transactions are downloaded. Eliminates receipt clutter and/or need to go find it later...

Quicken_Tyka

Hello jdfite,

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to provide this feedback.

There is an existing Idea thread regarding receipt recognition available here.

Please take a moment to navigate to the Idea and add your vote!

Thank you,
-Quicken Tyka

ZerMunde

I tried Quicken 2019 for the Mac for a year. I didn't end up using it. Here's why:

– Prior Statements are completely gone in 2019.
– Prefer registers appear as 2-lines instead of 1-line so you can view the memo field while scrolling through accounts. This could be a choice in the settings: 1-line or 2-lines.
– Prefer a blank entry field at bottom of register, ready to be filled in. Instead of using the "+" button or "new transaction" keystroke. An empty entry was more efficient and the 2nd line being a light color helped differentiate. This also could be a user-defined choice: empty entry field at bottom, or no empty field.
– The Reporting interface was vastly superior in previous versions. I don't like how 2019 seems to run a report before you define what type of report you want to run.
– Preferred when Accounts were housed in their own small window. Click command-A and they'd appear. But you could hide the accounts window to clear space when not needed. In Quicken 2019, the accounts are always there, taking up real estate when they don't need to.

jacobs

@ZerMunde I'm not trying to talk you into liking Quicken 2019, but I wanted to note a few things you commented on which have solutions you apparently weren't aware of.

ZerMunde said:

– Prior Statements are completely gone in 2019.

Are you referring to being able to get a past bank reconciliation? If so, you're correct this doesn't (yet) exists in Quicken 2019. Other types of "statements", such as an income statement for a previous year, are easily do-able.

– Prefer registers appear as 2-lines instead of 1-line so you can view the memo field while scrolling through accounts. This could be a choice in the settings: 1-line or 2-lines.

You're probably aware of this, but you can easily make the Memo field visible in your register. Although it's on one line, you can see every field as you scroll. One line versus 2 lines is clearly a matter of personal preference. I didn't like the 2-line register at first, but over time, I grew to like it much better than Quicken 2007's 2-line register; I find it easier to scrolls and scan for something in a column when it;'s the same columns on every line instead of every other line.

– Prefer a blank entry field at bottom of register, ready to be filled in. Instead of using the "+" button or "new transaction" keystroke. An empty entry was more efficient and the 2nd line being a light color helped differentiate. This also could be a user-defined choice: empty entry field at bottom, or no empty field..

This is again something that's personal preference. I found it annoying at first, but then came to like it -- and keeping my newest transactions at the top rather than the bottom. When I'm entering multiple transactions, pressing Command-N is the same one keystroke as Return in Quicken 2007, so it doesn't end up being more work, but does require retraining years of muscle memory. I agree with you about alternating shaded rows making it easier to read across lines in the register, and I hope they'll implement that at some point.

– I don't like how 2019 seems to run a report before you define what type of report you want to run.

I'm not sure when you stopped using Quicken 2019, but they fixed this -- finally! -- in a recent release. Now, you define a report and go to the Customize screen to finish setting the report parameters before it generates the report. I don't know why it took so long to fix this, but it is now happily better.

– Preferred when Accounts were housed in their own small window. Click command-A and they'd appear. But you could hide the accounts window to clear space when not needed. In Quicken 2019, the accounts are always there, taking up real estate when they don't need to.

There's been a solution to this for awhile now: in the dark blue heading above the Accounts sidebar, if you click the "<" icon, it collapses the sidebar to a thin strip that takes up almost no space. Clicking ">" re-expands it.

ZerMunde

@jacobs, yes, I'm aware of the various alternates and workaround methods you describe.

The main issue is the complete abandonment of prior statements. These statements are not imported during migration, and therefore unaccessible once in version 2019 and beyond. For some, it's a non-starter. There is no valid reason to delete the data. This historical data, carefully accumulated over decades in many cases, is gone forever.

I agree that the other annoyances could be adapted to. But when working with data, it's so easy to offer choices. 1-line or 2-lines in registry views as an example. Another example where there is a choice is sorting the newest on top, or newest at the bottom. This is doable now so both sides are happy.

Collapsing the accounts pane, sure, that frees up space. But so does having a closable floating accounts window, as in legacy versions of Quicken. Again, there could be a choice offered in the application so users could customize to their preference.

I think legacy users who've been with Quicken since the early 90s are frustrated in that not enough thought went into their preferences. I'm for progress but I'm also for giving users the ability to carry on as they prefer.

jacobs

ZerMunde said:

The main issue is the complete abandonment of prior statements. These statements are not imported during migration, and therefore unaccessible once in version 2019 and beyond. For some, it's a non-starter. There is no valid reason to delete the data. This historical data, carefully accumulated over decades in many cases, is gone forever.

