Is it safe, robust, secure, and steady?

Steve_in_NC

I’ve been using Quicken for 20+ years, and I’m currently using the current Quicken for Windows (subscription) version. R67.10, Build 27.1.67.10. I use Quicken only as a high-function multi-account register and not for anything involving investing. Also, I never download transactions from financial institutions; I enter everything manually.

I’m about to implement my first household budget.

I’m considering the Mobile app to let me enter transactions on an iPad. I see that there have been lots of concerns about it, but many of those are from 3 or 4 years ago. I also see the posts about budgeted transactions getting multiplied by 4, apparently as an artifact of either the Mobile app or the sync process.

My questions are whether this Mobile app is really ready for prime time. It should be, especially since downloads from banks aren’t in the picture. But I cannot tolerate my data getting scrambled, edited, corrupted, adjusted outside my control, etc. I’m an IT professional and I understand about not having the file open on 2 computers at once. Also, I’m the only person in the household that ever uses Quicken at all.

To summarize: I know my way around computers, I use Quicken in the simplest way possible, and I am completely intolerant of any anomalous behavior, period. The first obvious error I see will put me off Quicken, entirely.

So is this little Mobile app really ready to swim in deeper water? And will my data be secure, and never be used by Quicken or anyone else to try to sell stuff to me, or otherwise abuse my trust? And when my data is on your servers, will it be encrypted via a key known only to me?

I expect that any Qucken or Intuit person will say “yes!”. So I’m also interested in what the ‘civilians’ have to say.

Thank you all,

Steve

Chris_QPW

I would say you have a pretty unique use case and as such it is sort of hard to judge the risks, but I will give it my best shot.

What is pretty evident from what people report, using sync to Mobile/Web isn't "rock solid", as some people have reported errors that do seem to be tied to using it. But here is the problem with talking about your use case, I doubt that anyone of the people reporting on this were using it in pure manual mode. The Mobile/Web is basically the GUIs to the dataset kept on the server. That server interacts with these GUIs but it also interacts with fetching data from the financial institutions and also of course having to sync with the Desktop data file. I would say that your use case removes one of the possible problem sets (merging in when it downloads from the financial institution). But no one probably knows which have caused the problems the were reported.

I haven't seen any complaints about the syncing of the budget lately, I don't really know if that is because it is now fixed or people gave up on it. And actually I haven't seen more than one or two about syncing at all for quite some time. It is hard to just since the people that will frequent this forum the most (The SuperUsers) won't touch it.

As for the security of your data. They definitely say that it is encrypted, but as for you being in control of the key, I doubt it. What is known though is that each data file has an unique Id that does tied it to the server dataset. Whether that is the encryption key, I don't know. It certainly doesn't ask the user for such a key.