R40.28 Canadian - Should I update now or wait?

PLR

As other users I received an invitation to downlaod R40.28 for Canada and before doing it, I read that some users had issues after downloading this update.
What about theses issues and should I wait a while before going on with this update because I had major issues with new updates over the last 20 years of using Quicken.
I learned that it's better to wait a while with new updates.

Chris_QPW

I would say that is a good idea in this case.

First off R40.28 isn't official released to everyone at this time, see this announcement:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7912901/windows-canada-r40-xx-release

Second even though a lot of the changes have been "beta tested" on the US customers, and worked out a lot of the problems, the Canadian release is getting a year's worth of changes in one go, and that is bound to have problems.  Not to mention the kinds of problems that might come up that are only in the Canadian release/online flow.

steve.holtzkener

> @PLR said:
> As other users I received an invitation to downlaod R40.28 for Canada and before doing it, I read that some users had issues after downloading this update.
> What about theses issues and should I wait a while before going on with this update because I had major issues with new updates over the last 20 years of using Quicken.
> I learned that it's better to wait a while with new updates.

I updated a few days ago. Definitely more wonky... e.g. the investing screen doesn't fill completely... but after several refreshes, it does eventually fill in (I just ignore the error message). If you don't need the new stuff and are frustrated when it doesn't work perfectly, I'd suggest you wait.

Chris_QPW

I would say that is a good idea in this case.

First off R40.28 isn't official released to everyone at this time, see this announcement:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7912901/windows-canada-r40-xx-release

Second even though a lot of the changes have been "beta tested" on the US customers, and worked out a lot of the problems, the Canadian release is getting a year's worth of changes in one go, and that is bound to have problems.  Not to mention the kinds of problems that might come up that are only in the Canadian release/online flow.

PLR

Thank's Chris for your judicious advice because I'm always on the list of those who are informed first of new updates and many times I had issues when I accepted to download the updates. 

So I will wait and see before going on as you suggested to me.
Best regards 

PLR

This morning a pop up message appeared on Quicken asking to download last update R40.28 before May 31th to be able to keep downloading datas from banks and others.
So should I wait until new message to do so or risk of issues with R40.28 

UKR

IMHO, that's a decision best made by yourself.

Oldgrey

I would wait i updated yesterday and now it will not connect to update stock prices just tells me there is an internal error and try again

I have downloaded from TD and credit cards however with no issues so far

And yes I have restarted the PC after the update.

PLR

It's so pitiful that Quicken release updates with bugs and count on users to discover them and correct them after problems for users. We are in 2022!

Oldgrey

I would agree as a long time user of quicken that i started with Quicken 98 in 1998 and also I was a beta tester of the new releases for a few years its not a good product today and the support is very poor.

I have continued to use it as I have the financial history in the data file from 1998 to 2022

Time to look at migrating to something else.

PLR

You are in the same situation as me as an user of Quicken since 1999 for my personal and corporate finances.
It's always a guest to download or not the last update and I try to wait as much as I can before upgrading Quicken.
It's like that since Intuit sold Quicken to a USA company !

Chris_QPW

What?  You guys don't like an endless release of bug fix releases, like the US customers have been "enjoying" for the last year while the Canadian customers were left out?

BTW you should check, I think you have your rose color glasses on.  Quicken was no better when Intuit owned Quicken.  There was a difference though that the Canadian users enjoyed.  They would release a "big bang" annual release in October to the US customers, and then spend up to April of the next year sending out bug fix releases.  It wasn't until this was almost all done that, they would merge that code into the Canadian branch and put out the release.

Whether the Canadian customers have realized it or not, the US customers have been beta testers for the Canadian release for years.

So, if Quicken Inc had really done what everyone expected and did continuous releases for the Canadian customers like they have been doing for a few years for the US customers, it would have been the same "mixed bag" of nice that they aren't doing the "big bang" releases, but also been treated to many miss steps that require more releases to fix the bug introduced.

This year Quicken Windows Canadian basically is getting that "big bang" release, and that isn't going well.
And given the warning about Express Web Connect having to change over to new connection method and people having to be on R40.X for the Canadian release, I think this release was more forced on them than planned properly.

Oldgrey

I take the old versions and the once a year payment and no need to upgrade for 3 years than this shitshow we have now any day with this subscription model.

