Pending Price Increases

S Browne

I am absolutely flabbergasted that Quicken will be asking for a price increase for software that currently does not even work as advertised. For months I have been dealing with my fidelity accounts synchronization problems and yet with no real solutions in sight the company is sending out a notice of price increases. I still have no resolution on the failure of my FloridaPrepaid 429 linkage issues. I purchased this software to help me organize my finances and yet my finances still cant be trusted because of, duplicated accounts, billings and invoices. I feel the need to alert Quicken to the plight of the users. I've been using software for most of my adult life now, and frankly I don't feel as though I am getting our monies worth. I have never experienced the total inability of a product to work as advertised as I have with this program. I have never had problems with software by Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk or Graphisoft on a level similar to this. It feels as though the software is being beta tested by people paying to use it. Please listen to your customers and fix the software before releasing to the paying public. I promise you as soon as I find a better alternative I will no longer be renewing my subscription. Signed a frustrated user!! #QuickenMac

jacobs

I feel the need to alert Quicken to the plight of the users… Please listen to your customers and fix the software before releasing to the paying public. I promise you as soon as I find a better alternative I will no longer be renewing my subscription.

@S Browne I just wanted to make you aware that the people you're wanting to reach probably aren't seeing posts here. This forum is mostly fellow users and a few Quicken moderators. I do think product managers read some comments at times, but I'd guess that senior management and marketing folks do not. You could try emailing the company, but I'm not sure you'll reach the people who count. 😉

It feels as though the software is being beta tested by people paying to use it. Please listen to your customers and fix the software before releasing to the paying public.

I understand your sentiment, but the reality is that most of the issues you describe (and other users have problems with) are due to connectivity issues with financial institutions rather than Quicken simply releasing poorly written code. Those issues are caused by the financial institutions making changes in how they allow Quicken to connect, which often requires Quicken or its connectivity provider, Intuit, to have to recode things to interface successfully; in worse cases, it requires the financial institutions to make changes/fixes, which they often don't do on a high priority basis.

You don't have problems like this with Adobe or Microsoft because they aren't connecting to thousands of different data providers who don't use uniform standards. Adobe knows how to place a PDF file and a JPG image because these are well-established standards which do not vary from one source to another. Even though there are standards like OFX and FDX for financial transaction exchange, it seems there are differences (and mistakes) in implementation from one financial institution to another which causes customers headaches.

In one particular case I happened to get insight into, a top-tier brokerage company I won't name broke something such that Quicken Mac users weren't connecting successfully. It turned out they assigned a wrong length to one of the fields that is used to identify users. Quicken engineers figured out why it wasn't working, and the financial institution agreed — and told Quicken they could fix it in several months! In this case, the Quicken folks were able to figure out a way around what the financial institution was doing wrong, requiring a code change and program update, but they fixed it in a couple weeks rather than 2-3 months. But in many cases, Quicken can't fix something the financial institution is sending incorrectly, and the fixes come at whatever pace the financial institution assigns to it. (To be fair, financial institution IT departments have a lot more to deal with than the tiny percentage of their users who use Quicken to download transactions.)

So the unfortunate bottom line is that it often isn't Quicken's fault, and they can't fix it, but customers nonetheless have to contend with software which doesn't work correctly for days, weeks or months. I don't know what the solution is, other than the financial service industry getting its act together to make this easier for end customers… and I don't know how likely that is. I believe you will find other personal finance programs have similar connectivity issues for the same reason Quicken does: it's the financial institutions, not the end-user software. I know that brings you no satisfaction or resolution, but hopefully it helps a bit in understanding why there are such problems with this type of software.

kentgerhart77

I received my price increase notice today and had to LAUGH OUT LOUD at this part of their sales pitch: "

"Your continued support helps us keep improving the product you rely on — from fixing over 200 bugs to enhancing performance."

They have the audacity to actually say that we have the privilege of paying more money, so that they can fix their own bugs!!! And, that we should think this is a GOOD thing! [Removed - Disruptive/Rant] It would be like going to a restaurant, getting a meal with a worm in it and then having the owner proudly announce he is going to increase his price to help prevent wormy food in the future. Duhhhh - it is assumed that food will not have worms in it! We assume that when we buy a software product it will just work [Removed - Rant]

jacobs

@kentgerhart77 "We assume that when we buy a software product it will just work." Actually, that's not the case. Every software developer who charges you for a subscription or an upgrade is charging to you (a) maintain compatibility with operating system upgrades, (b) fix bugs discovered in the program, and (c) add new functionality to the program. Microsoft… Adobe… they all do it. No software is ever perfect nor complete. Quicken actually has more moving parts than many other software products, because Quicken needs to interface with thousands of financial institutions who are constantly making changes to their servers/interfaces/APIs/security. Microsoft doesn't have to contend with someone changing the .docx or .xls file format because they control it and it doesn't change often; Quicken has to contend with connectivity which breaks with large and small financial institutions almost every day.

I'm not suggesting you should be happy to see another price increase from Quicken; far from it! I think they have raised their prices too often and too much.

But I do accept that the subscriptions we buy do pay, in significant part, for the development teams who design, program and debug the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that make Quicken do what it does. So yes, we should think it's a good thing that they are fixing bugs and continuing to advance the program with new/enhanced features. (Particularly Quicken Mac, which had long been, and still continues to be, missing many feature which users want to see in the program.) Quicken has been advancing their more limited, online-only Simplifi product, and it seems clear that's where their future lies, so I'm happy to see them continuing to invest in Quicken Classic Mac which I and many of us have used for many years and find incredibly useful.