Yeah I know, asking for an opinion on the 'Net is asking for a huge debate but I'm willing to risk it. I'm finally fed up with M$ neglecting the Business side of Money and am in search of a new package to handle personal, investment, and small business financial matters preferably all under one roof. My focus is mainly on the business side of things.
What kind of customization abilities are there in the various forms/reports generated? For example, Microsoft's Invoice Designer utility (as poor as it is) is just a front end for modifying an HTML document. If you want something really slick looking you better know a little about HTML and be prepared to spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning. But you can come up with a finished product that would make people say "no way you generated that from Money!"
How are the forms stored in Quicken and how painful is it to use Quicken's utilities to modify the forms?
What are the shortcomings of the business side of Quicken?
What features is it missing the mark on?
What is the best thing about it?
Should I just stop right here and move on to Peachtree or something else?
Quicken allows repositioning just about every predefined element, along with choosing fonts and a logo, but that's about it. In that respect you're lucky you can adapt it use any pre-printed form, or you can create something that can use a window envelope. That's as far as it goes.
Invoice, credit, and estimate forms are stored within a user's Quicken data store, so you can't use external programs to modify them.
The fact that you have to deal with Intuit when it doesn't work, and they charge for support.
Support. Intuit is completely unresponsive about most issues other than things that make the program unusable for a lot of people, and only when a lot of people publicly harass them about it. They've got a bad track record for support for their other product lines (like Turbotax), so if you encounter a serious problem don't expect them to come through for you.
At one time Quicken updated stocks at any interval you chose (might have been '99 or 2000). Then Intuit changed Quicken automatic updates to no more than once per day. By comparison, Money 2004 allows you to update stocks as often as once every 15 minutes, and banks and brokerage accounts to up to once per hour).
The check printing system appears stable (Money 2004 and earlier versions never worked correctly, I assume that Money 2005 still doesn't record the correct check dates for scheduled transactions). The scheduled online updates work about
2/3 of the time. About 1/3 of the time you might have to reboot or manually kill the Quicken and Quicken Update tasks to regain control of your computer (I think this was happening to me regularly when American Express was taking their system down at 5 a.m. when I had scheduled my daily update). By comparison, Money 2004 and earlier versions would not update anything unless if the full executable (as opposed to the small Quicken update program) were running 24 hours/day, 7 days/week.
Depends upon your needs. If you're a consultant with a small customer base and simple invoicing and receivable requirements (i.e. where your personal and business activities are closely related and accounted for), Quicken or Money might do it. If you're running a real business, don't waste your time with this nonsense, just invest in a good GL package with flexible invoicing with which you can be comfortable (and I'm not convinced that Peachtree comes close).
I can only comment on Quicken 2004 H&B - I have never used Money Your question - "What kind of customization abilities are there in the various forms/reports generated?"
I will address these as two separate questions - (1) REPORTS & (2) FORMS (1) REPORTS I have been able, for the most part, been able to customize to meet all of my needs but there are limitations. For special reports (rearranging data, further analysis and restructuring into the format that I want), I print a Quicken report or reports that have the data I want to a file and use this a source document for Excel. From Excel you can restructure it to meet your specific needs. (2) FORMS I have created forms using Words that contain all constant information including Logo's and what ever you want the final form to look like except the variable information that comes from Quicken. (create your own blank forms) Print your statements (or whatever) to these "blank" forms from Quicken. This may be an oversimplification but it is an approach that has worked for me. Jim M.
Thanx, Malcolm. Sounds like you've been through the mill already. We parallel on a lot of the points you mentioned. I've learned to live without support. When small software companies become big they tend to forget about putting the "customer" in customer service. Norton (now Symantec), Microsoft, Intuit, the whole bunch actually. But that is a gripe fest for another occasion.
Too bad the templates are tucked away. I really have a specific format I want for my invoices. For investing and checkbook I can always go back to the old school method. I just want the "corporate image" to look the way I want it.
Yeah, I've done Peachtree before. It would be overkill in my situation and I don't recall just how flexible their forms design tool was. Seems I could embed graphics and push text all over the place. IIRC the stock Peachtree forms tend to have errors in them that are not intuitive to the mortals how to correct. But I can overcome even that.
I suspect Quickbooks is built on similar architecture to Quicken so I'll be avoiding that one too.
Quicken's database is open architecture you can get to through VBA? That might be an acceptable workaround for my invoicing. Is there documentation on the database or is the user pretty much on his (her) own to reverse engineer?
I hate to show my ignorance, but I have no idea what you are talking about. What I described is using the software (Quicken, Word & Excel) as you buy it off of the shelf. Sorry I cannot be of more help. Jim M.
When you are using Word or Excel to work with Quicken data, are you exporting data from Quicken and then opening the export file with Word and/or Excel? Or are you able to go directly against the Quicken data file and extract data using Word's and Excel's tools?
(Sorry for the confusion. I'm a programmer and sometimes forget there are non-programmers in the world.)
Okay, let's try a different (non-programmer) approach in case you haven't yet read my reply to "Jim M."
Can you extract data from the Quicken data file from within Word and/or Excel? Or do you have to export the data from Quicken and then open the export file with Word and/or Excel?
You have to print the report in spreadsheet-compatible format, ie. CSV or tab-delimited. No other method of access to the data is provided. Actually, that is not true. You could export the data in QIF format, but it is anyone's guess what you would do with that - not even Quicken will re-import it 100% correctly.
ROFLMAO. Well that kind of kills the idea of working around invoicing with Word. I would rather not have to manually export and import data when the rest of the world gets direct access to their databases. What a quandary - live with the devil I know or take a leap of faith?
Okay, aside from Quicken, Money, Quickbooks, and Peachtree ...
... can you think of some other small business packages I might look at? And if they happen to also handle personal finance and investing it would be a bonus.
Last resort, I could always develop an application but I'm a tad bit booked at the moment.
You are over complicating things. Use Words to create blank forms to use in place of blank paper. Use Quicken to print to BLANK FORMS not BLANK PAPER Jim M.
I use H&B 2004, and a wonderful program, Fineprint. Fineprint, among many other valuable features for me (rescaling to the paper in the printer, booklet printing, 2, 4, 8 up for backups, etc) allows creating "forms" to which you can print and have overlaid. My H&B invoice, for example, prints on this software background which I use for my letterhead and fax cover as well, and whihc was designed in AutoCAD. I'll be glad to send you an example if yo shoot me an email to gbynum, at, att, dot, net.
AFAIK, htere is no other customization on other forms; I do as others have reported and print to csv )or similar) then open and massage in Excel.
Hi George! I have downloaded the trial version of Fineprint and am going to give it a try. It looks very interesting. Thanks for the tip! From another satisfied user of H&B 2004, Jim M.
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