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Thinking about cancelling my Quicken subscription

lrlz17

I find Quicken to be high maintenance. I have investment accounts with Fidelity, Janus and Morgan Stanley. The updates by Quicken never match the balances that I have in these accounts, which requires me to manually make adjustments. The bank where I have my checking account has a money management feature that links to the same accounts and the updates are always to the penny. Before pulling the plug, have you experienced a similar situation?

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Chris_QPW

Lots of good salesmen in this thread. 😁

All comments

Chris_QPW

For me Quicken has been pretty reliable, but I would say a lot of that has to do with my picking of financial institutions, simplified finances, and updating frequently, and generally knowing a lot about how Quicken behaves and being able to use it in a way that makes maintaining it not so much of a chore.

On the other hand, I have not so good of results with having my financial institution (Chase at the moment) tracking other financial institutions (not inaccurate, but always in a state of "can't connect"). And the only thing they had to maintain is balances (which BTW might be an option in Quicken using Simple investing mode). So, you seem to be lucky in my experience with a financial institution that can keep such connections working properly.

You might also want to consider Simplifi, which might work better for your use case from what I hear of it (I haven't used it personally). There is even an online only Business & Personal now.

It really all depends on what you really need from your personal finance software. In my case, I have simplified my finances to the point that almost all of it works automatically and as such I don't even need any personal finance software, I just more maintain Quicken as a hobby.

leishirsute

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7964974/thinking-about-cancelling-my-quicken-subscription

I rarely have an exact balance match for Fidelity investment accounts due to the periodic fluctuation of share prices during the day for non-mutual fund investments. However, the cash balance is usually in agreement.

Chris_QPW

BTW for reference:

which requires me to manually make adjustments.

With one notable exception, I consider this just "not doing a proper reconcile", and that it just leads to more problems.

My one exception is with my wife's 401K. The financial institution that services it is Merril Lynch and they are almost always a few pennies off, but it averages out over time. In other words, say 15.23 was given to them to invest. It might actually buy 15.20 of the security, but still report zero cash. The next paycheck it might go the other way. I probably could just ignore the balance adjustments and they would balance out from time to time, but I just do it to zero out the cash on each paycheck.

Other that that all my accounts are properly balanced/reconciled.

I rarely have an exact balance match for Fidelity investment accounts due to the periodic fluctuation of share prices during the day for non-mutual fund investments. However, the cash balance is usually in agreement.

And by properly balance for an investment account I mean each security has the right amount of shares and the right cash balance, you can't go off of the "investment balance" because that is dependent on a changing price. At least not until the market closes.

But as I say that I now realize I have to throw in some more exceptions.

If you are going by what is downloaded from the financial institution, then it is very possible to have temporary situations where the transactions and the downloaded balances aren't in sync, and you have to know not to put in place holders or balance adjustments at this point. Note that when downloading investment transactions there is also the security share balances and cash amount in that information. Ideally the financial institutions would keep this information in sync, but I have certainly found that they don't. Usually it falls into the category of something like this where they update the transactions at one point in the day, but don't update the balances until later in the day. Or in some cases it is that you will do a buy or a sell and the "cash transaction" that is to go with it is delayed because the buy/sell is done on the day of the buy/sell, but the "cash transaction" is done on the day the buy/sell closes.

[Deleted User]

@lrlz17 you don't say how much you are off in these investment accounts, but if they are small (pennies) differences, that is normal due to the way market value is calculated. You also don't mention how you are adjusting your balances to match your financial institutions (shares, price, cash). If your balance differences are due to rounding, then trying to adjust them might just lead to more issues, depending on how they are being adjusted.

Bank and cash accounts should always balance to the penny. Their balances are not calculated like market value for investment accounts.

No matter what, whether you cancel your Quicken Subscription, of course, is up to you. Like any other program or app, it's a tool for you to use. You will need to decide if it's useful for you to keep. There may also be other features of Quicken that you haven't explored that might make keeping Quicken worthwhile.

lrlz17

Thank you all for the replies. I use Quicken to keep track of my daily expenses for budgeting purposes, and to have a consolidated view of my investments. Since my bank offers the same features for free, and the balance updates are always accurate, I see no point in renewing my subscription to Quicken, which expires this month. Quicken seems to be useful only if you have a minimum number of accounts, but it is definitely not worth the effort when you have multiple accounts, which is my case because I keep track of my wife's investments in addition to mine.

Jim_Harman

@lrlz17 Where Quicken really shines is when you have accounts at several financial institutions and you want to see a consolidated view of your finances, for example "How much did I spend on groceries last month?" or "What is my net worth?" when you use multiple credit and debit cards, have investing accounts at multiple brokerages, other assets, loans, etc.

I am sorry you are having many issues. I agree that Quicken requires maintenance - it is a complex and comprehensive program after all. But I must be among the lucky ones where everything has been an exact match and accurate for a very long time - tho I don't have Fidelity which seems to be a recent problematic FI due to changes.

I have two accounts that I have to make manual adjustments:

Schwab: (a) All the interest in cash balance download as Deposit. I manually change them to Interest Income or IntInc. (b) Sporadically Reinvested dividends download as two transactions of Div + Bought. I edit and change the Bought transaction to ReinvDiv and then delete the Div transaction.
Principal 401k: They have some quarterly fees that do not show up in my account until the 'next' quarter and even then do not get downloaded either, and therefore I have to wait and manually enter them accordingly later.

NotACPA

Regarding penny variations in the valuations in your Q accounts held at Fidelity.

Fidelity, in what's shown on their website, truncates fractional pennies, while Q uses standard 5/4 rounding.

So your valuations on any security might vary by a penny. If you've got multiple such positions in an account the variance could be a penny for each security.

I simply ignore that difference.

I don't have accounts at Janus or Morgan Stanley, so I don't know what they do.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20504162#Comment_20504162

I second this comment. There are many examples like this that I find invaluable.

[Deleted User]

@lrlz17 have you looked into Quicken Simplifi? I think it might be a good fit for you. I hear it's good with budgeting, uses simple investment tracking, and it pretty intuitive. I know you mentioned that your bank offers the same services for free, but maybe Quicken Simplifi would augment that rather than be a replacement.

Chris_QPW

Lots of good salesmen in this thread. 😁

leishirsute

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7964974/thinking-about-cancelling-my-quicken-subscription

I didn't realize a Quicken subscription could be cancelled, but I think just letting the subscription expire would "buy" some time to check if the issues are resolved.

Jim_Harman

Subscriptions are paid annually up front. I think the only way to get a refund is to cancel within the first 30 days.

If you don't want to renew, make sure your subscription is not set to renew automatically.

lrlz17

I just cancelled my Quicken account, which expires by August 20th anyway. Someone mentioned that Quicken shines when you have multiple bank, loan and brokerage accounts because you can see them in the aggregate. That was the reason I got Quicken in the first place, but after a year of getting incorrect balances and wasting time manually making adjustments, I decided it is time to say goodbye to the subscription. The updates to my brokerage accounts were always off, and not by a few pennies but by several thousands of dollars. In particular, Fidelity, Northwestern and Morgan Stanley. I guess Quicken works for some and not for others. That makes it not a very reliable product. In any case, thank you all for your replies and comments.