Quicken 2015

[Brierfield]

Still using the 2007 version of Quicken here. Use it only to track expenses; don't do any downloads of bank or investment info. (Use free Morningstar Portfolio Manager to track investments) Only time I updated was when I got a new computer that wasn't compatible with the older version I had. Don't expect to update until I purchase a new computer and possibly run into incompatibility issues again. Very happy with 2007 version for our present needs.

[nuisance]

Sorry to hijack the thread, but...
I bought Quicken recently, and was severely disappointed. The UI was beyond atrocious (opening up windows that were not resizable and too small to fit the numbers displayed), and there isn't even a real estate investment category.
What I'd like is something that I can use to track my investments across various accounts, and tell me what my overall AA is. Ideally it could tell me what I need to do to rebalance. It would be even better if I can say that x% of my portfolio is reserved for a house, y% for charity, z% for retirement, and so on. Then as I pull money out I'd tell it what the money was used for.
Does moneydance do anything like that? Is there anything else that does? I downloaded a trial version of investment account manager, and it didn't really do this, and the UI was pretty terrible also.
It's starting to look like cooking up my own solution is the way to go, but I'd rather just use something that works.

[tulak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cut-Throat I have written software for a living and the reason that software 'expires' is because the interfaces to other companies (Banks) software has changes, so to keep it operational, you would have to maintain multiple versions which cost

This can happen, but as far as I can tell it's not the case for financial software. The reason Intuit expires Quicken is because they want to maintain a revenue stream.

[pb4uski]

While I could use Quicken for more than 3 years and forgo automatic transaction downloads et al, to me the convenience of automatic downloads is well worth the minor cost of the software. Plus I get an updated tax planner and whatever other improvements are built into the new version. So I update every three years or so.

[M Paquette]

The data moved from banks to financial software is in OFX format. OFX, or Open Financial Exchange, is an industry standard.

The small subset of OFX needed to download transaction data from a bank to a consumer financial program has not changed over the years. OFX is a schema based extensible markup language, very easy to parse, and easy to ignore unrecognized extensions while handling ones an application needs.

Programs which are not Quicken seem to handle OFX downloads for many years. Where things get sketchy is in bill payment and bill presentment. There was supposed to be a certification process to validate the implementation of OFX servers, but this never happened. It might have something to do with the expectation that all OFX clients would be Quicken or MS Money...

[RonBoyd]

Dilbert - 04 Nov 2014.JPG