Is quicken support really as bad as it seems ?
I am a quicken user from 1994.
Today I upgraded quicken to the latest version R48.9 27.1.48.9 .
Reading the release notes, I saw that there was a new report that interested me: The income by Security report. I tried it and liked it. But then I saw a bug. The bug was the following:
After generating the report, when selecting the option to subtotal by account, it did that correctly for all interest and dividend transactions on a security, but any interest on cash in an account was not sub totaled correctly. All the interest for cash in all the accounts was totaled and attributed to 1 account and not to any of the others.
I thought - OK, it is new report. They have a minor bug, but still a real bug. And I decided to report it to Quicken support via Chat. Before doing that i took a backup and also ran supervalidate which reported no errors.
What a nightmare. I did what the support person asked and I reproduced the problem on a totally new Quicken file. I created 2 investment accounts each with a balance of $100. I manually entered 2 IntInc transactions for cash - one in each account for $1. I generated the report without subtotaling and it showed $2 in interest. When I subtotaled by account, it showed $2 interest for 1 account and did not show any interest for the other account.
I uploaded pictures of the report and all of the investment registers. The support person agreed that this was not correct but that he needed to contact another team. I had already spent a lot of time on this but waited patiently for the support person to get back to me.
Then came all these requests - none of which were pertinent to the problem. They could be important for a developer but from a user perspective I had already provided all the information needed to demonstrate the problem etc.
Did I enter transactions manually or download them ?
Could I enter a few more fake transactions in each account to see if the problem went away.
In the original real file , could I delete and manually reenter the transactions to see if it fixed the problem.
It was like there was no acknowledgement from the team that the support person contacted, that there was a problem with the report. It was like the problem was with me, with my quicken file or the way I entered transactions etc.
They insisted that further work would not be done unless I stayed on the chat and did exactly all the troubleshooting that they wanted me to do - why they can't do that themselves I don't understand as I already showed them how to reproduce the problem. I could see that I would have been on for several more hours.
As an aside, I have 39 year experience in IT. I have worked on some of the largest relational and nosql databases in the world at the largest financial institutions. I have managed many teams of Infrastructure and developers. As part of my job, I have had to depend on support from IT vendors many times and have reported numerous problems with Operating Systems, Databases etc.
I have never had a support experience worse than this.
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For further discussion of issues with the new report, see these posts
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