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I think I'm done with Quicken

Help.Me.Help.You

It's been 30+ years. I have nearly every cent that I (and my wife) ever earned and spent tracked in this software. All our investments, our home, and so on. I really want to keep this data set intact. I really want to make use of the tools.

But the performance of the interface is just ridiculously slow and frustrating, and the team is not investing in better performance. Maybe they can't, maybe they won't, maybe it's hard, maybe it's not. Who knows. The point is…they are not making the performance any better.

The data and tools sound great in theory, and in the past they actually were great in practice, but I cannot spend hours and hours troubleshooting issues, testing so called "fixes", and waiting 5-10 seconds every time I push "enter" on the keyboard. I can no longer tolerate typing a category into the category field and then actually stopping and waiting for the letters to appear in the data field, then push enter and wait again for the register to jump around visually and eventually settle down before i can do anything else.

This is miserable.

What is keeping us here? Why are we paying for this?

I really don't want to leave. I can't take my history with me to a new app, but at least I can get a full picture of current state without having to kill time trying to get that last 30 (small) transactions entered into a database. Kills me to think that the reason I'm thinking of leaving is the slow speed of…data entry. I just don't mean typing. I also mean downloading. It often takes several seconds of…waiting…to get each individual transaction into the system.

Why can't this be fixed? How many customers have they lost b/c of this? I feel like a chump paying for this. Am I subsidizing Simplifi? To what end? Simplifi is competing in a very crowded, competitive, well-funded space. Simplifi won't "win". Quicken already won, but the team is letting it fall apart—either b/c of different priorities, or because it's "too hard".

Too many hours of my life spent dealing with this.

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Comments

RalphC

I'm not experiencing any of those issues. With the difficulty you're having, I would start to suspect Quicken installation, Windows OS integrity, and/or your workflow.

Rocket J Squirrel

I'm not experiencing any of those issues either. I'm running QWin on a couple of pretty old PCs you'd think would be slow, and they're not.

I suspect you'll want to inspect your PC, @Help.Me.Help.You . In addition to @RalphC's suggestions, try tools like Task Manager to see who's hogging the CPU and the run queue. You might find some applications getting in QWin's way. Anti-virus programs are known for that, for example.

I can appreciate the frustrations. And I will echo the prior comments that I have not experienced any issues for a few years now and the program performs stellar and works solid for me. Sad to see longtime users leave and I hope you find a way to resolve it.

Two additional suggestions: Based on years of user feedback on this community, I would advice against using the Sync function (Mobile & Web) and keep it turned off at all times; and maybe start fresh with a test file and see how that works.

gtgerbo

I'm not experiencing any of those issues either. At least not as of today.

I think connection issues will always be there. One day they work smooth as silk, the next day you can't get them to work. Should they all be pinned on Quicken's nose? I don't think so. I think a lot of those connection issues are caused by system changes at the financial institution and not by Quicken.

You think that if you jump to Simplifi you won't see connection issues? Think again.

I addition to all the things mentioned in previous posts I wonder about the size of your Quicken data (i.e., *.QDF). There was a time when my data file was approaching 1GB. I had years of data in it. I was attaching receipts (PDF files) to a lot of routine transactions. It was crazy nuts. The system was slooooooow. So, I started a new data file. I stopped attaching files to transactions. It helped speed things up.

Boatnmaniac

When I've had slow Quicken performance I found out that there were many applications that were set to launch and run in the background upon Windows Startup. Most of those did not need to be running at Startup so I changed the settings so they no longer launch during Startup. That made some improvement in Quicken's speed performance.

But what I found to be most helpful was to change my anti-malware settings so that the app does not always run in the background. That is generally overkill because there are other settings in that app to scan files when they are opened and closed, to scan files when they are downloaded, to scan apps when they are launched and to scan websites that are not recognized as being safe to make sure they are safe, none of which consumes much in the way of computer resources. Making this change made the biggest difference in my computer's and Quicken's performance for me.

I also make sure to have the anti-malware software installed on and run from my local drive. I used to use an online anti-malware service and found that it slowed down my computer rather significantly so I killed that one and installed McAfee.

Another thing that I found helpful: Do not run VPN unless it is really needed. If you are using your local private wi-fi or ethernet then you really don't need VPN in most cases. And if you do need VPN make sure you are connecting it to a domestic VPN server that is performing well. I was surprised to find out that not all VPN servers will perform equally well.

Additionally, make sure your data file is being run from your local drive and not from a cloud storage system or linked with a cloud storage system. The default location for Quicken's data file is C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Quicken. If your data file's location URL includes "OneDrive" in it (or some other cloud storage service) then you really should move it to the default URL. (It is OK to save backup files to a cloud storage site but the live data file should not be run from there as it can cause Quicken performance issues and can cause damage (perhaps not reparable) to the data in the file.

Finally, every once in a while I clear system cache and delete all cookies and temporary files as they can cause drag on CPU and RAM.

Hopefully one or more of these things will help to improve Quicken performance for you.

Help.Me.Help.You

Thank you. This is encouraging. I'll continue to try to figure this out (at least for a while). Community is full of so many people highlighting problems. Seems there must be a way to make this work.

