Canada 2017 Cash Manger Version features (retirement accounts/mutual funds)

P.S. Just to be clear Cash Manager doesn't include support for investment accounts.

Joe Bedford said:

So we're stuck with a 125% price increase ($90 / year) just because of investment accounts?

Well from Quicken Inc's perspective they are giving you a discount, not a price increase (based on a customer that buys Quicken every year).

And the "Have to use Home & Business to get investment accounts" has been baked into the Canadian version for lots of years.  And I wouldn't doubt that from Quicken Inc's point of view that is probably along the lines of "you should be grateful".

Other than the Canadian version, there are no other country versions of Quicken supported by Quicken Inc and Intuit before that.  There use to be some other country versions back in 2004, but in truth they were done by other companies that licensed the code and name.  And there is Australian (Reckon) version still supported even though when I look at their website it looks like more and more they are trying to hide it and push their online services.

Their "Personal" version seems to be basically the Deluxe or maybe Premier version equivalent of the US version (has investment accounts).  It costs $150 (AUD) a year for an annual license, and $310 for the full version.  The Home & Business version is $195 for the annual license, and $685 for the full version.  With current exchange rates those numbers become, $113.16 USD, $233.86, and $147.11, $516.76.

And for reference the $90 CAD for Home & Business is currently: $67.1 USD.
The Cash Manager $40 CAD would be $29.82 USD.

Current retail US prices are:
Starter $40 (only these account types:Checking, Credit Card, Savings,Cash)
Deluxe $75 (up to investment accounts without some of the bells and whistles.)
Premier $110 (Deluxe, with the bells and whistles, more investment reports, tax reports, and Zillow estimates)
Home & Business $120 (Notice that they don't rate "Business" that much more than what is in Premier)
Rental Property Manager $165 (everything in all the others, plus rental property functions)

So if you figure that the Canadian version of Home & Business is Premier plus "business" given the US version's prices then there in fact wouldn't be much difference in price savings even if they introduced a version between Cash Manager and Home & Business.  Or more likely they wouldn't want to support three versions and as such they would put it in Cash Manager, and then just raise the price.

Of course people are use to buying at a discount at a retailer, and then keeping it for 3 years until their downloading stops.  Well "buying at a discount" has been out for a few years for the Canadian version has only been sold directly from Quicken Inc/Intuit).  So people doing that have costs that are extremely low.  But in this day and age everyone believes that they should get everything for free, so they believe they are "fair" and that Quicken Inc must be making tons of money.  If that was really true, Intuit would have never sold it.  And Microsoft Money would still be around.

And still every year when their 3 years of downloading came to an end there would be people that would come in and make ridiculous statements like they are going to file a class action suit because they felt that they should be able to download transactions forever.  Or that they should be able to keep their old version and pay say $10 to at the most $20 a year for downloading of transactions.  And of course they didn't want to hear the fact that it would in fact cost Quicken Inc more money to support the old versions than it would be to support the most recent ones.

BTW it is interesting the behavior of Cash Manager when "downgrading" is like the US Starter version.  If a person wants to switch between Deluxe to Rental Property Manager, they can do it at any time, and just get the functionality at that given level. But if they want to go down to Starter version they have to remove the accounts that it doesn't support.  Just like what happens in Cash Manager.

Joe Bedford said:

It's their software and they can charge whatever they want for it. I'll probably rent it for 1 more year because they didn't give enough notice for me to find a replacement. Our investment accounts have websites that are good enough for tracking. I never used any of the investment tools in Quicken because they don't do ROI correctly - nothing there on which I would base investment decisions. Probably only get cash manager for one year. I'll probably keep Q2014 and do quarterly investment updates manually.

I just guessed when I said it was a 125% increase: I looked up the price for Q2014 (in Quicken of course) and I paid $110 / 3 years = 36.66/yr. It's a 145% increase. (FYI Q2011 $98.99 Q2008 $100 Q1999 $31).

Note that you can also think of staying with Quicken 2014 and use QIF imports.