Switched back to Quicken from MS Money

I did a trial conversion from Money to Quicken. The converter didn't carry over the ticker symbols of all my investments. I had to re-enter every one of them. Not converting the budget is another disappointment, especially for mid-year. Quicken also added some mysterious entries ($.45 loss) in my investment account. How was your conversion?

Macrovision/C-Dilla

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You can also attach pdf files of your printed statements (and possibly other file types) to a Q2006 Quicken "account".

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Just to set the record straight ... Quicken was NEVER a Chipsoft product ... Turbotax was, until Intuit bought Chipsoft.

Quicken has always been an Intuit product.

I switched from Quicken to Money 5 or 6 years ago after something happened to my files that I had to reconstruct manually. I don't recall the facts now. Anyhow I switched back to Quicken last year with relatively few problems. I had to correct some "placemakers" in the investment accounts but really no problems. I swirched from Money because of problems downloading and that Quicken can download Morgan Stanley. I am happy now.

I switched from Quicken to Money 5 or 6 years ago after something happened to my files that I had to reconstruct manually. I don't recall the facts now. Anyhow I switched back to Quicken last year with relatively few problems. I had to correct some "placemakers" in the investment accounts but really no problems. I swirched from Money because of problems downloading and that Quicken can download Morgan Stanley. I am happy now.

I stand corrected. Thank you.

In any case, Quicken was a DOS-only program at the time I began using it. I upgraded every year and, in fact, I was very disappointed when Intuit finally stopped supporting the DOS version of Quicken (I was one of the last holdouts to make the switch to Windows). I finally did make the switch and continued to upgrade every year - until TurboTax 2002.

Long story short... I'm certainly not the only one who abandoned Intuit products out of anger and protest, due to the issues surrounding TurboTax

2002. I'm just curious to see how many have decided to give Intuit another chance with their latest version of Quicken.

And thanks to John Pollard for pointing out the fact that multi-page statements in .PDF format can also be attached.

Frankly, I set my standards very low for importing my data from MS Money. The only thing I was concerned about were my bank accounts, which converted with no problems. Our family's financial goals changed during this summer, so I wanted to start fresh from ground zero.

Can you explain why you'd do the above?

Some practical examples maybe?

Thanks so much!

John

I converted from Quicken 2005 to MS 2005 in January of this year. MS

2005 was a disaster - overall very buggy, slow, changed transactions, register balances no longer reflected the true balance of the account, sync' with finanical firms failed more times the not. I am now back in a stable Quicken 2006 - and I am very GLAD to be back.

I converted from Quicken 2005 to MS 2005 in January of this year. MS

2005 was a disaster - overall very buggy, slow, changed transactions, register balances no longer reflected the true balance of the account, sync' with finanical firms failed more times the not. I am now back in a stable Quicken 2006 - and I am very GLAD to be back.

Not to continue beating the same drum but I converted to Money 2004 after being a Quicken user since the good old days of DOS (Used Andrew Tobias's software prior to Quicken). I had become a user of the PocketPC and thought it would simplify my life to use Pocket Money etc.

Well, after about 1 1/2 years of using Money, I recently moved back to Quicken. Reasons; consistent download and billpay problems in Money. As someone else mentioned Money's idea of balancing an account is far from fool proof. I frequently reconciled my main checking account only to have Money want to change the opening account balance despite the fact the acccount was in balance without any adjustments. Several other issues popped-up randomly out of the blue. Pretty home page and a slick looking interface don't count for much if a user can't trust the data.

Moving back to Quicken was very painless. It was like finding an old friend. Despite some of Intuit's bazaar business decisions, Quicken get the job done. l am a happy camper (And billpay, account balancing downloaded transaction info matches like it should). Personally I think the relative success of Money has been a blessing to Quicken users. It keeps Intuit on their toes for one thing. Businesses without a challenger typically don't innovate or listen to their customers at all (Remember the of days Ma Bell companies - yes you can "rent" any colr phone you want as long as it is black - Am I dating myself?)

