Bite me, Quicken

The BBQ Pit
1

Here’s an e-mail I got today from Quicken:

Dear xxxx,

According to our records, you may be using Quicken® Basic 2004 or Quicken® Deluxe 2004. As of April 30, 2007, Online Services1 and live technical support for Quicken 2004 will no longer be available. To maintain uninterrupted service, upgrade to Quicken 2007.

Online Services are being discontinued for Quicken 2004 users.
Discontinuing online support for older versions helps us provide you with high service levels, while still delivering leading-edge financial solutions at a low cost. Discontinued services will include:

• **Downloading financial data from your bank, credit union, credit card, brokerage, 401(K), or mutual fund accounts
• Online bill pay **
• Downloading stock quotes, news headlines, and other financial information into Quicken
• Uploading portfolio information from Quicken to Quicken.com
• Access to the investing features on Quicken.com, including portfolio tracking, any watch lists you have created, One-Click Scorecard™, Stock Evaluator, and Mutual Fund Evaluator

(snip)

Maintaining uninterrupted service is easy and affordable.
To make this transition as simple as possible for you, we’re offering up to a $25 savings on the Quicken product of your choice. We’ll also provide free installation assistance, shipping, and bonus software.

• Quicken Deluxe 2007—Pay just $39.99 (after $20 discount).
Track and pay bills and plan for the future.
• Quicken Premier 2007—Pay just $54.99 (after $25 discount).
Get everything in Quicken Deluxe, plus tools to help you manage your investments.

Act today to ensure continued access to Online Services.
To avoid service interruption, upgrade and install Quicken 2007 before April 30, 2007. Upgrade online today or call 1-800-811-8766. Make sure to reference the priority code at the top of this e-mail to receive your savings.

Sincerely,

Chris Boch
Customer Care Manager

(bolding mine)

WTF? This software came pre-loaded onto my laptop that I bought just slightly over a year ago and I paid to install it after the 90 day trial was up. Now, they’re saying that I either pony up another $40 or I’ll lose my ability to download my banking information to Quicken?

Screw you, Quicken. If this is your new business practice, to disable features so that it renders older versions of your software unusable, then I’ll find another accounting program to track my accounts. You are not the only player in town.

Or better yet, I’ll just keep track of my accounts via my FREE online banking register.

Can you imagine if Microsoft could find a way to disable key features of Word or Excel on versions older than 3 years? It’s outrageous!

2

Not new at all. Intuit (makers of Quicken, Quickbooks, TurboTax, etc) has been doing this since at least 2000 when I bought my first copy of Quickbooks.

I absolutely loathe them for it as a consumer but as a business person I lust after their insanely clever money-making ideas and aspire to be more like them.

3

umm… speaking as somebody who’s still using Windows 98 at home, many features of which are no longer supported… yes, I can imagine MicroSoft doing that.

4

Hmm, what could you do with Windows 98 before that you cannot do anymore? To my knowledge, you can still surf the internet and use all the same software with all the same functionality as you had when you bought it.

Compared to the OP, who bought software that could do stuff, and is now being told that, though nothing about the software has changed, he has to upgrade or most of it will stop working.

5

Have fun dealing with the new Daylight Savings Time, Ethilrist.

I think there’s an unofficial patch somewhere.

6

Yep, I first ran into this with Quicken 2002. I still can’t believe that they wrote the code such that simply downloading data from my bank to my computer required an intermediate step from them, which they would then deliberately withhold to force me to buy a new version. It’s not like I wanted some Quicken.com service which they decided not to support. I wanted my program to import a table of data in a standard format from my bank’s website. It would be like Microsoft disabling the File/Open command in Excel two years down the road.

I rarely hold grudges against companies, but this is the exception. I’ll never buy another Intuit product as long as I live.

7

So which one do you use and do you recommend it? I’ll gleefully switch.

8

Okay, that’s fair. I’ll instead direct my consternation towards Norton, which considers my archaic version of their software not worth providing updated virus lists for any more.

9

I don’t think you’ll be kept from downloading data. Just from using their spiffy web-interconnected services to get it for you.

All my bank/credit accounts just let me download a file and let Quicken open it, when it promptly does whatever the fuck it feels like with the data contained. Most of those have options to download in Quicken 2001, 2002, etc. formats, so the old ones must still work.

