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When will Quicken for Mac support Cryptocurrency tracking?

J.P. Horgan

Quicken should be able to track cryptocurrencies. Many exchanges have APIs that would allow for downloading of data. If nothing else we should be able to identify the top 100 currency’s by market cap and enter transactions manually.

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Quicken Anja

Hello @J.P. Horgan,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your question.

Unfortunately, since Quicken for Mac does not currently support the ability to track cryptocurrency, I'd like to refer you to this active Idea post regarding this topic instead which is currently marked as "Under Consideration". If you agree with the idea, please feel free to add your own vote to it as well. To be notified of updates on this feature as they become available, you can go ahead and bookmark the thread by clicking the yellow star on the top-right corner.

Alternatively, if this is not quite what you are looking for and wish to submit your own request for something more specific, then you can create your own idea post and add your vote.

Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers.

I hope this helps!

hman36

I voted on that idea post that really seemed like it was about something else. Why the heck would you not have the ability to track precious metals and crypto. I can scrounge around and find an ETF in your securities database thats pretty close to the bid price for silver. Like just add a silver tracker as a security that you can track. Same thing for crypto coins. And add Betterment to a list of supported financial institutions. How do I create an "Idea" post on these topics. People need to be able to vote on this stuff.

jacobs

@hman36 Betterment needs to support Quicken, not the other way around. Quicken can't pull in investment information from a financial institution unless the financial institution signs on with Quicken. (And pays a fee to Intuit, who operates the connectivity services.) Customers should lobby Betterment to support Quicken!

Chris_QPW

And what a lot of people don't realize is that just because XXX website might have an API for downloading this or that information, that doesn't mean that a business can use it, at least not without paying for it.

On top of that Quicken has its own way of doing this and if it starts catering to every single "API" that is out there it would quickly become a mess.

J.P. Horgan

To be honest this does not seem like a big ask. It’s not like I am asking for Quicken to mine data from the blockchain. Although most exchanges do allow you to download data via APIs.

hman36

@jacobs Yes I get it, this has been going on since like 2013. Maybe both of them need to come to some compromise. In my latest emails to to quicken office of the president and betterment this was there responses. I guess they'll say the same thing another 10 years from now. But yes it seems like its leaning toward it being more on betterments side as to why this is being held up. Still, if quicken could be proactive and reach out to them instead of just sitting around when their customers want their support, it could go a long way. We need to start getting these posts elevated. The more people to comment on these the better:

QUICKEN RESPONSE:

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to reach out to us today. For this Betterment would need to reach out to Intuit using the link below to get a quote to get themselves added to our directory of banks that we support.

https://www.intuit.com/partners/fdp/implementation-support/ofx/

If you have any further questions or concerns that you would like to address, please contact us by phone at 650-250-1900 or through our website at http://quicken.com/contact-support to choose the contact method that best suits your needs.

Thank you,

Quicken Office of the President

BETTERMENT RESPONSE:

Thank you for reaching out and sharing your thoughts about direct importation into Quicken. This is not available, and though we do not have plans in the near or medium term to support Quicken, we are exploring additional integration solutions in the future. This is something we would like to build in 2021 but unfortunately, other priorities are taking place.

hman36

@Chris_QPW There may be a little bit more to it, but you can go sign up for coinmktcap API https://coinmarketcap.com/api/pricing/ right there. Maybe quicken needs to go sign up and learn that they aren't the only ones who can charge fees (as they do with any banks who want to sync). They can go on there and get some corporate pricing set up and get it integrated, done. Shouldn't be that hard from a development perspective to add to their list in their "securities" section. The question is, are they even being proactive. I have not seen a single post from any quicken employee saying we are looking into this or we are planning this for the future.

@J.P. Horgan I agree, not a big ask here at all. Also below is a link to another post on people wanting crypto and precious metals. We need to make as much noise and comments on this stuff as possible!

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20158907#Comment_20158907

jacobs

@hman36 "Maybe both of them need to come to some compromise." No, I don't think you understand the way it works. Quicken's connectivity is run by a division of Intuit (the former parent company of Quicken). Every financial institution that works with Quicken — every one — signs a contract with Intuit to allow access. There are different levels of services, from simply importing QFX files produced by the financial institution to direct two-way connection to the financial institution's servers. And financial institutions have to pay a fee to Intuit -- which may be a reason Betterment says "nope." Betterment may also not want to set up the server(s) for Quicken users to connect to, or may not want to provide the support for such an interface.

There's nothing for Quicken to "compromise" on to support Betterment. Quicken supports 14,000+ financial institutions, and will work with any one that signs on to support Quicken. If the financial institution says they have no plan to support Quicken, there's nothing Quicken can do; they can't force their way in, nor can they set the terms for working with Intuit.

Now, supporting users tracking cryptocurrencies is something that I agree makes sense for Quicken to build support for. But when you say it's not a big ask, I'd guess that it probably is. It's something that may require significant engineering work to support 8 or more digits. It has to work across the Mac and Windows versions because both use the same mobile app -- so that's three separate development teams at Quicken that have to develop it. Adding a quotes provider is probably the easiest part.

As for not seeing comments from Quicken about doing so, Quicken typically doesn't pre-announce anything they're working on. We don't know what's coming, or when. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it's the way Quicken works.

