Quicken 2016

[wanaberetiree]

I use Quicken for 20+ years and while see shortcomings, don't see any alternatives and anything even remotely as good (or as bad if you wish) as Quicken (Windows version, Mac is not good at all).

Tried MoneyDance and it could not even d/l investment accounts correctly into a new file !

So what do you guys suggest instead on Quicken? spreadsheet ?

 

[zinger1457]

I upgraded to Quicken 2016 Deluxe about a week ago and everything went well, haven't seen any issues yet. The interface looks very similar to the 2013 Deluxe version I upgraded from. I'm a long time Quicken user but after reading some of the negative reports posted it almost seems like I'm using a different product. It's certainly not perfect but well worth the ~$10/year cost IMO.

 

[Fean]

Quicken is horrendous, appalling, and lots of other adjectives that I'm too polite to post -- but I can't live without it. I've looked at the other alternatives but none of them currently meets my needs better than Quicken. As soon as my financial institutions all provide an approved and supported way for me to link my accounts to Personal Capital, I'm jumping ship. Until then, Quicken looks like the best out of a pile of bad options.

I started with Quicken 2010 Premier and then upgraded to 2013 and 2016 respectively. All of those versions have stability issues and the program crashes roughly 1 out of 10 times that I attempt to use it. Both the 2013 and 2016 versions intermittently and mysteriously "lose" my information for one of my banks about once per month. The 2010 and 2013 versions both had issues where duplicate transactions could appear and I needed to manually delete the duplicates. I haven't seen that yet with 2016 so I'm crossing my fingers My favorite bug in the 2013 version is that the summary totals for your accounts do not always match the totals if you go into each account and manually add up the transactions there. That drove me nuts for hours one morning. Finally I restarted Quicken and the summaries suddenly matched the expected values. Ouch. Oh, and I needed to manually rebuild Quicken 2013's database every few months because it sometimes lost the ability to update the prices for some ETFs that I own. After rebuilding the database, the ETF price updates start working.

Other than that, I love Quicken

-Fean

 

[wanaberetiree]

As soon as my financial institutions all provide an approved and supported way for me to link my accounts to Personal Capital, I'm jumping ship.

What exactly do see you will be able to achieve using Personal Capital especially compared to Quicken features?

 

[Fean]

What exactly do see you will be able to achieve using Personal Capital especially compared to Quicken features?

The problem isn't features as much as stability, reliability, and trust. I'm perfectly happy with Quicken's features, I simply have lost a lot of trust for it over the last 6 years that I've used it.

The final straw for me was when I realized that the account totals listed on Quicken's main view were not always accurate. The totals sometimes (but not always) didn't include transactions that were recently downloaded. I found that restarting Quicken was required for the totals to update even though the transaction register clearly showed the "missing" transactions before the restart. My procedure now is to manually restart Quicken every time I perform the 1-step update procedure. That's just wrong...I need to be able to trust my financial aggregator. How many people would use Excel if it randomly used the wrong formulas on some cells?

My (probably misguided) hope is that Personal Capital is a reliable equivalent to Quicken. I haven't heard of any horror stories about Personal Capital and every review I've seen of it is pretty glowing. As a bonus, Personal Capital is free.

 

[wanaberetiree]

My (probably misguided) hope is that Personal Capital is a reliable equivalent to Quicken. I haven't heard of any horror stories about Personal Capital and every review I've seen of it is pretty glowing. As a bonus, Personal Capital is free.

I understand with the "Quicken sucks" part and it's cool

I am not sure then Quicken can be compared with Personal Capital, like apples and oranges. And trying understand what you know and I am missing?

 

[Fean]

I understand with the "Quicken sucks" part and it's cool

I am not sure then Quicken can be compared with Personal Capital, like apples and oranges. And trying understand what you know and I am missing?

All I want is a utility that aggregates all of my financial info into one place and lets me generate reports covering aspects of that data. Quicken has a great feature set and I'd be happy to stick with them if they were reliable and if Intuit weren't trying to stop Quicken development and sell Quicken to another company.

I've looked at several competitors to Quicken and the one whose grass looks greenest to me is Personal Capital. It lets you aggregate all of your data and analyze it. The extra bells and whistles Personal Capital has (woohoo an Apple watch app!) aren't particularly interesting to me The thing that differentiates Personal Capital from other Quicken competitors to me is that it has a much brighter roadmap and future in my opinion. It has tons of funding ($100M at last count) and a good business model ($1.8B in assets under management) and I think it will still be around in 10 years. I can't say the same thing about other apps like iBank or Moneydance although I hope that they also do well and create a competitive environment.

 

[bUU]

Without a desktop application that I can utilize disconnected from the Internet, it's a non-starter for me. If I wanted everything online, I'd use Mint.com.

 

[tulak]

I've been using Moneydance for three years with no issues. I switched from Quicken and prior to that, MS Money. All of these programs have their own flow, but once you get the hang of it, it works fine. And the few bugs that I did have were fixed pretty quickly. I'd never get that level of support from Intuit (or MS).

I'm glad to be rid of Intuit for tracking my personal finances. They still have me hooked for taxes, but in that case their product is better. Not so much for Quicken (IMO).

 

[Rusty]

Been a Quicken user since the 1990's. Upgraded every 3 to 5 years. Never had any problem with importing past data into the latest version.

I rely upon it to track my finances and to keep an eye on where all the dollars go.

Downloaded Quicken 2016 Deluxe from Amazon a few days ago for $32. Since I'll use that version for several years, ten bucks or less a year is a bargain.

 

[grasshopper]

60 days of Quicken 2016 Deluxe, no problems that I didn't create. I stayed away from Q2015.

 

[HadEnuff]

I started another thread specific to using Quicken on a Mac. I'm not getting much feedback.

Those of you who are happy with Q16, any of you using it on a Mac?

 

[neihn]

I started another thread specific to using Quicken on a Mac. I'm not getting much feedback.

Those of you who are happy with Q16, any of you using it on a Mac?

I am using Q16 in a Windows 7 VM on my Mac. You can download a free Oracle Virtual Box for Mac and use it to create your Windows VM.