I am a Quicken user no longer.
Last night, after trying for the umpteenth time to get Quicken to stop sucking so much, I gave up. I’m not going to use it anymore. After hundreds of years on paper and dozens in software, Intuit still has not mastered multiple-entry bookkeeping. I enter a few transactions by hand, but the vast majority of my financial actions are via credit or debit card, which transactions I download on an approximately monthly schedule from my various banks. This is far too much for Quicken to handle, and it’s a constant struggle to get even the simplest of accounts to balance correctly due to a failure to properly synchronize actions across multiple accounts.
[ul][li]It “remembers” the category that common transactions belong in. Except that transfers (which includes checks) from one account to another have the account name as the category. So, if you enter a transfer from A to B in account A one time and then the next time in account B, it “remembers” that it was a “transfer to account B” transaction, causing A to lose no money and B to miraculously gain money by transferring to itself! Brilliant! (I suspect that Enron based its accounting on Quicken)[/li][li]It goes without saying that the above occurs when it downloads information from bank/credit card accounts. So in order to have even a remote chance of keeping things synchronized, I have to remember the order of the accounts that I download my transactions in.[/li][li]It can’t manage to synchronize checks that aren’t deposited the day that I write them! Seriously, it’ll actually warn me about the automatic download entering a check with a “duplicate number” five days after the date I wrote it, when it has the same amount. That is, of course, if it hasn’t decided that this particular check isn’t really a transaction from the checking account to itself.[/ul] So I’m looking for something new.[/li]
It doesn’t need much. Just the ability to handle a dozen or two accounts (credit, checking, savings, investment), a dozen or two categories, download from my banks (which probably means that it supports some kind of csv file or imports the quicken standard) and not do stupid things like Quicken does. Free would be great, but I’m willing to pay up to $50-60 or so if the program verifiably fails to suck.
I’m willing to accept that it may be that downloading transactions just never works well. But I don’t want to accept that.