Quicken 2004 Premier

by Intuit

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000AA3M3
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 25, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,059 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #26 in Software > Personal Finance > Investment Tools
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Quicken 2004 Premier lets you see your complete financial picture in minutes! It includes all the time-saving features of Quicken Deluxe to help you manage your finances easily, plus exclusive tools to help you optimize your investment portfolio and maximize tax-saving opportunities. Optimize your finances with Quicken 2004 Premier:

• Instantly set up and connect all of your financial accounts to Quicken to quickly and easily download your financial data directly into Quicken. Quicken 2004 works with over 2,000 banks, credit card, brokerage, and 401(k) companies, so you avoid manually entering your financial transactions. You can be sure that Quicken is always up-to-date with your latest financial data.
• Setting up and staying on top of your investments is easier than ever with the redesigned investment area that looks just like your broker statement or broker web site.
• Track your investment holdings—without taking the time to enter every historical transaction. You can decide to add in transaction details later for tax purposes or performance analysis.
• See the average annual return for your entire portfolio and individual accounts compared to selected benchmarks for key periods (e.g. 1 year, 3 year, 5 year).
• Intelligent and tax-smart investing insights alert you to more tax-efficient investments, opportunities to offset capital gains or losses, or when taxable events occur.
• Schedules A, B and D tax reports help you stay on top of deductions, interest, dividends, and capital gains.
• Investment sale optimization tool helps you figure out what securities to sell based on criteria you set, such as minimizing capital gains taxes.
• Investor's Reference Guide provides step-by-step tutorials on getting started with investing, stocks, bonds, investing strategies, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Run, don't walk, AWAY from this program..., August 15, 2003

By 

Matt the Coffeeman "matt875" (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quicken 2004 Premier (CD-ROM)

I have been a loyal Quicken 99 Deluxe user for five years. In the past, I have tried the 2000 and 2002 versions but have always returned to '99 for various reasons. After trying 2004 Premier, I am throwing in the towel on Intuit and going elsewhere.

In the first two minutes of operation, there were several apparent problems. Reports would only print if you manually printed each individual page seperately. The program failed several times, abruptly shutting down for no reason. I would enter my entire portfolio into the setup account function only to see all the work disappear when I hit "done" (I guess the software takes "done" literally). The import/export function never worked properly, often omitting portions of transactions.

To add injury to insult, there is no email support and phone support is $$$$/minute (a free chat is available but, for some reason, is closed on Thursday and Fridays). Nothing like having to pay to have Intuit correct its own problems.

Intuit seems to have abondoned the concept of creating decent products. After the TurboTax disaster of last year, one would have thought they would have learned. Take it from me, they didn't - run away from this software as fast as you can.

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Bugs, bugs, bugs...., September 29, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Quicken 2004 Premier (CD-ROM)

I had been using Quicken 2002 Basic for a couple of years and it seemed to work fine. Like one other reviewer, I decided to upgrade because of some rebates and the lure of being able to better track investments that Basic did not do... Well to start, it took all of about 3 DAYS to finally get my 2002 data file converted! No "easy upgrade" there... and I was converting from one Quicken version to another, not from some other program to Quicken. The program kept crashing and locking my computer. I had to delete and reinstall the program at least 5 five times. I finally called Inuit. The solution... uninstall 2004, reinstall 2002, go into my 2002 data file and make sure there were no saved graphs or reports that contained more that 12 months of data (my current file has about a 5 year transaction history). Once that was done, I had to backup that file, uninstall 2002, reinstall 2004 and reconvert the backup file. Still, if you set any graph in 2004 to a period longer than 12 months (i.e., use the "earliest to date" menu selection with dates that go back more than 12 months) the program will crash. The net worth graph on the "Overview" page shows complete nonsense (don't know what data it's displaying, but it's not net worth) and there is no way to customize or change the graph on this page. If you CHOOSE to enter transactions manually, the reminder box letting you know you can download transactions from the web continues to pop up every time, even after checking the "don't show this reminder again" box... very annoying. Intuit says it is aware of these problems and it "will be fixed shortly"... I hope so. How did this even get released with so many bugs? Better to stick with an older version.

I also agree with other reviews about the large number of adds. At least in 2002 you could turn off the add bar. No such luck in 2004... all of these things take up space.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Investors Beware!, October 27, 2003

By 

ron_777 (North East USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quicken 2004 Premier (CD-ROM)

I have been a faithful Quicken user and updater for at least 7 years now. The first 4 or so years, I would look forward to the next release and felt I got value for my money.

Unfortunately, around Quicken 2001 I started to question the value of the updates. Not only were the features less impressive, but they did not do much more for my main area of interest - tracking my stock investments.

I have more than one investment account and found both Quicken 2001 and 2002 to be less investor friendly. I held off for 2003 but figured that Quicken 2004 may be worth a shot (and I wanted the Quicken "Write a Will" program that went with it).

I have just spent a week trying to get the @#$@% Quicken 2004 program to work. I didn't have trouble with the program crashing as described by earlier users, but I could not get several features to work.

For example, there is a "Printer Setup" tab that is supposed to let you change the font size of what you print out. It would gleefully take my input, but it would not actually change the font size, even after I deleted and then reloaded Quicken 2004. I contacted an on-line Quicken help-tech and the tech's answer was "I have worked on my resources (?) and conclude that it is by the design of the program." When I asked "What does that mean?", he replied "You can not change the font". Oh...OK, silly me!

I spent untold hours trying to remove 0.000003 shares of Pfizer from my Quicken account. I was unable to do it even with the program's "Adjust Share Balance" feature, which works basically as "if all else fails, cheat!" So I guess I would now have to carry that 0.000003 of a share with me to the end of time.

The screens ARE confusing - there has to be a better way to do this. (Actually, I know there is - just look at an old Quicken 1999 or 2000 screen.) To help me with the mess, I bought the book "Quicken 2004 for Dummies", but it just touches lightly on investments. Definitely not worth buying if your are an investor.

Quicken 2004 does let you set up a fairly flexible Portfolio view to monitor all your accounts in one window, but if you try to look at just one account, you are faced with 3 or 4 "canned" views that can not be changed. Grrrr....

Of course, you may not be missing that much. Quicken lets you select such neat things as 'P/E ratios' and 'comparison's to market indexes' which would be really useful, but despite endless downloading of data, I could not get the program to actually show that information on the screens. Maybe if I called Intuit's help phone at $1.95 per minute they would eventually tell me that "it's by the design of the program" that I will not get that information to display and that maybe in Quicken 2005 it will actually show up!

So, to summarize my grumblings, my advice to investors is to carefully protect your old pre-2004 copy of Quicken. Don't even think about getting the Quicken 2004 version - do you really want to trust your detailed investment data to such a buggy, poorly conceived program?

- Ron, confirmed Quicken 2000 user!

(PS: Those of you who were Quicken users back when dinosaurs ruled the earth may remember "Investor Insight", an optional tag-along program that Quicken used to support. It was a great product for its time and would allow you to do such simple but helpful things as write notes which would show up on your individual stock graph as little icons. When you clicked on the icon, you could read the note. It was great way to store reminders to yourself such as "watch-out for the upcoming earnings announcement" and "sell at $XX". Sigh... that was the type of thinking Quicken needs to rediscover.)