An update from our CEO, Eric Dunn
Quicken Kathryn
Administrator ✭✭✭✭
I am writing to give you an update on Quicken. Since my last letter in January, we have had a busy year making Quicken faster and more reliable as well as adding new capabilities to give you greater insights into your financial picture, along with more flexible access to your data.
Our focus this year has been on improving reliability across the product line; on filling in functionality for the Mac product; and on extending the capability of the web and mobile versions. We've also started work on significant extensions to Online Bills for both desktop versions of Quicken, which we will release early in the new year, in our Premier and Home & Business products. Here are some specifics:
- Mobile and web Quicken now support Assets and Liability accounts, so you have access to your full net worth. Mobile and web also can now show scheduled transactions and allow you to directly enter transfer transactions. And we've added Reconcile to the web app. (It's slick – even though I am primarily a Windows Quicken user, I use the web app for reconciling.)
- Quicken for Mac has significantly improved reports, new renaming rules, and, by the end of this year, a full-featured Memorized Transactions capability.
- It's easier to get started with Quicken for Windows, thanks to simplified budget setup, Q Cards and new in-product videos. We've also improved performance (launching Quicken is up to 30% faster), improved compatibility, and added enhancements to investment reporting. In addition, our testing shows that we have been able to achieve a 35% reduction in product exceptions since the beginning of the year.
- As well as being more reliable, all Quicken products benefit from the work we've done to improve the security and quality of bank downloads, such as the introduction of OFX SecurePlus with several of our FI partners.
And one more thing: we are working on a new product, Simplifi by Quicken, intended for people who are looking for an easy but complete personal financial solution on mobile and the web. Simplifi is in Beta now; there will be more to come when we are closer to release.
We are excited about these Quicken updates and are proud of these latest versions. If you have additional thoughts for improvement, please do not hesitate to let us know your ideas here in this thread. With millions of people using Quicken every day, it's no surprise that we get some of our best ideas from you.
Thank you for being a Quicken user!
Sincerely,
CEO
Quicken Inc.
Community Administrator
Comments
I like the sound of the new product Simplifi by Quicken. It would be cool to see a web-based application with the power of Quicken but better than Mint.
Some ideas, if you are interested.
1. What-If conditions - this is a feature that Money had and one that I still miss. Being able to put in a potential raise and see the result of my balance on a graph would be very useful. If Quicken has it, it certainly isn't obvious. Right now I have to make a copy of my file and then play around with scheduled transactions to see what might happen if I get a 2% raise.
2. Stability - your developers have been working hard on this. I know it's an annoyance of my own when Quicken crashes for no apparent reason and there is no obvious way of reproducing it (so what's the point of reporting it).
3. Performance - Quicken is still very sluggish. Have you tried just drag-n-dropping the window from one screen to another (I have dual screens at home and work)? Just dragging it out of the maximized state is sluggish. There is no reason for this. There are also more refreshes than should be necessary.
4. Start from scratch - it seems that Simplifi by Quicken is almost a do-over of Quicken. But I'm talking about the desktop version, too. Start all over. Scrap the existing code and re-architect it. Use an updated UI. You could probably figure out how to use a ribbon, too. Or look at what Money was using in the last version. That was almost a predecessor to the ribbon (or maybe a predecessor of the predecessor of the ribbon). Menus are so 20th century. It seems there is just so much legacy code involved it causes all kinds of problems. New file format. New file extension. "Maybe" provide a conversion from the old Quicken to the new but I don't see that as a necessity. Perhaps you could make this an open source project and get a community of developers to participate?
5. Automatic updates - I love the fact that you have updates nearly once a month or sometimes even more frequent. What I don't like is that I get prompted to install but am NOT shown what changes were made. Once the update is installed and the product opens there is no way to see the list of fixes for the just installed update. Very frustrating. The update installer should include the changes for that update so the user can at least see what they are.
That's it for now. I would love to see #4 happen. I think on this list #5 is most important.
Kris Culin
Quicken User
Former MS Money User
I've been unable to use the Android app and cloud for a few years now, because if I enable it Quicken (PC) quickly corrupts its own data file, typically taking long since defunct accounts and reactivating them multiple times over creating a massive, hard to clean up mess.
I don't know how many times over years I've had, on my biweekly pay, note 'net salary' category because Quicken doesn't memorize it. Or uses its imagination to randomly assign a nonsense category. I'm a long time customer and the longer I have it the worse this seems to get. A big side effect of this problem is that Quicken gets so many errors that I've got to spend many hours cleaning up mistakes before starting my taxes each year.