Using Win11 64bit on Parallels 19 VM on a 2019 Macbook Pro 2019 (Sequoia).
Dedicated 4 of 8 cores and 8 of 16gb RAM to the VM (should be plenty).
BitDefender (supposedly more efficent, less of a hog than Defencer/Win Security).

30 years of quicken makes for a large file: 246GB. Stored on C: drive.
Yes, that's big. I like to keep the full history. I may see if some old accounts are still active, in case they are a drag (but I think I've already addressed this).

I've repaired the file, tried 2-line registers and 1-line registers, put it on C: (not OneDrive) and so on. Tried lots of tricks.

Maybe I'll try Quicken Support again. Has been a while since I did that.

gtgerbo

246GB! Wow!

A note on Antivirus/malware since @Boatnmaniac brought it up. That has been the biggest culprit of Windows slowness in general (not Quicken specific). The research I did indicated a divided group between using the built-in Windows Security vs adding a third party. A few years ago I decided on Windows security only, and on top of that I secured my router (using the recommendation of ShieldsUP). That has worked very well for me.

However, I don't believe that approach made a noticeable difference with Quicken (because Quicken was a non-issue for me), but it made a huge difference in Windows performance in general.

I cannot comment on Mac and Parallels.

Jim_Harman

30 years of quicken makes for a large file: 246GB. Stored on C: drive.

That's 246 MB, right?

I can't imagine a Quicken file being 246GB unless you have many thousands of attachments, or huge attachments. I have 25 years of data and my file is about 212 MB.

Roger Kint

The only way I can see a 246GB data file is either a lot of attachments, or file corruption.

I too run Quicken on a Windows VM with about 20 years of data. Files size is ~110MB. Opening the file is slower than I'd like but I can't imagine what it would be like working with a file over 2000 times larger. Likely I would come to the same conclusion and find the software unusable.

If you are using attachments, you might experiment on a duplicate file by removing them (this seems like a painful, manual process), validating the file, and see if the software becomes "usable" again.

Help.Me.Help.You

typo. GB clearly wrong. Sorry! This was all a bit of a rant. :)

Help.Me.Help.You

GB a typo. This was a bit of a rant. Sorry!

Help.Me.Help.You

GB a typo. Clearly wrong thanks

bsantelli

I've been using quicken since the DOS days. I've had similar issues to yours. I do a archive of older transactions, about every 5 years so that I'm only keeping 5 years of data. That helps some but my categories were still very slow. Until a few months ago I stumbled across a function that you can delete unused categories. I didn't think I had that many unused categories but apparently I did. After running that, and I'm sorry I forget exactly where it is in quicken, my category lookup now is lickety split.

jacobs

Since you're already using a Mac, when's the last time you considered using the native Quicken Mac program? It doesn't have all the features that Quicken Windows does, but it will handle your 30+ years of transactions now and into the future. The database is fast, and more importantly, rock-solid reliable. So before walking away from Quicken entirely, why not switch to the capable Mac sibling?

dblski

I was using a similar configuration with parallels on my iMac 2020 with Windows 10 and the latest Parallels update. There were days when it worked fine and then towards the last few months it seemed to drag on and have similar issues like you have described. I had 2 files, one for my wife’s accounts and one for mine. Data as far back as 2000. So this was starting to aggravate me as well. I was going to start all over but I decided to try the Mac version and export/import both Windows quicken files into a single Mac file.

I was actually shocked at how “clean” this export and imports worked for me. All my investment accounts and transactions all seemed to come into the Mac version just fine. Yes, there was some cleanup but it truly was minimal.

I did this about 2 months ago and was going to run the windows version and Mac versions in parallels until I got comfortable. Figured I would do it this entire year.

But now my parallels license is coming due and the end of May and this Mac side has been running so smoothly and fast compared to the Windows/Parallels side that this past week I have decided to not renew my parallels license (only thing I had it for was quicken) and stopped updating the windows quicken files.

This may not be an option for you but I certainly am feeling your pain and slowness that I was seeing on the windows side under parallels. I was figuring it was just a CPU/processor issue under parallels on the iMac since my iMac is over 6 years old.

There are some differences being no savings goal accounts but I am working around that. Other than that I am loving the Mac side of quicken so far.

mshiggins

Sounds like you used the Memorized Payee preference that enables automatic clean up of older Memorized Payees. A large number of Memorized Payees is one contributor to slowness with transaction entry and editing in banking registers.

bsantelli

ahh, yes you are right, it was payees that I did automatically., not categories. for unused categories, I did that manually.

jtashiro

Have similar use case, Quicken on Win 11, running in Parallels on Mac Studio. My transaction data back to 1988. Quicken data file is 240 MB on disk. One Step Update takes nearly 30 minutes to complete. This is recent phenomenon and is very painful. I'm on the subscription plan and install all updates that Quicken team release, so this change happened recently. Quicken for Mac is missing too many features for my taste and would prefer to keep Windows version. Unfortunately, there isn't a strong competitor to Quicken.