J.P. Horgan

Quicken doesn’t have to set up any special connectivity to the various exchanges for staters. Quicken need only be able to support the import of a CSV file and for cryptocurrency designated accounts expand it out to 8 decimal points. Try walking first, run when you understand the environment better. Who knows maybe you might want to incorporate your own software wallet one day.

Chris_QPW

J.P. Horgan said:

Quicken doesn’t have to set up any special connectivity to the various exchanges for staters. Quicken need only be able to support the import of a CSV file and for cryptocurrency designated accounts expand it out to 8 decimal points. Try walking first, run when you understand the environment better. Who knows maybe you might want to incorporate your own software wallet one day.

Even though I think the "incremental approach" is a good idea, I would point out that in fact the 8 decimal points is one of the "technical challenges". Both in the underline way numbers are stored, and in the GUI making sure there is the right amount of space to display them without messing up existing functionality.

As an example of that recently on Quicken Windows they changed from 4 to 6 digits after the decimal point. The result was that for several people there were now "rounding errors". As in very small fractions of shares in long closed positions, that the users had to clean up.

EDIT:
I'm wondering (long term) if it makes sense that you have "cryptocurrency accounts". What if cryptocurrency is actually adopted by major brokers. They are going to most likely just treat them like any other security. And as such any "rules" you make based on the account might not work right when such an event happens.

jacobs

@J.P. Horgan You're talking to me as if I'm from Quicken. I'm not, I'm just a fellow user.

If you understand how Quicken works, for all financial institutions, they need to be registered with Quicken (through their service provider, Intuit). Even if they could build something on their own, they need to have a designated support contact at each financial institution for when something goes wrong. (Things always go wrong; it's just a matter of when.) And financial institutions are then supposed to notify Quicken (Intuit) if they are changing their website/server requiring Quicken to make changes to maintain connectivity. It's easy to think of this as "just go to this URL and suck in data", because that might be all that's needed 98% or 99% of the time, but for Quicken to support it, they need to deal with the times when things go wrong. Because users will call Quicken Support, or flame them on this or other online forums, if something which worked fine for awhile breaks, or worse, messes up past data.

Could Quicken decide to support cryptocurrency accounts without any of those practices? I suppose they could. But it's not their model for support, nor their (and Intuit's) business model. They go slow, try to cover all bases, and if possible, make some money while doing it.

Switching all three Quicken platforms from 6 to 8 digits of security accuracy might be trivially easy, or it might be a big change if the math libraries used on any of those platforms needs to be re-engineered or replaced for the added precision. And many windows and panels need to be reviewed and tweaked to make sure they'll correctly support a larger field of digits. Again, I don't know how big a change this is to incorporate into Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows and Quicken Cloud, but I'm guessing there are some complexities involved. I would think the Quicken executives are not unaware of the rise of cryptocurrencies, and the increasing number of places where bitcoin and others are being accepted for payments. I'm sure they know that somewhere between 6% and 10% of Americans (depending which source you look at) have some amount of cryptocurrency, and that it's going to continue to grow. So I expect they have a plan for it. We just don't know if they've been working on it for a year and it will be ready to unveil this spring, or if they plan to address this a year from now. And they very, very rarely reveal their future roadmap.

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

So I expect they have a plan for it. We just don't know if they've been working on it for a year and it will be ready to unveil this spring, or if they plan to address this a year from now. And they very, very rarely reveal their future roadmap.

Just to emphasize what @jacobs said, from this thread (and to Idea post it points to):

Clearly they don't need to be told people want this (and your best method to let them know "how many people" is to vote on that thread), the real question comes up as do majority of users want this before XXX feature, and of course how hard is it to put in. As in I'm sure if it was a top priority they would have already put it in. But what is your top priority isn't necessarily the top priority of the majority of Quicken users (note this same request is on the Windows side too) or the developers.

I'm sure if we put the question differently you would get quite a different response from the people posting here.

What if you start a thread that says:

Quicken Mac users Let's have the Quicken developers stop working on any other feature that you might want, and instead spend whatever amount of time is needed to get cryptocurrency support. And see how many of your fellow Quicken Mac users like that idea.

hman36

@jacobs Yea it makes sense what you say about it being more on betterment side, and they need to be the ones reaching out. I'll go find the betterment forums and act like a donkey on there too and see what happens. Will report back for sure!

hman36

@Chris_QPW @J.P. Horgan This is good discussion. I am glad we are making noise on this. While we wait however long for quicken to do something about this I will state how I handle my cryptocurrency and precious metal. For crypto I just added a manual security that I go update via CSV file. I do not have BTC at the moment I have TRX so the digits isn't a huge issue for me now. I update my csv file by copying and pasting from coin market cap historical data. I am working on a script that will go fetch the text from yahoo crypto tracker and auto put them into a spreadsheet. So, essentially, with the script or 1 command i will say, it should go pull down and auto update your csv file, making it easier to just go right into quicken and do an upload of your csv. I will report back when I have it working. For precious metals I found this security Aberdeen Standard Physical Silver Shares ETF that is pretty close to the actual price of silver, so that updates automatically. There is one for Gold too somewhere. Cheers!