quicken question

[wabmester]

I gave up on Quicken years ago since it seemed to require so many work-arounds that I decided it was simpler to maintain my own spreadsheet.

I recently decided to see if it had improved over the years, so I bought the 2007 version.

Ugh. It's all coming back to me now. Weird data drops when downloading and no transparency or diagnostics.

Anyway, has anybody had any luck downloading *anything* from PenFed or TD Ameritrade using the latest Quicken?

And luck downloading from Vanguard when you have multiple accounts? (For example, it's downloading my individual data, but not the joint account data.)

 

[justin]

I gave up on Quicken years ago since it seemed to require so many work-arounds that I decided it was simpler to maintain my own spreadsheet.

I tried quicken and money and came to the same conclusion as you - the extra time spent figuring out workarounds and doing manual entry/correction/review far exceeded the time it takes me to do recordkeeping with spreadsheets and online tools.

 

[cube_rat]

ditto, ditto, ditto on Quicken (slog-ken). I've had to do too many "reclassifications" of items from categories the software assumes I want posted. Yeah, I don't keep on top of stuff, which makes the "reclassifications" even more burdensome. Oh and I still never figured out how to make my 401K appear on my balance sheet.

 

[Peaceful_Warrior]

Another ditto here. I picked up Quicken 2006 earlier this year and found that the reclassification and workarounds just made it too much time investment than it was worth.

Now I'm back to budgeting on a spreadsheet, and though it's not exactly as accurate (because I classify loosely under some categories like "misc"), it takes me a lot less time to maintain and is a lot less of a headache.

ditto, ditto, ditto on Quicken (slog-ken). I've had to do too many "reclassifications" of items from categories the software assumes I want posted. Yeah, I don't keep on top of stuff, which makes the "reclassifications" even more burdensome. Oh and I still never figured out how to make my 401K appear on my balance sheet.

 

[magellan_nh]

Hmmm, it's odd for me to be defending Quicken because I'm using the 2002 version and have tried and returned most of the newer versions after finding them less capable and less robust than the 2002 version.

Anyhow, as far as downloading investment transactions, I'm with the other posters, especially with Vanguard. I do investment stuff manually (except for quotes) and it comes out just the way I want it.

As for credit card and bank transactions, I do use the automatic download and I find it works quite well. The first time a new payee is encountered, you need to assign a category, but after that it remembers your assignment. After a couple of months, nearly everything gets assigned correctly by default.

As I said in another recent post, I can't imagine managing my finances without Quicken. With it, I can easily track investments, income, and spending and make sure my retirement plan is on track. It has its warts, but it does some things really well.

Jim

 

[LOL!]

My workaround with MSMoney and Quicken is really quite simple: Never enter any transactions. I have an awesome return on investment as well. I really love these programs!

 

[Linney]

I only use Quicken for expense tracking and it does a great job for that task. I have stuck with the 2001 version since I heard so many bad comments about the later versions. (And Cut-Throat, if you are reading this, the memorized transaction feature is working great -- thanks for the tip!!)

Like others here, I use Excel and not Quicken for my investment tracking . . .

 

[Brat]

I bought Q 2006 last year thinking that they had fixed the network printer problem. Today I tried to print to the HP and the program quit... Arahh. This has been an issue for years. There is NO reason for me to buy the upgrade, IMHO.

So, is MSMoney any better?

 

[DRiP Guy]

I have the 2007 Premiere, and it didn't get any better than prior versions, IMHO.

It is brain dead, it is opaque, but dang it, I feel that it is better for me to use than not, because it does do a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

That said, it's inflexibility is positively maddening! Even just tiny things, forget about functional boneheaded moves.

Like graph color: You can of course get auto-generated pie charts for asset allocation, return, etc. But am I able to go in and change colors so that there is some consistency? NO. So the graph leads you to look into the textual information anyway to decipher what you are looking at, and if you add one new item, with 0.3% value of total portfolio, the color scheme can auto-alter everything, so what you were used to seeing, perhaps yellow = midcap, blue = intern'l, etc, will just be altered.

"One step update"? Ha. I haven't counted them all, but there are at least five steps (select function, enter PW, hit continue, confirm choice, when data arrives tell it 'yes' to accept and close window, then go to individual accounts that are now flagged with new data, and tell them 'okay' one by one.) I'm not saying all those extra steps are horrible, I am just saying that calling that process "one step" is a bit disconnected from reality.

This S/W basically has the old-school proprietary (read "Microsoft") style thinking all over it -- the customer is seen as an annoyance, my beautiful code is what is important, so if they want something that is a bit difficult for me to do, forget them!

Also, crappy S/W means they will be likely to buy an upgrade; if we made it really work well, we would not be able to sell it again, and again, and again!

C'mon Open Source geniuses - make an Open Source financial package with good support, and I bet people will beat a path to your door to purchase it. Unfortunately, the Evil One in Redmond and his ilk at Intuit seems to be in cahoots with the financial industry, i.e. the old Quicken proprietary format was dropped from both Quicken and the banks at same time -- mandatory upgrade needed...

