New subscriptions feature is horrible.

@joecooler - I just used the new feature myself, and it worked well for me. The "Auto Identify" feature can be a little confusing at first, and I think that may be what caused the issue you're seeing. It identifies recurring bills in the accounts you select, and if your existing scheduled bills don't have matching payee names, it can result in duplicate reminders being created.

As for Subscriptions vs. Bills, that can sometimes be subjective. In my case, I reviewed the items it identified and simply manually marked the ones I knew were subscriptions.

The feature is definitely different from how Bills & Income has traditionally worked, and I found it took a little time to understand exactly what Auto Identify was doing and how it interacted with my existing reminders. Once I understood that, the results made more sense.

I had the same experience. Found 3 out of probably 25 recurring monthly or annual bills. I have them all ID'd in Scheduled Transactions, which has worked for me for years. I will just stick with that method.

Doug Giannotti

Same experience. Did not find Netflix or Disney+

I would have assumed it would pick those up.

RelayMoM

I think I will use it for Autopay transactions instead of subscriptions. This would include yard care, pest control, cellphone, etc., in addition to classical subscriptions such as Netflix or Sirius/XM. These types of transactions do not vary as compared to utility bills. It will also automatically enter the transaction, which works fine for me.

I was thinking the same thing.

Snorkle

I balance the urge to try new things with the reminder, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." With Quicken, I err on the latter. I will not be clicking "get started" anytime soon. 😉

Quicken Kade

Hello @joecooler,

Thank you for sharing your experience with the new Subscriptions feature. I apologize for the frustration this has caused, especially with your existing scheduled bills being duplicated during setup.

Does this support article cover the specific feature you are referring to?

I would be happy to try to assist you here in the Community. However, given the circumstances, I would recommend contacting Quicken Support for real-time assistance. They can work with you directly to investigate what happened during setup and help resolve the duplicate entries.

We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback, and I apologize again for the disappointing experience.

Thank you!

Here is general feedback that I think the developers should be made aware of.

Just because they can detect a payment is repeatable doesn't mean they should assume it is monthly or yearly. I notice this in the old Bills and Income Reminders "Schedule These" and the new Subscription feature. It seems to assume everything that repeats is either monthly or yearly.

This one is every other month, but they have it stated as monthly.

And this one from the new feature is about three times a year (and isn't the same amount each time): (I do notice that they didn't show the water bill in the new feature, and the old one didn't show this one, so I guess they are using different algorithms)

I will mention this just in case people missed it. Bill vs. Subscription only controls which tab they appear on: "Bills, Income & Transfers" vs. "Subscriptions". They both create scheduled reminders; it is just a personal choice in what one might consider a bill to be. I sort of wonder how Quicken decides on the default for this when searching for the repeating ones.

But at any rate, the scheduled reminders now have this setting that you can change any time:

EDIT:

I see there is this option too:

Which gets you this on the Subscriptions page:

And the other thing different between the two I notice is that bills can be connected to online bills, but subscriptions can't. So, most likely "bill" is the right choice for a bill that varies and you want to have the monthly amount picked up (if possible).

cc4005

I thought the new feature had promise. Like the idea of seeing how much we're spending monthly on subscriptions. It found maybe 25% of ours. Pretty useless.

Bob_L

Yes, that needs improvement, but you can add others manually, of course.

tandk4ever

I agree with "If it works, leave it alone."

When i clicked on every update to install, I had problems where my vault for passwords would disappear, after every update I would need to setup all my accounts again. I would not see any other improvements, just my having to go over all my accounts.

I have been using Quicken since the late 80's, they never pushed out all the updates that we now see from Quicken. I did not find anywhere to stop auto updates.

So, I marked the Quicken.exe file to read only, I have to acknowledge the file overwrite before it happens. I have not updated for quite some time. My quicken still works the same as it always did, tried and true and I know what to expect.

AS far as issues, I have not been able to consistently download transactions from Sam's Club business account from Symphony. We used to use our card for everything. Manually entering transactions does not cut it. Stopped using Sams Credit card and switched to Costco, everything works fine, even paying at Sam's using the Costco card. Not worth a fight as both sides blamed the other.

Why are there more updates than the Firefox browser? Seems overambitious, does each update get Beta tested before rollout?

BEL

Interesting. I have Quicken Classic Business & Personal R69.53. I do not have this feature. No idea what it is, which is why I looked at the questions.

I do not have any subscription in Bills or anywhere else.

@BEL You need to update to R70.20 to see this new feature.

smoore@

I agree with the frustration. It didn't pick up any of the three: SiriusXM, NY Times, WSJ… I tried to manually add them, and it was such a pain in the butt. You should be able to right-click on a transaction from your credit card or banking account and mark it as a subscription. This feature isn't worth the effort for me at this point, but hopefully V2 will make it usable.

You can do that now.

Right-click on a transaction and select "Add reminder".

In that dialog, there is a new selection for "Type", which can be either Bill or Subscription.

BEL

Well, that's interesting, as when I check for updates, it repeatedly comes back with " You have the current version.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20585066#Comment_20585066

It seems like they removed R70.20 from the manual updates, so the latest available is R69.53.

Oh, I guess I got "lucky" to get it. It was there this morning. I didn't get it automatically.

