So, in accordance with the “sunset” provisions of the end user license agreement, Quicken will no longer be offering on-line services to users of that ever-so-ancient product known as Quicken 2002. (Which was purchased in 2003, and so is less than 2 years old). So, if you want to continue to use Quicken for on-line bill pay, or even to connect to your bank to download your current transactions and balance, you need to upgrade to Quicken 2005.
Maybe I was being naive, but when I paid $40-50 for Q2002, I expected it to be usable for more than 2 years.
Yep, we got the same letter - only 6 months after they set us up with on-line payments. You think they mentioned that they were going to pull support? It turned out to be the best thing to happen to us in a long time. It motivated us to get off our butts and investigate our options. We have found several integrated, wed based applications that are:
A) more powerful
B) more flexible
C) less hardware intensive (we can get rid of a couple of servers)
D) less expensive
Sometimes it takes a push to overcome the inertia of “what we have is fine”. Go forth, shelbo, and look around. There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t include Quicken. As for me, I’m glad they inticed us to find it.
I am still using Quicken 2000 (Which they just stopped supporting in May 2004) and you can still download files containing your transactions. You just have to save them to your system and import them instead of them getting directly fed into your information. Since that is what I did with most of my accounts anyway, it is no hardship for me.
I got pissed off at Intuit a couple years ago, when I discovered that Turbo Tax only supports the most current version of Quicken, plus one or two prior. So, if you want the easy integration to Quicken that Turbo Tax promises, you have to upgrade Quicken. They’re really pushing that every-two-year upgrade cycle.
So I upgraded. I’ve been a good little frequent-upgrader ever since. Now I’m pissed because the current version of Quicken (2005?) does not support the Quicken Interface Format (.QIF) they *they * devised, and which many banks and investment houses support from their websites. So now I don’t have the option to save to the desktop and import. If my institution doesn’t offer direct integration, I’m back to hand-entering transactions.
Ah, a topic near and dear to my heart (which is as sad a commentary on my life as I’ve heard this year, actually)…
I got tired of getting jacked over by Quicken after two forced upgrades in 4 years and then finding out I was basically going to have to go to a pay-by-month service to have any assurance of useability in the future. Meantime, the product is getting more and more bloated with unnecessary and machine-intensive features, the data files are ginormous, and I once had to pay US$15 for the priviledge of talking to an Inituit employee on the phone to fix a software-caused database corruption. (AND! It took me 15 minutes on their website to find the phone number to call.)
Now I use Acemoney. I paid US$10 for a lifetime license. It’s not too heavy on the graphical bells and whistles, and can’t autolink to a stock price database, but it does all the account management, budgeting, and reconciliation stuff I need, simply and easily, and the data files are small enough that 3 years worth of data can be backed up to floppy with room to spare.
<i><b>I cannot recommend this product enough for the home user.</i></b>
There are one or two open license alternatives (Gnucash, for e.g.) but they may require Linux or Linux emulation. I never dug into it in much detail after I found this other software.
I just downloaded a QIF file, and imported it using Quicken 2005. They do say that this is the last version that will support QIF importing, because they are switching to the industry standard, OFX, which has been in use since 1997. And which the accounts I looked at all had available for using with Quicken. Really sucks how they are going to an open standard used throughtout the financial industry for transaction transfers. :dubious:
If you download the version for earlier than 2004, it is still the QIF format. The newer formats are the OFX. I just upgraded to 2005 from 2000 a couple of weeks ago, and the QIF stuff still worked in that version.
I would guess that whether or not a particular place offers the old version will be up to the financial institute. And I wouldn’t bet on the 2006 version supporting importing the old version at all.