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Can Quicken really be trusted?

I've been using Quicken since the product was introduced, starting on the Macintosh and for at least the last 10 years on PC's. I've really enjoyed the fairly seamless connection to my banking and credit card accounts over the last few years.

I recently upgraded to Quicken 2006. This has become a nightmare, but I think the problem may go back further than the upgrade.

The first symptom I noticed after upgrading was that two months' reconciliations were lost in my main checking account. The transactions were there, but the reconciliations were lost.

I went through a series of machinations of going back to my last Q2005 data file and Q2005 which did not give me any comfort.

I'm now back in Q2006 with a Q2006 data file that validates but my checking account reconciliations are lost for an entire year. My main credit card account has also re-downloaded many reconciled transactions for the last year. I see no good interface to get rid of them, just accept them all and go back to the register and delete them one by one.

The bottom line on all this is that although I haven't lost transactions that I know of, I will probably never again have confidence that my accounts are reconciled correctly or for that matter, much faith in Quicken software.

The lack of clear, openly available documentation on how to manage Quicken data files, the lack of tools to check data that doesn't have so many caveats and disclaimers that you're afraid to use them, the lack of an open format for data export; all of these things give me a bad feeling.

I will call Quicken tech support on a day off when I have my home computer available and Quicken actually offers tech support. Forget about getting support on weekends when I actually use the software.

Please tell me. Have I rushed to judgement too quickly? Is any part of what I've said here off base?

Reply to
Paul II
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I recently upgraded from 2004 to Qbasic2006 with no issues. My reconciliations are OK back to 1997. I know that's not much help. Good luck!

Reply to
Bob Burns

I concur with your assumption, I've felt that ever since each additional verison since 1999, it been getting bloated and offers less value to each upgrade compared to pre-1999. They tout features that are inconsequential [ more premade reports and graphs] and keep big features, like tighter security, encryption, error correction, data integrity checks etc., secret or unimplemented.

When I started using Quicken from DOS days in 1987-ish period, it was a simple checkbook like program. It was up to the user to maintain connections between various accounts, reconcile and gasp, input data. It was laborious but saved the trouble of calculating values. At the time, a well organized spreadsheet sufficed.

It has evolved into a financial managing _system_, not just a extended checkbook, as Quicken manages and tracks financial data much beyond what I required in 1987. It probably does it more like a CPA than I would as an amateur. Since I resigned myself in 1999 to following its way of reconciling, tracking and reporting including my categorizing and labeling accounts correctly, I've had no issues. Through the 1990s, Quicken made major strides in ease of use and functionality, and that ended after 1999.

Programming management is worse than Microsoft since the 1999 version. Since Windows is so much larger an application than Quicken, to me that reflects average to nitwit programming management, considering how many revisions occur after its release, how many bugs it has for a program that is fundamentally a spreadsheet on steroids.

Much more like a major accounting package, you can wreck havoc on your accounting and balances by deleting accounts unused for many years that maybe linked to an active account. With Quicken now managing links versus manual connections such as I did from DOS days, you may not know what is linked. You can minimize but not guarantee its effect by archive old records and use File->File Operations->Year End Copy to reduce your new file to numbers carried over from the archive, but are kept internally and unseen. You are better off just retiring the account and making it 'invisible' than deleting it to avoid such havoc.

If an upgrade from a prior Quicken file format was less than perfect, the errors may show up later on, when you least expect it. Over time, and not due to disk problems, data files seem to corrupt, that's based on on running the File->File Operations->Validate program.

Why in all this time is there no UNDO function incase of an erroneous download or user input errors? You need to restore a backup to effect an UNDO.

While encrypting the files is a definite plus as the financial data gets increasing more centralized and sensitive, having an undefined file format is not, nor explaining the steps in detail Quicken goes through to accept data from financial institutions.

"Paul II" wrote in news:1128289196.590004.325670 @f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

Reply to
John Peterson

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