I'm done with Quicken! - What else?

[IMATERP]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 Heck, I just use the back of an old envelope. I don't write enough checks to bother with the check register. On the back of an envelope, I have a round # current balance, add in the routine monthly, automated deposit from my brokerage account, subtract mortgage and HI payments. When Credit Cards are settled, I enter those amounts, plus any actual checks of significant amount (rare), or other transfers. A few entries every month is all I need to know I've got sufficient balance in the checking account. Not even worth a spreadsheet. -ERD50

What is a check?

Haven't seen one in years...

[Scrapr]

IIRC Quicken was spun off (sold) by Intuit. So the new owners need to bump revenue to pay for the purchase. Which is why the subscription model.

Intuit is moving the Quickbooks to a subscription model too (my suspicion). Lots of folks having trouble on the newest QB release. Auto upgrade to password protection and such. Which is going to suck since our business has used QB for over 25 years

[KM]

I'd love to get off Quicken - but it seems all the other products require your financial institutions to support Direct Connect or you have to do the downloads yourself. Most of my credit cards and banks don't. With Quicken, they all get downloaded via Express Web Connect. Not sure I want to go back to having to import all the transactions myself.

Anyone else running into this issue? If so - what did you do? Stick with Quicken? Do the downloads yourself? Something else?

[JustCurious]

Quote:

Originally Posted by W2R Personally I much prefer being able to do what I want to do, in the way I want to do it, and if you are like that then you might love a spreadsheet approach.

+1

I use Google Sheets.

[Jerry1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zinger1457 What version of Quicken or features are you using that requires it to be connected to the Internet to work? My experience is that once it's installed and registered I can use Quicken (make manual entries, etc.) without an Internet connection.

2016 R 12

I forget what it was doing and how I worked around it, but when I first installed it, I couldn't access my file unless I logged into Quicken. Now it works like I want and you are correct that I can work with it without a connection (tested it with internet unplugged). It may have been as simple as an original (default) setting, but at the time it was very frustrating.

Now I'm in leave it alone mode and I will not upgrade again.

[Katsmeow]

Quote:

Originally Posted by KM I'd love to get off Quicken - but it seems all the other products require your financial institutions to support Direct Connect or you have to do the downloads yourself. Most of my credit cards and banks don't. With Quicken, they all get downloaded via Express Web Connect. Not sure I want to go back to having to import all the transactions myself. Anyone else running into this issue? If so - what did you do? Stick with Quicken? Do the downloads yourself? Something else?

I use YNAB. I know you can do a direct download where you don't have to do it yourself. But, I don't know the ins and outs because I do it myself. This is painless mostly because the vast majority of our spending is on American Express. For everywhere else, I just enter the transactions as I spend the money. I then go online and just check. So, I will go to my bank and see if what I have entered agrees with what the bank has. If it doesn't then I add in what the bank has that I don't have (if it is correct, of course).

This takes next to no time because I don't have a lot of bank transactions. If I did have a lot I could just click to download.

With Amex I click to download myself. I just drag the downloaded file to YNAB and it is imported. I just prefer to do it this way to keep control of downloads with me. Again, none of this takes much time at all.

[Montecfo]

I did try Ace Money a few years ago. It seemed to have trouble with getting all the old Quicken transactions imported, particularly transfers were double counted. Seemed it would take a lot of accounting to clean it up. Not something I wanted to do though I am.an accountant.

It was a bit clunky but not as ambitious as Quicken. Ultimately I went back to Quicken. I do not like it, but I have 24 years of data there. I do not use it to track investments. Just expenses.

I have a lot of credit card activity so I need to be able to download. Otherwise I would stop updating quicken and go rural.

Back in the day, I used Moneycoints from Parsons Technology. That was good simple clear and I think MSMoney bought it and killed it.

[audreyh1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by KM I'd love to get off Quicken - but it seems all the other products require your financial institutions to support Direct Connect or you have to do the downloads yourself. Most of my credit cards and banks don't. With Quicken, they all get downloaded via Express Web Connect. Not sure I want to go back to having to import all the transactions myself. Anyone else running into this issue? If so - what did you do? Stick with Quicken? Do the downloads yourself? Something else?

I prefer to import and do most transactions that way. The reason- I don't like entering my password via Quicken.

Holdouts - American Express and Fidelity. I really wish Fidelity would support something other than direct connect.

[conversationalphrase]

My Quicken (2015) magically decided to start working again!?!? Based on the suggestions I have now tried Countabout and MoneyDance. Both programs, after connecting to my bank and loading Quicken backups had much different and wrong current balances. The errors were several 1k$ in both so I thought it'd be obvious, nevertheless I searched both looking for error sources but couldn't find it.

