Quicken XG 2006

What is XG?

Hi, Stubby.

I had the same question here a couple of years ago. Somebody explained that it is the Canadian version of Quicken.

But I have never heard any explanation of why it's called "XG".

RC

When the 2003 version of Quicken came out in Canada, Intuit Canada decided to call it "Quicken XG" instead of "Quicken 2003". When the 2004 version was released, it was called "Quicken XG 2004", and the 2005/2006 versions were named similarly. As to what the "XG" stands for, I have no idea.

In Canada, we don't have "basic", "deluxe", and "home & business" versions of Quicken - we have "Quicken Cash Manager" which is a basic version for tracking bank accounts (but not investments) and the standard Quicken product, called Quicken XG.

Probably not. The only major new features are the ability to attach files to transactions (like a scan of a cheque or a receipt), and the ability to save reports to PDF (to make them easier to send to an accountant). Other than that, it's going to be very similar to XG 2005.

Personally, I will only upgrade Quicken every few years. There just aren't enough changes from year to year to justify upgrading that often, IMHO. I'm using Quicken 2002 right now, and will upgrade to XG 2006 once the Quicken-Quicktax bundle ("Quicken Suite") is released at the end of December (it's about $20 cheaper to buy the bundle than to buy Quicken and Quicktax separately).

I'd like to see a new feature that displays asset allocation in terms of mutual fund types: monthly income, precious metal, bond, balanced and so on. Something in line with what you see at Globefund or Mourningstar.

I'd like to see Quicken deal with scheduled investment transactions properly. I put fixed amounts into various mutual funds each time I get paid - $100 here, $150 there, etc. I can schedule investment transactions, but Quicken memorizes everything about the transaction, including the price (which of course varies from day to day).

The result is that all of the scheduled transactions have the same unit cost and number of shares purchased as the original memorized transaction, rather than the unit cost and number of shares based on the price on the day the purchase was made. Considering that Quicken can download the unit values, it shouldn't be that hard to schedule an investment transaction and have the prices correspond correctly.

If somebody knows if this has been fixed (or if there's a way to properly schedule investment transactions), please post it.

So you want Quicken to automatically access the internet every time you start Quicken? (That's the only way Quicken can get your correct security price).

Gee, suppose you don't have access to the internet ... what should happen to your scheduled transaction?

And what does Quicken do when the price of your security is not available via Quicken's price download?

And what exactly would you have Quicken do with those purchases that occur with prices that Quicken could never get correct because you purchased at some market price during the day?

There is no meaningful way for Quicken to guarantee to know the price paid for the vast majority of security purchases that you could enter via Scheduled Transactions.

Look for some other problem to complain about.

Quicken should be able to enter the transaction with the price as memorized, and then update that price based on the actual unit price for the date of the transaction.

Default to the price from when the transaction was memorized.

Quicken can't guarantee the price paid, but it certainly can do better than blindly entering the price from when the transaction was originally memorized. It could just enter its best guess for the price (based on the unit prices it downloads) and put a note in the memo field that the price is estimated.

As it stands, I have to manually correct each transaction every two weeks, or leave them all wrong and correct them when I receive my quarterly statements. It strikes me that this is something that _should_ be easy enough to automate.

Why? I use Quicken to track my investments. I make regular investments of fixed amounts of money into specific mutual funds. Quicken is able to download the prices of those mutual funds, and should be able to ensure that the prices in the register for scheduled transactions match the prices downloaded for that day.

Come to think of it, Quicken already does this every time I start it - it prompts me for a "one step update" to download quotes and security prices.

If I have a transaction scheduled for November 18th, then as of November 19th Quicken should know the unit prices for the 18th - and should be able to correct the prices for any scheduled transactions automatically.

This is moronic. Why is one wrong price better than another.

BAD IDEA!

Quicken can download the _correct_ prices, the day after the scheduled transaction is posted. For mutual funds, the price will be correct, since there's only one price each day. Quicken currently DOES download the prices, and the downloaded prices are totally correct - it just doesn't have any facility to make scheduled transactions make use of the downloaded prices.

I can understand that you disagree with my suggestion, but calling it moronic just makes you look petty. Get off your high horse.

What good would this do? Quicken would automatically post the transaction one day, then automatically go back the next day and recompute the number of shares bought? You think this is realistic? Quicken needs the price available when it posts the transaction.

This is not so; apparently you haven't been reading this group regularly. Some days, some prices are not available. Some days some prices are wrong. Some days the internet is not available.

- it just doesn't have any facility to make scheduled

Quicken will virtually never get the price right for stocks; you are falsely assuming that all purchases are made using closing prices, which I doubt is usually the case. For mutual funds you will have to make sure that you do not open Quicken until after about 6pm on the date of the transaction or you will get yesterday's price. Does this seem like a viable requirement?

And to top it all off, even if you get the exact correct price, you can still get the wrong number of shares computed by Quicken due to rounding differences.

I believe the odds of getting the correct number of shares computed by Quicken is tiny, and if Quicken can't reliably compute the correct number of shares, there is no reason to incur the cost of going through the motion.

The future is in downloading transactions: there you should have every reason to expect Quicken to get the number of shares correct ... and have good reason to complain if Quicken, or your fi, fails to do so.

This I most definitely agree with - Quicken wouldn't need to go through the trouble of memorizing and scheduling investment transactions if it could simply download the information when it downloads banking transactions, and enter it in the registers accordingly.

It would be fantastic if Quicken supported downloading investment transactions similarly to the way it supports downloading bank/credit card transactions.

It does.

Let's put it another way: It would be fantastic if the financial institutions in Canada supported downloads to Quicken for investment transactions...

Ahhh, that makes sense. Perhaps in time they will.