Investment differences Deluxe vs Premier

mansart

Background:
I have been using Quicken Premier for many years, but I'm not sure that I'm using any of the features that I'm paying for (over and above those available in Deluxe). I don't use the bill pay features (I don't trust Quicken to pay my bills) and I've never called customer service, but I do have investments that I track in Quicken. I download transactions from my brokerage, and occasionally manually enter or adjust a transaction, but that's about it.

My questions:
What exactly can I do with Premier, in terms of investments, that I cannot do with Deluxe? Does Deluxe have all the same investment transaction types?
Does it have the same "Holdings" view in the transaction register?
Is there any way to preview what my Quicken file would look like in Deluxe?

Jim_Harman

Here is a summary of some investment related differences between current versions of Deluxe and Premier:

-- Premier has a Portfolio X-Ray tab under Investing. This lets you send a snapshot of your holdings from selected accounts and securities to Morningstar. Morningstar analyzes the data and returns a page that looks like the Portfolio X-Ray, which I think is normally available only to their subscribers. It shows your overall asset allocation, the weightings of your holdings by the M* Style boxes, by sector, and by global region.

The X-Ray also returns a Stock Intersection page that analyzes the underlying stocks in your holdings, to show your largest combined stock holdings.

-- Premier also has an enhanced version of the Growth of $10,000 chart on the Investing Performance page. This lets you compare your performance for selected accounts and securities to a "Buy and Hold" strategy, which I think assumes that you kept your original holdings for the whole analysis period.

-- The Schedule B and D tax reports might also be useful for investors.

volvogirl

I have 2013 Premier on my Desktop and Deluxe on my laptop.  They look the same to me.  I think you just get some more investment reports in Premier.  

volvogirl

You can compare features here,

https://www.quicken.com/compare

mansart

Hi volvogirl. Thanks for the response!

You have a unique perspective, having both Deluxe and Premier installed. Maybe someone with a newer version of Premier will be in a similar position and can add to your answer.

I did look at the Quicken comparison link, but "Simplify your taxes and investments" doesn't really tell me much. I'm hoping to learn the specific differences re investments.

NotACPA

mansart said:

Hi volvogirl. Thanks for the response!

You have a unique perspective, having both Deluxe and Premier installed. Maybe someone with a newer version of Premier will be in a similar position and can add to your answer.

I did look at the Quicken comparison link, but "Simplify your taxes and investments" doesn't really tell me much. I'm hoping to learn the specific differences re investments.

When you looked at the link that @volvogirl provided, did you click to expand the "details"?  There's a whole lot of features under Premier that aren't checked under Deluxe.

mansart

Hi @NotACPA,

I originally followed the link on my phone and didn't notice the various columns at the bottom. Opening it on my computer I now see the more detailed information. Thanks for pointing that out.

And thanks again, @volvogirl. I'll look at the features they mention there on my Premier edition (as I've never used them before) and see if they're important to me or not. That should answer my question!

Chris_QPW

volvogirl said:

I have 2013 Premier on my Desktop and Deluxe on my laptop.  They look the same to me.  I think you just get some more investment reports in Premier.  

And that sort of sums up the problem with trying to answer a question like this.  The differences aren't going to jump out at you, and even their comparison is generally missing some of the features, especially if you extend that to newer versions and are looking for features other than "investments", like the Zillow estimates.

I used Deluxe for most of the time I have used Quicken and I can definitely say that it is quite usable for investments, and I could certainly go back to it (I'm using Premier currently) without much lost.

Jim_Harman

Here is a summary of some investment related differences between current versions of Deluxe and Premier:

-- Premier has a Portfolio X-Ray tab under Investing. This lets you send a snapshot of your holdings from selected accounts and securities to Morningstar. Morningstar analyzes the data and returns a page that looks like the Portfolio X-Ray, which I think is normally available only to their subscribers. It shows your overall asset allocation, the weightings of your holdings by the M* Style boxes, by sector, and by global region.

The X-Ray also returns a Stock Intersection page that analyzes the underlying stocks in your holdings, to show your largest combined stock holdings.

-- Premier also has an enhanced version of the Growth of $10,000 chart on the Investing Performance page. This lets you compare your performance for selected accounts and securities to a "Buy and Hold" strategy, which I think assumes that you kept your original holdings for the whole analysis period.

-- The Schedule B and D tax reports might also be useful for investors.

Chris_QPW

One of the ways they shoot themselves in the foot on some of this is on the Home tab.
The Growth of $10,000 chart is available on the Home tab, so the Deluxe edition has it there.

The Premier version has a Performance tab that has Portfolio Value vs. Cost Basis, Growth of $10,000 and Average Annual Return.  Of these I think only the Average Annual Return is missing from the Deluxe edition.

And on the Schedule B and D tax reports they are just subsets of the Tax Schedule report.

I think someone said that the new Dashboard is also not in the Deluxe version.

That is the way it has been going, Quicken Inc has been trying to add new features to enhance the Premier version and make it stand out from the Deluxe version, but not all of the features have to do with investing.

One of the strange differences that was pointed out is that even though the Deluxe edition has multiple currency support, it can't download the current exchange rates.

There is also the getting some paying of bills/checks included using Quicken Bill Manager.   Personally I wouldn't touch it with a hundred foot pool, but it is there.  And another thing I think is worthless is the automatic updating of security quotes every 15 minutes.  This doesn't happen in the background so if you leave it on it will disrupt what you might be doing at the time.

It seems to me that I'm forgetting some of the Premier features, but that's really my point, it really hard to remember what is and what isn't a Premier feature.

Jim_Harman

The difference in Premier re: Growth of $10,000 is not the chart itself but the "Buy and Hold" checkbox, which I believe is not present in Deluxe. Maybe a Deluxe user could check.

Chris_QPW

Jim_Harman said:

The difference in Premier re: Growth of $10,000 is not the chart itself but the "Buy and Hold" checkbox, which I believe is not present in Deluxe. Maybe a Deluxe user could check.

That's possible, I haven't had a Deluxe version since they added that, so I certainly can be wrong about it.
But my guess would be that it is the same.  The reason is because in fact in a lot of these cases they just reuse the same code.

q_lurker

With respect to the marketing comparison provided in the link vovlogirl offered, I consider both of these deceptions that the marketing folk say are omitted from the Deluxe version:

See how your returns compare to market averages*
Track cost basis and create Schedule D tax reports Deluxe can readily compare 'your returns' to 'market averages' through various portfolio view selections.  As others have suggested, there may be other formats of comparison not available but it is NOT that the comparison is impossible in Deluxe.  To suggest that Deluxe does NOT "Track cost Basis" is a blatant misrepresentation.  The Schedule D report is not available in Deluxe, but an almost equivalent Capital Gains report is.

Marketing deceptions for many years!

Tom Young

"Marketing deceptions for many years! "

Intuit DNA. 

eqpu

Deluxe edition has multiple currency support

Quicken has been supporting multiple currency from many years (and I read here in another post about FBAR report too) so I wonder what made them not support multiple stock markets or investments 🙄

Jim_Harman

Quicken has been supporting multiple currency from many years (and I read here in another post about FBAR report too) so I wonder what made them not support multiple stock markets or investments

I suspect that Quicken would have to pay more to their quote provider to get support for foreign stock quotes, and that they feel it would not significantly boost sales or customer retention.

You could create an Idea post requesting support for additional exchanges and see how many votes it receives.

There have been numerous requests from Canadian users for Quicken to support the NEO exchange but so far no luck.