About a year ago, I was looking into software tools to better manage my personal finance. I decided to go with the desktop version of Quicken because the only alternatives (Mint, Quicken, etc.) made me too nervous. However, the desktop version of quicken allows one to enter their account information to automatically download transactions.
I have been manually entering transactions for a year because I think that the fewer places that store my account info, the better. As you can imagine, though, this manual entering is getting pretty old.
If I enter account info into the desktop version of Quicken, does it store my info in the “cloud” somewhere, or is it stored locally on my computer?
I wouldn’t hesitate to enter at least the account numbers. Then you can optionally set up the passwords which are stored encrypted in a local password vault. Those are only needed if you have the Quicken-driven download (Quicken Direct Connect I think it’s called).
The only weird thing I noticed was at one point my credit union seemed to be working with Direct Connect, so I set everything up - and once a day, I got an email from the credit union saying I’d logged in.
As these were always times when I knew I had NOT logged in, and the credit union verified that they were from a Quicken-owned IP address, clearly Quicken saved that password somewhere - whether it was in the cloud, or maybe my computer was auto-connecting somehow (I had probably left it booted up during the day), I don’t know. That’s the main reason I don’t pooh-pooh the thought that they store the info in the cloud.
I don’t stress about it too much. I do monitor our accounts pretty carefully and have never noticed anything amiss. But I did change our credit union passwords and disable that feature for those accounts (it never worked well anyway). I left it active for the main credit card account which sees a lot of usage, and that saves me a lot of downloading angst.