Quicken Next Step announcemen t

skeleton567

"Now, Quicken, Inc. is transitioning from our partner H.I.G Capital to Aquiline Capital Partners LLC, a firm with extensive expertise in financial services and technology.  We’re all excited about our new partnership, and this next phase of Quicken, Inc."

First, let me congratulate all the Quicken folks on this, assuming this is good news for you.  On the other hand, I find it  bit disconcerting at this point, due to the brevity of your last 'partnership'.  

However, if I am any indicator of why this is happening, I should say I am not surprised.  

I have been a Quicken user since 1986 and progressed through various versions since then.  My Quicken records include my complete financial history which began with a life insurance policy my father purchased for me in 1943, and a second one I purchased from the same company in 1961.  I have interest/dividend/cash value investment records from that point on, in addition to accounting for every penny of my substantial investment and retirement savings.

I have not continued to upgrade my Quicken software since QW2014 for two main reasons:

First and foremost, I feel that Quicken has nearly forsaken the capability to manage investment data by not supporting investment import/export capability between files.  This has often required me to spend countless hours re-entering data as I have discovered things I need to 'upgrade' in how I recorded data, and incorporating data from archived files into my current file.

I am weary of hearing that investment import/export cannot be done 'because there is no register'.  That is NOT an excuse.  As a software developer, I see this as a cop-out, pure and simple.  If you can  cobble together the 'register' for recording investment transactions, you can cobble together the same data for import/export.  

And second, I stopped upgrading my software when blackmail was attempted with he subscription model and requirements to connect online with my personal data.  you are obviously more concerned with collecting revenue than with provide a workable product.

I highly value my historical financial data as I am a career-long information technology developer and user, and I'm sure I suffer OCD in that area.  

Over the years I have followed Quicken on the community website I have become more and more concerned with the volume of discussion regarding software errors and with the reports of users having problems managing their Quicken data.

While I have never used online connections for my financial data, due to my background in software development and support it is disappointing that so many folks experience failures in that area.  My though is that if you are going to attempt to provide that service you should work with the data provider to be sure your clients have a workable solution.  you need to actively work with your data providers to assure ongoing functionality

The last 12 years of my career was spent as a DBA/SQL Developer in a large multi-national corporation where we moved manufacturing and financial data over a network multiple times a day from numerous remote servers, and we did not have the luxury of blaming failures on anyone else.  We had to move the data.

Once again I would implore all you folks at Quicken to refocus your efforts on making your existing software more and more functional instead of attempting to meet with the latest fads.  There are some of us faithful users left and you need to take care of us too.