Product has deteriorated to the point of no longer of value.

dave304

What was probably the last great financial tracking package for desktop users is now useless. I have cancelled all further subscriptions as of now.

Final straw for quicken has come for me. Cancelled all future subscriptions due to degrading of what was the last great financial app for desktop users. this last update has killed the direct connect feature for downloading transactions from institutions. It now seems quicken will only support express web connect. For direct connect (which worked in the past) they will tell you to call your financial institution for support with any problems. When I deactivated and reactivated an account, update only updates for 1 day. This now looks like the standard update and not as in the past where it brought in all past transactions. Quicken support had me create a "test" file to download my accounts at fidelity and what was downloaded was pure garbage. checking account had 4 transactions and that was it.

Removed - Rant/Disruptive]

jacobs

@dave304 I understand your frustration and feel your pain — and I can't offer help. I'd just note that while you have determined the product is no longer of value, it's worth noting for others who may read this that it's no longer of value to you. There are still millions of users using Quicken and finding it either fine or useful enough warts and all to be worthwhile for them. (If not, no one would be renewing their subscription.) We all have different financial institutions, and we all use Quicken differently, so the problems you're experiencing don't apply to everyone. for instance, I enter most of my transactions manually because I find it nearly as fast as cleaning up downloads and dealing with service outages, and it's still incredibly useful to me. (I'm not in any way saying I'm right and you're wrong, because your problems are all-too-real for you.)

The disappearance of Direct Connect has almost nothing to do with Quicken; it's the financial institutions which have adopted a newer standard (FDX) which they consider more secure as well as cheaper to implement/maintain. Quicken happily supports Direct Connect for financial institutions which provide it, but many financial institutions are discontinuing their support for Direct Connect, and there's nothing Quicken can do about that.

Quicken connects with more than 10,000 financial institutions, so what you term "garbage" and a need for a "serious QC department" calls out the connectivity problems, but they don't have accounts of every type at each of the 10,000+ financial institutions they connect to. Further, they don't deal directly with connectivity; they contract with former parent Intuit to create and maintain connectivity with all those banks, credit unions and brokerages — so Quicken isn't the one testing connectivity in many cases. Most but not all problems with connectivity aren't the result of changes in the Quicken program, but changes made by financial institutions to their connectivity portal for third-party applications like Quicken. Unfortunately, this means that when a financial institution changes some server setting or security protocol, it's Quicken users who first discover the problems and start the process moving upstream through Quicken to Intuit to track down and fix the problem. I know: we as consumers paying for Quicken shouldn't need to be the ones reporting problems and waiting for them to be fixed, but hopefully this description helps make is understandable why that's inevitably the way things work. (I'm also not saying they can't do better programming or testing; just that many connectivity problems aren't their making.)

In the end, we all have to decide if Quicken works well enough for us to be worth the time and the money we spend on it. If you determine that it's not, then you're right that, for you, it's time to move on.

NJMoleman

my biggest issue is that all operating systems are now 64 bit and Microsoft Office is default installed as 64 bit, Quicken is still 32 bit so out of the box on a new computer reminders and email will no work. To get it to work you have to downgrade Office to 32 bit. I have been using Quicken since 2004 and I'm having to evaluate continuing with it for this main reason. I am an IT tech and this is the only product that I have installed that has not moved on and kept up with modern software coding. For the newest yearly price for my H&B subscription I have to really think about staying with this product.