Axel

I would not update if you use the Projected Balance feature/chart - it broke with R40 and is still not fixed in R40.28 

Chris_QPW

PLR said:

It's like that since Intuit sold Quicken to a USA company !

BTW what makes you think that Quicken was ever owned by a non USA company?

Quicken was founding by Scott Cook in Palo California, and Intuit has always been a US company.
At some points in the development, they did have a Canadian group doing the Canadian software development.  I think basically they created that group when they Quicken Windows into a US and Canadian branch of development instead of keeping it as one program (a really bad idea).  But I believe they got rid of that group about the same time they withdrew the licenses for all the foreign versions.  Which would have been about 2004 (at least that is the last year of the UK version).

And what Intuit did is sell Quicken to a private equity firm (about in 2013/2014), and not to long ago it got sold again to another private equity firm.

PLR

Ouf...it's seem that it's forbidden to critics an USA company (or Canadian if so) but as old Canadian users, since 1999,  I know  
that bugs wasn't realty with new version of QUICKEN  when we paid for it for one or more years but now with annual subscription it's seem normal to release updates with bugs however for USA or Canadian users!
Final results ....some guys like me don't trust anymore new updates of Quicken and I try to avoid issues with Quicken.
So thank's to inform us of settlements of bugs which will permit us to continue to work with joy and trust Quicken.
Best regards 

PLR

I read that some canadian users still have issues with R40.23 and also with fix R40.28.
So to avoid issues , Quicken what should we do?

Chris_QPW

@PLR I think you will find this thread enlightening.  At the end the US R40.21 seems to be "pretty stable", but it really isn't the point, as you can see from the discussion.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7913020/is-r40-21-safe-to-install

PLR

Chris , thank's for the following.
What is weird is that Quicken release their updates in first only to few users who don't know that they are the "elected ones" to check for bugs and after a while and sometimes some fix updates, Quicken release the "final" update to all users.
In fact Quicken use some of their clients as testers and don't tell them. I have doubt about Quicken's ethic about that.
For myself I don't want to be a free Quicken's tester after paying annual fees to use Quicken.

Chris_QPW

I have a couple theories of why they picked this model for releases (note that time and time again I have posted that I think they should make it much more visible to the users that they are in fact running a "stagged release" version.

I'm currently not in any betas but have done a lot of that for Quicken in the past.
The first thing that one would notice about that is that it takes quite a bit of time, both calendar time, and effort to support.  With going to the concept of "continuous releases" (known as "agile") I think that doing full betas would slow them down too much for what in some cases they feel is "minor" (even if in reality some changes, they make turn out to affect the users more than "minor").

At any rate not all the releases go through beta.  But even some of the ones that did go through beta still had problems when they were release to the general public.  A lot of times I think that was/is caused by what I would have to call "beta user bias".  Beta's don't attract in experienced users.  And they don't normally attract "QA minded users".  In other words they attract experienced Quicken users, that want to test out their use cases, but not just look for problems in general (which is hampered by Quicken Inc sometimes not even telling them what has been changed).

I contend that learning how to effectively use Quicken is more about learning what not to use than, how to use it in a lot of cases.  Experienced Quicken users naturally avoid problem features like sync to Mobile & Web.  So, even if they test these features in beta, they do it with "test data files", not with real world use cases.  I remember people coming and saying that they couldn't find any bugs in a given beta.  I on the other hand could log a hundred.  Yes, most of them were minor, but you get the difference in focus.

You see it here on the Quicken forum.  When one person reports that XX release is fine for them, they are definitely talking about their limited use case.

The other main problem with the betas is not enough different combinations.  Let's take Express Web Connect as an example.  On the US side they say they support 15,000+ financial institutions.  Clearly any beta is going to have very small subset of those being tested.  Now if Express Web Connect was like Direct Connect where there is a set protocol, then there would be a much more likelihood that the feature would be tested "enough" with these limited users. But it isn't.  Express Web Connect is an "agreement" between Intuit and the financial institution on how to download transactions from unstandardized websites that can change at any time.  So, it is very hard job to do "limited testing" and get it tested.  But this also goes for how people are using Quicken.  The long-time users tend to not use the "new features".

