Quicken Web merges Business accounts into all personal accounts in sidebar

MontanaKarl

Quicken Mac desktop classic has joined QWin desktop classic in supporting business accounts - bank, credit card, asset etc.

In the desktop product, the business accounts are all grouped under Business.

In the Quicken Web sidebar (today at least), the business accounts are grouped with all personal accounts by type (business checking with personal, business credit card with personal, business assets with personal). It makes it a total mess for finding things on the web … and I assume the mobile app as well.

Is Quicken Inc planning on adding business account grouping to Quicken Web?

Quicken Web also will not display the Business column… so there is no way to see what business any transactions are associated with.

Chris_QPW

Quicken Inc never pre-announces their plans, so it is impossible to say one way or another if they are planning this, but I doubt it.

First off, there are many more requests for changes to the Mobile/Web that have more votes for them, like multiple currency support that have yet to be done. I don't even know if there is even an active "idea" post to vote on for it.

MontanaKarl

Thanks, @Chris_QPW - I didn't post this in the Feature Request forum, but in the Q Web Errors forum. Business features were just added to QMac. It makes no sense that Q Web does not segregate accounts in the same manner.

Chris_QPW

It makes perfect sense, we don’t live in a magical world where things come into existence just because someone wishes it.

Do you think it would have been better if that Quicken Mac didn’t put out the business features until the group doing the Mobile/Web apps were ready to add these features?

And this were I disagree with what @jacobs has said at times where there is belief that features can’t be added to Quicken Mac because either Quicken Windows and Mobile/Web have to all do it at the same time. Yes, the groups should plan it so that they don’t create an incompatible system, but they shouldn’t hold up features just because another “app” doesn’t support it.

Chris_QPW

BTW at times is mentioned that Quicken Mac and quicken windows have different amounts of people working on them because of priorities and such. But I don’t think anybody has actually talked about what kind of group/resources there might be for supporting quicken mobile and Web. If I had to guess I would say that would be the smallest group.

MontanaKarl

Quicken Windows has had business features for decades… so, yes, it is quite surprising that Q Web hasn't yet managed to segregate business accounts. And, yes, it is ridiculous that a company that offers supposed seamless data access across web and mobile apps cannot synchronize the basics between them. Other companies have no problem coordinating their efforts and the issue here is an absolutely trivial database query as you well know.

Thanks for your thoughts :-)

Chris_QPW

As far as I can see, it’s all about priorities. The truth of the matter is Quicken mobile and Web are disasters especially on the windows side they corrupt data and all kinds of other problems. And the reason why it is a disaster at least on the windows side is because they are trying to patch this into a very old system that was never meant for it. People hear the term software and think it’s soft easy to change no problem whatsoever. But in reality, it really matters what something was designed for what frameworks are in place what technologies are being used and sometimes had things like this just isn’t in the best interest.

And if Quicken Inc can hire good software engineers for mobile and Web, the best place to put them for the company is in simplifi.

and as far as I can see Quicken Web and mobile have always been just there for some quick remote viewing an entering of transactions is never been the case that they were viewed as any kind of full application. In someways Quicken mobile and Web represent the mistake before they decided that they should just create a separate mobile and Web application. in my opinion, Quicken will never represent that modern application that some people seem to think it should be. It is a desktop application model old methodology just doesn’t merge well with that kind of thinking.

I’m absolutely sure that if they were to go and quicken from scratch to accomplish these kinds of goals they would never create Quicken in this way. It would be server-based where it doesn’t have to have the problems of trying to keep things in sync.

and frankly, it makes zero sense for them to put any resources into this. Add up all the requests for business features on mobile web. I probably could count them up on my fingers. There is much more pressing work that needs to be done.

as you noted Quicken windows has business features for basically almost the whole history of the application and yet there are very few requests for business features on the mobile Web applications. And here’s a shocker for you if it hasn’t changed quicken windows doesn’t allow syncing business accounts to mobile or Web apps. Quicken windows US also does not allow syncing non USD account to mobile and Web.

Is the very fact that Quicken windows has full support for these and understands that syncing them to mobile and Web is inaccurate and gives a false impression of the support that’s there and as such doesn’t do it. Where is Quicken Mac Doesn’t care and just pushes up the accounts and numbers.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW said: And this is where I disagree with what @jacobs has said at times where there is belief that features can’t be added to Quicken Mac because either Quicken Windows and Mobile/Web have to all do it at the same time.

Okay, Chris, I did some digging into this, and I found a (the?) place where the former Quicken Mac product manager explained that a feature couldn't be implemented in Quicken Mac because it didn't exist in Quicken Windows, which defined the functionality in the mobile app.

In this case, it was in reference to a specific feature, not all features, so I have probably generalized in the past about this.

Back in 2019, Quicken Mac added functionality to allow limited editing of the next instance of a scheduled transaction without editing all future instances of the transaction. The question asked was why this functionality allowed editing of the date or amount, but not the memo (or other fields). The Quicken Mac product manager answered thus: "It is a good question with probably an unsatisfactory answer. The reason is that Quicken Windows doesn't support it and the Quicken Cloud's feature set for scheduled transactions is defined by Quicken Windows. We aren't syncing scheduled transactions in 5.12 but the feature is defined by the Quicken Cloud feature set."

So in this case, a feature in Quicken Cloud was defined by Quicken Windows, which prevented the Mac team from adding a feature the Windows and cloud versions didn't support. That should not be extrapolated to mean that all features in Quicken Cloud are defined by what Quicken Windows does or does not support — but it's probably often the case.

Chris_QPW

Sounds reasonable, sort of like the "first one there defines it". All the more reason for Quicken Mac to get there first. 😉