Quicken 2005 removed a feature that's been an essential part of Quicken for over 15 years (I've used Quicken since 1987) - scheduled transactions. Yes, if you look on the menu it's still listed there, but it no longer works, at least not as expected.
Example: enter a scheduled transaction for a check to be automatically entered 3 months in advance. Normally, when you exit and re-enter Quicken you would have three months of transactions. In 2005, it only enters one transaction, and locks that transaction down (you cannot edit or delete it from the scheduled transaction list, though you can from the register). This behavior is only seen on checks and online payments - other transaction will be entered as expected. According to Intuit, customers (not sure how many) requested this feature - though I could not get an explanation as to what problem it solved. Assumedly, someone did not like having multiple transactions in the register. Okay...that's fine....but why not just make the lead time for that transaction 7 days? Or 29 days? Instead, Quicken has broken a feature that represents 90% of the reason I use it. I've heard the suggestion to use the forecasting feature, but that's just a report; by using the register the way I do I have a 3 month preview of my finances and can quickly spot problems before they occur, and make adjustments when needed. And it's not a guess like the forecasting feature.
Since Quicken 2005 is looking for a flag (eg, is it a "print" type or an "online payment" type), there needs to be a way to tell it to ignore this flag (like it does for every other type of transaction). Yet I was told that a developer couldn't spend 20 hours to correct this problem; if it takes a developer 20 hours to edit a few lines of code - that already exist - then Intuit is in more trouble than I thought.
If you wish to contact Intuit about this:
Intuit Inc.
2632 Marine Way Mountain View, CA 94043-1126 Phone: 650-944-6000 Fax: 650-944-3699 Toll Free: 800-446-8848 William V. (Bill) Campbell , Chairman Stephen M. (Steve) Bennett, President, CEO, and Director Robert B. (Brad) Henske, SVP and CFOI will be making a stink about this until they fix it....
Mike