Leary of Quicken -online-

It is not necessary to use Passport at this time. A related issue is Yodlee. It uses Passport for authentication, and I hate it for other reasons. At this time, there are many financial institutions that provide online updates without using Yodlee. Instead, Money uses a reasonable protocol called OFX. The f.i.'s that don't provide this protocol can be accessed with Yodlee, but I won't do it! Fortunately, most of my f.i.'s provide OFX. No Passport or Yodlee on my peecee!

I am currently using both programs. Both are OK for now. With Quicken, the great risk going forward is that you won't have a way to extract your own data from the program in a portable format (like QIF). I won't accept that, and that's why I started running Money. With Money, the great risk going forward is that you will be forced to use Passport, Yodlee, or both in some future version.

I find that Quicken is, well, quicker. Money can drag when your data file gets big. Other than that, Money seems OK. Is it worth your time? Maybe not. Fear and anger drove my decision to use both products in parallel. You probably don't have those issues!

snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (David Arnstein) wrote in news:diieav$nuo$1 @reader1.panix.com:

You can still print reports to a spreadsheet compatible file. Requires maybe a little fiddling, but it works fine.

Interesting. I installed Money and spend about an hour trying to get past the log-on screen but could not without getting a connection (to validate my passport). I'll try again.

You mean to tell us that fear and anger were sufficient motivation to justify entering all your transactions into two financial software packages?

More or less. Actually, each programs can import data from the other. In my case, I used the MS Money feature that imports data from a Quicken data file. The import feature had plenty of flaws, which I had to correct manually. For example, all split transactions involving a certain category imported with NO category. I had to enter the category myself. For these sorts of manual tasks, I allotted 15 minutes per day to myself.

I guess I really am one sick puppy, eh?

I wouldn't quite go that far, but you are doing some extra work, no doubt about that.

Intuit had *NEVER* announced that they are withdrawing QIF export. IMHO, QIF exported data was only ever good for imports into Quicken (and perhaps Money). If you did this for fear of not being able to export your data in QIF format, you did it for the wrong reason.

Also, all versions of Quicken can still import QIF data. All that it won't do is to import individual transactions. But it *will* import entire accounts at a time, hence it is still possible to repair accounts using export/import.