Friday, January 21, 2005

How did Quicken become a joke?

Quicken.com

In the late 80s Quicken was one of my favorite applications. It was a fast, reliable, DOS application that kept my checkbooks balanced. One a month a diskette arrived in the mail containing my credit card transactions. It was always complete and my accounts balanced. Every so often it corrupted all my data, but heck -- that's what backups are for. (I knew 3-4 different ways to rebuild Quicken's famously unstable database.

15 years or so later Quicken is a joke. I download my statements and the reconcile function is off by $1000 or so. Same thing happens every so often with the "fully integrated" Quicken credit card. I used to track down those things, but it was an enormous pain and the bank was always right. Intuit/Quicken extort money from banks to use their proprietary transfer format (Quicken no longer supports the old "open" xml format they once championed) and few want to bother with tight integration.

Last year I gave up. I use Quicken to download transactions (it mostly gets them straight) and otherwise I'm back to spreadsheets. I assume the banks get the checking accounts more or less right.

It's a sad tale ...

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