To this day I'm probably the only long-time user that posts on here that uses automatic transaction entry mode, even though for the new user that mode is the default.  And whenever anyone has a problem in that mode the very first thing most of the SuperUsers suggest is turning it off.  And that goes for features like the Dashboards, and especially Quicken Bill Pay and sync to Mobile/web (the last two I suggest turning off too because they have so many reported big bugs in them).

So, Quicken Inc really has only two choices, release to a limited amount of "real world users", and monitor, or release to everyone with the results of even more people hung up when things go wrong.

Oldgrey

So I tried reinstalling but it installed the R40.28 version again and the same problem with quick connect and Quicken account recognition.

So I then downgraded back to R33.7 and updating is working again and I can download fine from Banks and Credit cards. I can also see my Quicken ID in the edit/preference/Quicken ID & Cloud box before it would take 5 min and then fault out telling me to try another id.

Somehow the R40.28 update broke the connection to quicken so it could not verify the account and so update stock prices as normal going back fixed this.

I will now wait until the bugs are out of R40.28 before updating

PLR

Thank's Chris for long explanations of Quicken updates "system" but bottom line Quicken Inc should remember that new or older users need a SAFE software to help them to manage their banking accounts, credit cards accounts, investments accounts and so on. They often don't have time to "play" with Quicken which is not a " gamer" software, at least I think so !
As so, I hope that major bugs with R40.28 will be fix before May 30th because after this date Quicken inform us that banking updates or investments accounts updates will need at least version R40 for canadian users, and when I read "Oldgrey" R40.28 don't do the job at all.
Will see...l

steve.holtzkener

> @PLR said:
> As other users I received an invitation to downlaod R40.28 for Canada and before doing it, I read that some users had issues after downloading this update.
> What about theses issues and should I wait a while before going on with this update because I had major issues with new updates over the last 20 years of using Quicken.
> I learned that it's better to wait a while with new updates.

I updated a few days ago. Definitely more wonky... e.g. the investing screen doesn't fill completely... but after several refreshes, it does eventually fill in (I just ignore the error message). If you don't need the new stuff and are frustrated when it doesn't work perfectly, I'd suggest you wait.

PLR

Thank's Steve, as I don't have time to "play" with Quicken , I don't appreciate Quicken's ways which consist to put out updates with bugs and correct them later despite issues for users.
Meanwhile I chatted with Quicken's agent who informed me that banking and investments updates could MAY BE  still working after May 30th even without R40.28. Very odd ! 
Yes, I'm still waiting to download this last update and I will see on last days of May.

Chris_QPW

@PLR just to be clear, I was simply giving what I think is happening and where I think Quicken Inc is coming from, but in no way to I endorse this system.  I have worked in several companies where the norm is they are always in firefighting mode because of bad practices.  So, even though I can understand what is going on, doesn't mean that I think it is right.

There was a statement I always loved "Bad planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part.".

PLR

Chris , I didn't understood your last statement about "bad planning ..." anyway I think that we both agree that Quicken ways to put on updates are questionable .
Best regards 

Chris_QPW

Yes, and there are things that Quicken Inc is “stubborn” about.  Like the renewal banner, the “fake main window”, and not properly notifying people that they are installing a staged release version, no matter how much we complain, they don’t change it.

On the last statement.  Organizations get in a constant firefighting mode where all they do is go from one emergency to the next.  This is usually caused by bad planning and a bad process.

This leads to people running into other people’s cubical declaring that they need to stop everything to fix a problem the other person caused by not planning properly.  And of course it needs to be fixed “right now because it is an emergency”.  So, people running into my cubical got the surprise that I wouldn’t jump on their “emergency”.

PLR

Chris , you're right and as so Quicken Inc is asking to their users to do a part of their job......"great" product and organization 
So we must live with it or leave ....we have the choice.
Best regards 

PLR

Good news😀😀😀
I jumped anxiously into update R40.28 Canadian this morning and everything went smooth without bugs.
I updated my banking accounts without issues and did a complete backup of my Quicken's datas on an external USB key as usual.
So for me everything is OK and I hope it will be the same for other canadian users. 
Best regards 

Chris_QPW

Judging purely one the comments on this forum, you are one of the lucky ones.  Others haven't been so lucky.