 

[DRiP Guy]

Whoops - dupe.

Man, I am not starting off the New Year on a very good footing...

 

[SaveSome]

It looks like I'm one of the few that really love Quicken and have used it for probably 7 years or so (currently using 2007 Premier). I certainly have some quibbles with the program, but I think it's great. We don't have any trouble downloading Vanguard transactions where DW and I hold both joint and retirement accounts.

 

[hogwild]

Count me as another one that likes Quicken and I use it religiously and have since 1993. I have input every transaction since '93. Even cash transactions. My main data file (QDF) is 20 megs. When I started using Quicken I could back it up to a single 3.5 inch floppy. I consider the data it contains as so valuable, I back it up on a parallel hard drive, also on a different PC, and a third backup on a "thumb" drive.

One of the biggest benefits, which rarely gets mentioned, is you can go back and see how much you paid for something years ago, go back and see the last time you renewed your Money mag subscription, go back and see when you bought that DVD player to see how much warranty time you have left. When was the last time you changed your oil? "Honey, when was the last time I had my hair done?"

These are examples of the way I get tremendous utilization from the program.

Sure, it has some shortcomings, but it sure beats the alternative. I think it is like most things, you get out of it what you put into it.

I upgrade every other year. This happened to be the upgrade year, so I'm on 2007 Premier.

 

[Cut-Throat]

I gave up on Quicken years ago since it seemed to require so many work-arounds that I decided it was simpler to maintain my own spreadsheet.

I recently decided to see if it had improved over the years, so I bought the 2007 version.

Ugh. It's all coming back to me now. Weird data drops when downloading and no transparency or diagnostics.

Anyway, has anybody had any luck downloading *anything* from PenFed or TD Ameritrade using the latest Quicken?

And luck downloading from Vanguard when you have multiple accounts? (For example, it's downloading my individual data, but not the joint account data.)

I use Quicken Successfully, but you have to do things 'their' way to get it to work right. I was also having trouble downloading transactions from Vanguard using Multiple accounts. The key for me was to delete the account and when re-creating the account let Quicken set it up automatically from Vanguard. Then all the transactions were successfully download.

I first had the accounts manually set up myself and downloading would just not work at all. !

 

[JustCurious]

C'mon Open Source geniuses - make an Open Source financial package with good support, and I bet people will beat a path to your door to purchase it.

Such a product already exists....it's called Excel. (I know it's not open source, but you can customize any spreadsheet to your heart's content).

 

[DRiP Guy]

Such a product already exists....it's called Excel. (I know it's not open source, but you can customize any spreadsheet to your heart's content).

Well, I would like to have the capability to write an Excel app that does everything that Quicken does (but better), from importing from banks directly, to downloading alerts and news, etc, and presenting it in a consistent way, allowing tax and retirement modeling, but I am not sure I could ever be that good.

 

[rs0460a]

I was also having trouble downloading transactions from Vanguard using Multiple accounts.

Have multiple accounts for both Fidelity & Vanguard - no problem with the download. Also, use the "vault" feature to store my multiple passwords (a question on input, from another comment).

Works fine for me, as a long-term user.

- Ron

 

[magellan_nh]

Have multiple accounts for both Fidelity & Vanguard - no problem with the download.

Works fine for me, as a long-term user.

As Cut-Throat indicated, you can make it work as long as you do things their way. For relatively new users, I suspect it's not a problem at all.

My challenge is that I've been using Quicken and Vanguard since around 1991 and I have a lot of transactions and a lot of data. When I first set things up I put each mutual fund in its own account as they recommended (this was before online downloads). i think it would be a lot of work to reorganize the accounts and reenter all the transactions, such that I could keep all the tax-lot information intact.

Jim

 

[2B]

I've been using Quicken successfully since the early 90's to track expenses, pay bills and maintain investment records.

I can't imagine doing it any other way. I only update my version when I'm told they won't support online access with my version any longer -- about every 3 or 4 years. I don't have any serious problems although major events will force me into the Help menu.

 

[wabmester]

Have multiple accounts for both Fidelity & Vanguard - no problem with the download.

I wrestled with Quicken a bit more. It turns out they have a limit of 6 accounts that can be downloaded per institution (at least with Vanguard). But if you simply (?) iterate again through the add-account process, it'll pick up the accounts it missed on the first round.

So, I've got it mostly working with Vanguard (but I'm still getting an OL-301 after updates, which seems to mean "something bad happened.")

And during the update process, Quicken threw up one of those "Unexpected Error" dialog boxes that indicate a CPU-level exception occurred. Ugh. There has to be a better way.

 

[kcowan]

If you want to play with Excel, here is a great selection of spreadsheets.

The latest one that I am using is this download that will download anything that Yahoo quotes. He also supplies templates for downloading from other sites such as Morningstar.