Customer Reviews

Quicken 2004 Premier

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

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.

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.

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.)

Terrible application and I wish I was still running 1999 Quicken. This program FORCES you to upload your data to quicken.com and I resent this. If you turn off the nearly hidden options so it does not send your financial data to quicken.com, then everytime you download stock quotes, it reports an error indicating you have not yet uploaded your data to quicken.com.

My annual Christmas present to myself has been a Quicken upgrade for as long as I can remember--way back to the DOS days. For years, the program just got better and better. Now, I am not so sure. The last couple of years, it has looked different, but little else has changed. The decrease in simlicity is actually a step backward. At the very least, $75.00 is way too much for what you get. If you have 2003, or even 2002, stay put.

I had been using Quicken 2000 which worked fine. The interface is decent and it did everything I wanted. I was suckered into 2004 by a good deal and some rebates. Worst mistake I made. The interface on 2004 (is bad. Quicken has decided, arbitrarily, to reduce the input screen, put banner-type ads on the bottom, and in general, not allow you to determine the look or functionality of the program. Plus, in importing my data from 2000, I found several errors that I had to manually fix. Who knows what else is lurking in there. My advice, don't upgrade. Intuit needs to take a different approach to how their program presents itself and what you're able to do with it. I hate this program and can't wait to dump it.

From my experience with upgrading to Quicken 2003 (on Windows 98 SE), I have become disenchanted with this product. While my experience is only with versions 2003 and earlier, their response to my complaints does not lead me to expect improvement in 2004. Through the years Intuit has added more bells and whistles, made the product fancier, but at the expense of making it less usable. Worse still they have neglected to fix some nasty flaws in previously existing features.

When I upgraded to 2003, I immediately lost the ability to do transaction downloads in the background while I use other Quicken features. This is not a "bug" ; once you careful study their web based support material or start using the upgrade you find that transaction downloads in the background are no longer an option! Furthermore, if you use another program while Quicken downloads transactions, because everytime it finishes one step, the Quicken download pops into the foreground.

The new interface for reports is awkward and confusing. If you try to change the customization of a saved report, it insists on making a "new version" of the report instead of replacing the existing one. While this in many cases is a useful feature, your "saved report" ends up as the original with a clutter of re-customized reports. Supposedly you can disable this feature, but my attempts have failed.

Furthermore, there are clitches in the reports' interface with Microsoft's windowing system. In Windows 98 SE, Quicken frequently appears to lock up when Customizing reports because the customization window becomes invisible. Hitting the enter key the correct number of times will step you through the invisible options and often get you out of the customize mode. If you don't recognize that this is happening, you must kill Quicken with the task manager and restart it.

Finally, most annoying, Quicken has serious difficulties matching transactions from web-enabled downloads. With some institutions, transactions are rarely matched with any hand entries made in the register. This means you must manually match or delete the downloaded transaction.
Worse still, with other accounts, Quicken 2003 will match a downloaded transaction from 2003 with a manual entry from years ago as a "near match." In these situations the "unmatch" function does not appear in the menu. If the transaction is accidently accepted, instead of deleted and manually entered, you will have fun sorting through back statements to get your position correct. DejaNews users detail this problem in posts from as far back as 1999.

To add insult to injury Intuit refuses to acknowledge this as a bug in my correspondence through the Tuscon BBB (after Intuit refused to acknowledge other communcations). They maintain the function is working as designed! Their attempt at rectifying my complaint was to offer me the opportunity to pay to speak with one of their technicians! A non technical person called me from Intuit's President's office and explained this to me. She refused an offer for me to step through this issue with their technician to demonstrate that the problem was not merely an issue of the institution using duplicate transaction IDs.

If you think my ranting is unreasonable, Microsoft Money's reviews prove that one can write a personal finance program that will not anger as many users! My next upgrade may be to Money!

I have been using Quicken since 1996 and upgrade every year to get the newest enhancements - 2004 has been such a disaster after installing, I am still getting memory errors and can not even open the program - I am so disapppointed in Intuit that they would release a product so full of bugs. I now have to reinstall 2003 - this is my last upgrade in a long time. I am returning for my money back!! Intuit you owe your customers reliable products that work!

I have been fairly happy so far with Quicken, but this version is plain terrible.

The upgrade seemed to go OK at first, and the setup reported it had all data converted. But as soon as the program ran for the first time, I was in for a surprise! First of all, the program didn't even show up. Then, I relized that it was simply positioned somewhere off screen, so I couldn't see it. I can maximize it through the task bar, and sometimes, I can move it using the keyboard. But doing this every time it starts up is a pain!

Also, many things just do not work. For instance, the net-worth graph is totally broken if you show more than a year of data. And if you dare to change the date range more than once or twice, the program crashes to the desktop. If you do that a few times, you have to reboot your machine, because Quicken crashes on startup!

Also, I just plain hate how Quicken now keeps make you do certain things a certain way. This seems to get worse with every version. It tries to upload all your financial data to the web. It also tries to sucker you into all kinds of other deals Quicken offers. There are advertisements all over the place. And there are a number of dialogs that come up every time and you can' get rid of. Reconcile a credit card account and it asks you ever time whether you want to write a check. No, I don't, thank you! (I am paying my CCs online). Next time again: "Do you want to write a check?" NO, I DON'T! And on the third card you enter, again: "Are you sure you do not want to write a check?" YOU ARE DAMN RIGHT I AM!

Aren't those types of things standard these days? They are in all the apps I build...

And finally, Quicken just doesn't seem to improve the way I want it to. I guess that's just because my needs are not mainstream. Or are they? I had been hoping for a way to automatically update currency exchange rates. I had also hoped for a way to indicate that I only own a certain percentage of a property, so it shows up right in the net worth calculation. I had also hoped for better ways to analyze my portfolio with much easier ways to see how well each holding does year-by-year, rather than all-time. This is especially true for stock I have all sold, but I still would like to go back and see how well it performed and (more importantly) how it developed since then to see whether I made the right decision. I would also like a better stock-wish-list feature that would allow me to track much more information about stock I am considering to buy.

Those would all be nice features. Of course right now I would be happy if the thing would run for more than 3 minutes without crashing. Maybe I should switch to MS Money after all...

I have been using Quicken for at least 10 years. I upgraded from 2002 to 2004 about two weeks ago. The program hits a bug about every other time I run the program. It shuts down and then I have to bring it up again. Note that I have fixed the Net Worth graphing problem described on the technical support site. I still get lots of bugs.

Do not upgrade to this product at this time. Maybe in 3-6 months? I am not sure.

I am going to try to get my money back and go back to 2002. I will need to retype two weeks worth of transactions and any other changes I have made! That is how frustrated I am.