My tangential rant: Fuck you, Quicken, for not fucking understanding what an account transfer is! At first I thought they were pretty cool. When I enter a transaction in acct. A marked as a transfer from acct. B, Quicken automatically makes the corresponding change in acct. B. Except that Quicken tries to auto-fill things in, and it doesn’t really consider a transfer as one transaction with two entries, it remembers a single entry. So when I download my data, and it autofills the transaction data, it may just as well decide that I made a transfer from acct. A to itself! It won’t make the appropriate “deduction” in the other register, so I get discrepancies in both accounts. Quicken pops up little reminders all the fucking time about inane shit like not explicitly saving a transaction, but it can’t arse itself to raise a little flag when you try to manufacture money by transfering from an account to itself?

10

I never really found a replacement that I liked, so I just keep track of things with a spreadsheet. Since I didn’t use Quicken for anything but tracking what we spent our money on each month, this is good enough. Better for me in a lot of ways, because I don’t get distracted by too much detail. I just sort our spending into three categories: fixed bills (rent, car payment, etc.), standard household spending (gas, groceries, casual dining out, random little purchases) and discretionary, where I lump everything from car repairs to birthday presents. The first two are pretty consistent, so I only really track the last one in detail. We try to keep it below a certain amount and send what’s left over to savings, so if we’re already getting close to our limit by the 7th, we know to tighten up for the rest of the month.

11

You’d think so, but they don’t. I had assumed the same thing and was appalled when the deadline rolled around and Quicken informed me it was unable to open the downloaded files because Intuit no longer supported them.

I’m guessing the banks still keep them around because there are other programs which can use the earlier Quicken formats (and because it doesn’t hurt them any to keep the option open).

12

Heh. Just ran into this when I tried to run TurboTax and import from QuickBooks 2004. Worked last year, but not this year. Had to upgrade to QuickBooks 2007; $158. That works out to $50 per year to use their accounting software. Just enough to make me go grrr, but not so much as to drive me to learn a new package and maybe find it less useful. They know what they are doing.

13

Quicken also only supports two tax years in any one version, so you need to upgrade every two years if you want to track taxes at all.

Personally, I don’t mind much - $30 or $40 a year to use Quicken is worth it to me. I am in the software business, so I know the issues of keeping a revenue stream going.

14

I just found out that my 2004 Saab convertible equipped with Onstar will, because Onstar is switching to digital instead of analog, that they can no longer offer Onstar service to my vehicle once 2007 ends. The good news, though, they tell me, is that the new digital service will be offered on all 2007/2008 models.

15

This is why I’m still running Quicken 99 and Quickbooks 99. (Yes, I have to reconcile the accounts manually, not online.) But it all still works fine for me, and I haven’t been paying Intuit lots of money every year.

16

Well, if all you want is a glorified check register, try poking around the Internet for a copy of Quicken 5 or the like. (We’re talking late 80s-early 90s, probably running in DOS, not even Windows 3.1.) No download capability of course. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I called Intuit’s customer service to bitch that their program and customer service has been going downhill ever since about Quicken 5. (I actually installed my parents’ old copy of Quicken 5 off 5.25" floppies the other day.)

Dad, for whatever reason, seems to buy the latest version of Quicken every year. So when he does that, I just grab the second-latest version and keep it for myself. I expect to get his old copy of Quicken 2006 in the mail any day now.

My bank doesn’t support the QIF format to begin with and Quicken can’t handle CSVs. So I manually enter all my transactions, as I have only one set of accounts–USAA–that actually downloads. Even then, Quicken manages to completely screw up the brokerage transactions on a regular basis.

17

Ha – they did!
Check out the “reduced function mode” that Vista goes into if they decide (correctly or not) that your copy is not properly registered, or if you don’t allow Vista to ‘phone home’ to Microsoft.

18

You are kidding, right? Let me guess…
You installed the program after April 15, so the trial never let you know it was out-of-date until you tried to use it this year.
How can anyone think a tax-bank program 3 years old is up-to-date. or would be up-to-date 3 years later?

That is the reason I would NEVER pay for a tax or banking program without a guarantee for a free update whenever the tax-laws/banking procedures change.

19

There sure are a lot of folks unhappy with the Q softwares. There was even a book called He’s Just Not That Intuit.

20

I only use it as a glorified check register. I download data from my bank, add manual checks that I write and pending payments so that I’m not overdrawn, and reconcile once a month. That’s it. Can’t see why they’d need to update that feature as I doubt the coding has changed appreciably in a decade.

I can go back to entering/reconciling my data manually but it was nice being able to download data automatically from my bank. The question I have to ask myself is whether that alone is worth $40 every 3 years.

I don’t mind Intuit, MS, etc. protecting themselves from pirated software. I do mind when they sell a product that has a built in obsolescense* that they didn’t make me aware of when they sold it to me.

*I may have created a new word.