My apologies, but I still don't understand what "prior statements" you're referring to here. Reports? Attachments? Reconciliations? I'm not aware of any historical data I've accumulated that didn't migrate from Quicken 2007 to the modern Quicken Mac.

But when working with data, it's so easy to offer choices. 1-line or 2-lines in registry views as an example. Another example where there is a choice is sorting the newest on top, or newest at the bottom. This is doable now so both sides are happy.

Except it's not always easy. The Quicken Mac product manager has written in the past about the 1-line versus 2-line register. The 1-line register views are created using a lot of tools built into the Mac operating system; there are frameworks and system calls that allow the operating system to do a lot of the complex work of painting the screen with data from the application in a list view. (Think about a Finder window in list view: it's basically the same thing, with columns that can be resided, re-ordered, sorted ascending or descending; Quicken uses the same tools built into the OS to create its list views.) But here are no such tools to allow the creation of a 2-line display, so in order to implement that, they would have to write complex code to manually control the painting of the screen. It's certainly not impossible -- it's programming. But assuming that is is "easy to offer choices" is incorrect. It would take a significant amount of time to implement the 2-line display.
And they might still do it. (The idea thread requesting this feature is here, and is is marked as "under consideration".) They do listen to their customers, but it's a matter of priorities. They only have a certain number of programmers, and they have to evaluate which of hundreds of user-requested features to work on: does it add a capability the program is currently missing or does it enhance a capability that exists in ways some users would prefer? how many people want it? how long will it take to develop? which members of the development team are needed to build the feature?

Collapsing the accounts pane, sure, that frees up space. But so does having a closable floating accounts window, as in legacy versions of Quicken. Again, there could be a choice offered in the application so users could customize to their preference.

Here again, anything can be done with enough time, but the question is: what would such a change accomplish? Simply making something "like it used to be" is not a particularly compelling reason to take time and add complexity to the program. Is there a particular advantage to having a floating window for accounts? Does this solve a particular problem? When users can put forward examples or use cases for requested functionality, the better the chance for the engineers to see an issue in a way they perhaps haven't considered before.
I obviously can't speak for the programmers here, but I think the independent window for accounts in legacy Quicken Mac is something they intentionally redesigned in the new program. People frequently need to move between accounts, so making the accounts always present on the left of the screen saved people from having to repeatedly open a new window, or find a window hidden by other windows. But then users said it takes too much space, so they implemented a way for it to take almost no space for those who want to hide the sidebar. I can't see an advantage for having Accounts in a separate window, too. But if you can, you should create a new Idea post on this site to put forth your reasons for wanting it, and see if other users vote for it to compel the developers to consider it.

ZerMunde

I use the term "Prior Statements" because that's what it's called in Quicken. Each time a user reconciles an account (monthly in most cases), a Prior Statement is generated. More information about Prior Statements can be found here:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7310430/add-ability-to-track-store-prior-reconciled-statements-periods-in-quicken-for-mac-256-legacy-votes/p1

jacobs

@ZerMunde Thank you for the clarification. I've used Quicken 2007 for the past 13 years, and its predecessors for another 13 years before that, but I have rarely in all that time gone back to edit a previously reconciled month -- and I didn't recall that it called that window a "Prior Statement".
I agree that being able to access prior reconciliations is a feature that should be added to Quicken Mac, and I'm cautiously optimistic that this idea which has nearly 300 votes and is marked as "Under Consideration" will be acted on by the developers. (I don't know why anyone needs reconciliations going back decades, and I'm doubtful they'll go back to add this to the Quicken 2007 converter for the relatively small number of Quicken 2007 users who remain, but I do agree that going back to a prior month can be helpful in untangling something that gets out of whack.)

ZerMunde

@jacobs The deletion of Prior Statements is not relegated to QM2007 migrations. All users migrating to QM2020 will have all their prior statements deleted. QM2020 no longer saves prior statement information.

Even a brand new Quicken Deluxe 2020 file, created solely in QM2020, will have no prior statements. Prior statements were dropped completely, wether migrating from a previous version, or starting fresh with QM2020.

As for a reason for needing to access them, it's more of a case of knowing that you could reference the info if needed. If a user reconciles perfectly, every month, for decades, and there are no user errors or application bugs, then no, a user will not have a need to access them. But if any issues do arise, referencing the prior statements is a valuable tool to suss out any problems.