I guess I'll continue slogging along with Quicken. At least until it breaks again!

[bobandsherry]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rustic23 I found this link when working with a friend. It has 11 programs mentioned other than Quicken. Good-Bye, Microsoft Money! 12 Powerful Personal Finance Programs

And article concludes "For myself, I’ll continue to use the desktop version of Quicken on my Mac for my personal finance software. It’s not perfect, but I know its quirks."

[bobandsherry]

As many have pointed out, it's not just functionality but also ability to import years worth of data. I've not found any alternative that does a good job of importing data.

[braumeister]

It seems to me that a big reason many stick with Quicken is because they tried another and had a less than perfect experience importing all their old data so they gave up.

AFAIK there is no such thing as a perfect import, because there is no such thing as a combination of a perfect Quicken export and another program having the exact same assumptions in every instance.

When I switched to Moneydance a number of years ago I just resigned myself to spending several hours on cleanup tasks and also starting some accounts over from scratch. Meanwhile I exported everything I could from Quicken into spreadsheets and stuck them in an "old records" folder.

Eventually I realized that 98% of the time I have been just fine with my "from scratch" accounts in Moneydance, and the other 2% of the time when I need to look something up from the dim past I can do it easily with a Find command in one of the old spreadsheets.

[bobandsherry]

I'm sticking with Quicken for now as:

1. Anything else will cost me something additional now - I have 2 more years left with my current Quicken program
2. I'll waste more time converting and fixing data or tinkering with other workarounds
3. I'll waste even more time learning new software
4. Whatever alternative I choose will have a bug or other issue that I will have to spend time researching and since the alternative will have a smaller user base it may take more time to find a solution - issues now that may pop up in Quicken are usually quickly resolved since I've been down that path before
5. I end up with less functionality than I have today with Quicken.

Spending more money, more time and getting less functionality is not glide path I want to take at this time.

[easysurfer]

I stopped using Quicken many years ago. Main reason along with having to learn the "How To's" of using Quicken is discovering that I really didn't find myself needing to retrieve historical data. My main need with Quicken was budgeting. But only for current year. Once when the year is over, I'm was done with the data and on to the next year's budget.

[bobandsherry]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RetireSoon For investments, I found an absolutely awesome program called FundManager (https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com). Everything about it works the way you'd expect, and so far it's been nothing but flawless. Blows Quicken out of the water when it comes to managing your investments.

Cost $99 with upgrades costing $39, not sure how often one needs to upgrade.

[spncity]

Can one just keep using one's current Quicken software going forward without a subscription fee if one doesn't need or use downloading of transactions?

[Gotadimple]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spncity Can one just keep using one's current Quicken software going forward without a subscription fee if one doesn't need or use downloading of transactions?

Yes you can.

- Rita

[ejman]

I used Gnucash for Linux in parallel with Quicken 2010 last year and it works fine and has download capabilities but lacks a lot of the reports I'm used to producing with little effort in Quicken. I found that importing my Quicken data (which goes back to 1992) resulted in a massive cleanup effort that was simply not worth my time so I started 2016 with a clean slate and set up accounts as needed in Gnucash. I could live with Gnucash but after the year trial I went back to Quicken 2010 as I don't need the download capability and was missing Quicken's reporting richness.

[teejayevans]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ejman I used Gnucash for Linux in parallel with Quicken 2010 last year and it works fine and has download capabilities but lacks a lot of the reports I'm used to producing with little effort in Quicken. I found that importing my Quicken data (which goes back to 1992) resulted in a massive cleanup effort that was simply not worth my time so I started 2016 with a clean slate and set up accounts as needed in Gnucash. I could live with Gnucash but after the year trial I went back to Quicken 2010 as I don't need the download capability and was missing Quicken's reporting richness.

I thought gnucash interface was awful. i use homebank for linux, but it has some usability issues as well, so I stayed with Quicken 2000 running using wine, obviously I don't need the internet capability since it was disabled a long time ago when they tried to force me to upgrade.

[ejman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by teejayevans I thought gnucash interface was awful. i use homebank for linux, but it has some usability issues as well, so I stayed with Quicken 2000 running using wine, obviously I don't need the internet capability since it was disabled a long time ago when they tried to force me to upgrade.

Indeed, it took a while to get used to the Gnucash interface but as with most things, using it over time got me to the point where that wasn't really a problem. I just got used to its quirks. I currently use Quicken 2010 running under wine in my linux setup (linux mint) and it works just fine. I'll probably stick with this until something so superior shows up that I'm compelled to upgrade ( I might croak first ).