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Could you expand on this a little? Did you attach images of the cancelled checks to register items?

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You're partially right on that issue, which is why I started to migrate back to Money. Quicken used to allow automatic downloads more than once a day, which included stock quotes (it wasn't like real market data, but convenient). Money at first allowed stock and portfolio downloads as little as 15 minutes apart, but now Money won't download on a schedule more than once or twice. I fact, as of this moment, Money 2005 will not download anything automatically, and won't alert for upcoming payment transactions that are due. As of my last phone call with Microsoft on that issue (last week), they have no solution.

But it gets worse if your browser crashes Money, since, Microsoft says, Money is like a big web browser, built around MSIE. If Money crashes because of a browser add-on you've got (like a popup-blocker), it uses default program settings and ignores what you've already set up in the program. That includes changing the transaction dates and payee names to those in a download file from your bank, rather than what you've entered in the register. That one issue (that Microsoft knows about at least as of last week) trashed about 6 months of Fleet and American Express transactions before I discovered what the program was doing.

There's also a fairly serious bug in the scheduled transactions section that will regularly trash your transaction dates. If you've set up payments and deposits to be entered on a schedule, Money will ignore your dates and enter today's date for everything you enter in the register. Microsoft's work-around for this problem with printed checks is to set the transaction to "write check" and then just as you're entering the transaction in the register, change it to "print transaction." That works, but the program now prompts you for EVERY transaction to change to "print transaction" for all future transactions. Working around so many problems has become tedious, and although Microsoft has documented these bugs, they have no intent to fix them. I can virtually guarantee that if you called Money support to report anything I've described here (which was covered in a call with a Microsoft support person within the past few weeks), you'll be told they never heard it before.

Something else you need to be aware of is that Quicken and Money use different budget categories, and Turbotax (among others) also use different tax categories as represented in Quicken. If you use tax software, you need to find out FIRST what categories they are picking up from Quicken before you allow your tax software to import from Quicken. I made the mistake of doing that for my return, and found that Turbotax 2004 is far more buggy than Quicken. Deduction and income categories had been way off, and I was left with numbers stuck in places I couldn't find (like excess expense reimbursement that didn't exist). The only safe way to handle that is to only use Quicken to input transactions (and let it decide which tax categories you're using), or not import into tax software at all.

"Malcolm Moovis" wrote

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Do you have your Q categories linked to specific tax line items? The name & description of a category is irrelevant; it's the tax line setup in Q that is supposed to get Q's numbers in the correct place within TT.

This is one of those "grass is always greener" situations. Wouldn't wanna add up the amount of time people have wasted switching back and forth between these two products, only to find that some important functions of each product have been poorly implemented...

No, not since the f*&#ing bastards STOPPED DEVELOPING and supporting Quicken in the UK! They just simply said "fukk you..." to the loyal UK version users - and then had the bloody audacity to encourage us to convert to Quickbooks!

And they didn't even give us an option to convert our UK data files to the US version of Quicken...

If I do "give them another chance" it will have to be the US version. But it'll be a pirate copy... Anything else I use from Intuit will be pirated...

A representative of my bank told me that their PC banking tech support department receives so many more calls dealing with MS Money bugs and glitches that they're giving very serious thought to dropping their support for MS Money users after this year.

You and I must be of the same "vintage" because I can recall very clearly the time frame you refer to.

I had the same sort of reconciliation issues with Money. That, plus the reintroduction of being able to attach images of checks, receipts, etc. to individual transactions resulted in my decision (in spite of my feelings about Intuit) to return to Quicken.

Here are some of the items I've attached to the related transactions...

1. Paycheck stubs
2. Rental property checks received, along with any accompanying correspondence from a tenant.
3. Checks payable to government entities
4. Bank Statements and cancelled checks
5. Flight itineraries
6. USPS receipts for items shipped
7. Receipts for items purchased online
8. Screen captured Ebay ads for items purchased.

The above list is by no means all-inclusive. These are just a few examples of what can be done with this feature.