Yeah, I just checked; the install is still there. They just changed the link in the article to hide it.

smoore@

That's really helpful. It should be clearer to do this. The subscription tab should let you know this is a much easier way to manually add a subscription.

Why doesn't the feature let you input when the subscription renews? That would be one of the most valuable features for me so, for example, I can negotiate with Sirius before getting charged the standard rate when the subscription ends. I know there are ways to add reminders, but that should be part of the Subscription feature (unless you'll tell me it is 😊).

drew2u

I tried the new Subscriptions feature and, like others, can report that it didn't find most of my pre-existing subscriptions captured as Bills and duplicated others, but I have 2 bugs to report:

The startup window isn't resizable: it placed recommended subscriptions above subscriptions it found, with each section having a collapsible header and a dedicated scrollbar in each section. Collapsing either section shrunk the Subscription window as opposed to exposing more items for me to view.
SERIOUS ISSUE: The "account to use" for many of my bills that I marked as a subscription in the onboarding WAS CHANGED WITHOUT MY CONSENT( NOR MY KNOWLEDGE) to a different account. I found this today when looking at my register and all my future balances were different, because a dozen subscriptions were moved to be paid from a different account than where I had them planned. I now have to manually edit each bill to correct this.
On the Bills and Income >Subscription tab, it's not possible to edit future instances of subscriptions - we can only edit THIS INSTANCE. Instead, you have to go back to all Bill Reminders to find the subscription to edit future instances. In the Subscriptions tab, each subscription should have the same options as on a bill: enter this, edit this, edit all future, skip this, delete all future.

And a suggestion: please update the Bills & Income Reminders window (Control-J) to make the TYPE column sortable, to group Bills, Subscriptions, Loans, Income, etc.

CTS

I think I am in the minority and see promise in the "feature," even though the implementation is a little confusing.

I found the easiest way to designate a bill as a subscription and manage them is in the "Manage Manual Bill and Income" popup, not any of the standard tab views. In the Manage Bills popup, if you look at the "All Bills and Deposits" tab, there is now a column for "Type" so you can easily see which ones were designated as subscriptions. If you want to designate something as a subscription, just right-click it, select Edit this and all future instances, and click the subscription box. Trying to use the standard tabs under bills and income was confusing since what shows up is based on the time selected, and you either get repeats or miss something. The "manage manual bills and income" pop-up selection bypasses most of the confusion.

The tricky part will be: what do you want to call a subscription? Do you want anything recurring that automatically debits your account, like a phone bill or Netflix? Or do you just want entertainment or TV streaming services? Or do you want any recurring bill even if it changes each month, like electricity? Anything this flexible will be confusing since it can mean so many different things depending on the user. You have to decide what benefits you and set it up that way.

I sort of like the "overview" on the "subscriptions" tab and wish it were a completely separate tab view to see what percentage of bills make up what categories. Seems like only having this in the subscriptions tab limits its use. Would also like to be able to select the timeframe for the graph.

Mikmartn

I see promise too, but am disappointed so far. Mostly, because I had hoped there would be the ability to add information concerning subscription renewal. Our challenge is knowing what/when subscription promotions expire and auto-renew at higher rates. Hopefully, something will be added; otherwise, the new Quicken subscription feature isn't very helpful to me.

smoore@

I 100% agree. That is the value I see in the feature, and it's not there. I tried to create a workaround by checking the trial period box, but it doesn't let you insert a date.

Greg Brown

I use a TAG for any bill reminders I consider subscriptions. I have created a report to show me all of my transactions with the "subscription" tag. When I run the report, I can view it yearly, monthly, etc. I can also sort/subtotal by month/year, etc. I am attaching the last 2 pages of my current report if anyone's interested.

Greg, are these items all of your monthly and yearly scheduled transactions / bill reminders? If so, how did you create it? I typically just print from the "scheduled transactions" item on the toolbar but it doesn't give me the memo and tag fields.. I print this out occasionally as a "just in case", if someone needs to know my expenses. I have been asking for these fields to be added to the printed report for a long time. I use the tag field for the same purpose you do..

Greg Brown

Using the Reports and Graphs Icon from the top toolbar,

This pops up to create reports:

And then select a type of report and then the details. Of course you have to use TAGs when you create bill reminders so the tags are populated on each transaction… Play around with creating a report and let me know how it goes. You select the columns you want in the report as well…

Thanks Greg,

I gave it a shot, but it doesn't produce the info I'm looking for. I wish Quicken would create a "Bill and Income Reminders" report in "Reports & Graphs" that included all of the fields used when setting up a scheduled reminder.

Greg Brown

This pops up when you select Register Report

Use the icon the arrow points to to select columns for your Register Report…

CTS

This is my favorite view for Bills and Reminders. If it only included the "Category" field, it would be perfect for me. If it also had the memo field, you could include subscription details.

Mine too. In addition to needing to see Category and Memo fields, I also need to see the Tag field as that is the field that shows my autopay's and subscriptions

I think having a column that shows what funding account would be beneficial as well. The new subscription tab has the account included but it would be nice to have the information consolidated on one tab, if possible.

CTS

Basically show the fields it already collects for each Reminder!