Pending Price Increases

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.