Turning on bills created massive new problems in using Quicken - only way to fix them was to carefully excise any billing info that you'd entered.
I have found the credit score lookup feature so buggy with no known ways to fix problems that I stopped using it - fortunately my bank offers the same ability - weekly, with far fewer problems.
I don't know just how many features of Quicken Premier that I don't use. I've had Quicken for well over 17 years, and am constantly in fear that some new bug or old bug will destroy my data file. BTW, I've been using computers since the early 1970's, and the bulk of my career has been in IT, much of that as a programmer, DBA and project manager. My confidence level in it is not very high, and my experience with the features you are so proud of leaves me no confidence in them at all. So again - please, not just fix the bugs, but figure out how to fix our data files from all the errors past bugs have created so it might finally be safe to try out some of those new features. And help us fix the category problems which have been around pretty much forever.
In Quicken, there is no way to create an accurate view of gains/losses within a family of trades, e.g., you can't combine an option spread of the macro view of the trade, i.e., the short and the long positions. Similar, as it gets more complicated if you roll the options to other months or strikes.
I realize this would likely involve major changes, but without these structural changes, there is very little analytic value from Quicken in these, simpler or more complicated transactions.
I would volunteer to be part of a user panel to discuss these issues.
Can you simply support the Euro sign : € , Not talking about French accents ...
When I tell people I use Quicken for my record keeping they usually laugh. They think it's outdated and not cool. But Quicken does things no one else does. Microsoft Money was a close competitor back in the day, but they're gone so Quicken really is the only option.
I use Quicken, Home, Business and Rental Property and for the most part I really like it. It's funny, but the big differentiator is the "Memo" section in the register. I use that all of the time, and I add notes to the transaction if there isn't room in the Memo section. That one little feature is a huge differentiator for your product (I'm not a bookkeeper or accountant, so I rely a lot on notes to myself so I can look back on them).
Reconciling could be a lot better. For instance I have about 20 accounts set up in Quicken at about 6 different banks. When I do the '1 Step Update' only 2-3 accounts actually get updated. All usernames and passwords are correct, accounts have been reset in Quicken many times. So I have to manually download history for almost every account every time I reconcile (2x/mo). Often times I have to delete duplicate transactions. As much as of a pain in the butt it is, it's worth it because the end result is worth it.
I use Xero for my business time tracking, invoicing, and bill tracking and payments. Xero offers bank balance tracking, reconciling, etc., but it's horrible. No Memo section for one, well they do, but not visible without clicking on each individual transaction. Anyway, if Quicken offered better small business services such as time tracking, invoicing, accepting payments, bill tracking, check printing that would be huge (a killer app!) and all of us small business owners for which Quickbooks is overkill. Quicken already offers all/most of these things, but the UI is very outdated and not user friendly. Basically, a viable competitor to Quickbooks, Xero, and others.
I would be great if Quicken was better on the cloud, basically the same on the cloud as the desktop version. I have only been to the cloud version once because it totally didn't do what I needed it to do (be like the desktop version).
Of course I know how hard all of this must be. Having reconcile work for every bank every time will probably never happen. Internet security issues, firewalls, captchas, etc. Having a simple UI for homeowners and small business owners may not be realistic. But there really is a whole lot of room for improvement with Quicken. More money to be made!
If millions of small business owners paid Quicken $30/month (like I do with Xero) it would be huge for them. I would love to get rid of Xero and do everything in Quicken.
> I am a long time Quicken user, but because my data file contains about 7 years of data it is very large for both loading and for saving the ongoing file. It would be nice to be able to keep only the current an prior year transactions and have an archive file for the rest if needed later.
I think that the greatest strength of Quicken, if used properly, is the history, which lets you see when you bought X, did y, etc. But my 17 plus years of data is a lot to handle at times.
I know I'm not the only one....but my computer crashed, could not be repaired.
I thought...CLOUD....I CAN RETRIVE MY QUICKEN DATA THERE.....nope :-(
Crazy, been a Quicken user for YEARS AND YEARS....NEVER KNEW YOU COULD NOT RETRIVE FROM THE CLOUD....
I run a back-up to a thumb drive...every time I close Quicken now....all these years I always thought I could get it from the cloud....never had a crash before...lucky I guess.
Now, I have lost ALL My Scanned receipts !! That's the worst part...I referred back to those receipts a lot and my account loved them.....now the are gone...
I would pay for a cloud...I wish I had known !! You should call it TRANSFER … NOT A CLOUD !