Replacing Mint with Quicken Classic

ibasta

I just subscribed to Quicken Classic to replace Mint for tracking all of my accounts. But whenever I log in, it tells me I need to set up a sync and subscribe to something else. Why do I need to subscribe to two different things?

Jon

There's a couple different things that could be going on here, it's a bit difficult to tell which one is happening from your description so let's run through the possibilities.

Quicken Classic is primarily a desktop app for managing finances; while you can access your data via the web or a mobile app those are secondary uses. If you're trying to log into Quicken on the web or on the mobile app and you haven't already setup a Quicken file on your PC or Mac then you're doing things in the wrong order. You need to set up your file on the desktop first, enable syncing to make the file available to the web & mobile apps, and then you can log in and access that data remotely. Note that the web & mobile apps don't do everything that the desktop app does.

There are a couple services Quicken provides that are in addition to Quicken Classic. One is an online backup service that can help you in the case of a catastrophic PC or Mac failure that destroys all your Quicken data files & backups. The other is Quicken LifeHub which provides online storage of things like wills & other documents. Neither of these things is required to use Quicken Classic, you don't need to pay for them if you don't want to.

Finally there's Quicken Simplify. This is a completely separate app from Quicken Classic that is entirely online, much like Mint was. It does not share any data with Quicken Classic and has a separate subscription, so if you are accidentally trying to log into that it could explain the request for an additional subscription. You don't need to pay for Simplify if you want to use Quicken Classic; likewise you don't need to pay for Quicken Classic if you want to use Simplify. Which one you use depends on whether you want something that's entirely online (Simplify) or primarily not online but has some online features (Classic).