Quicken 2004 Premier Home & Business

by Intuit

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000AA3KN
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 25, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,151 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #8 in Software > Personal Finance > Investment Tools
  • #80 in Software > Personal Finance > Money Management
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Quicken 2004 Premier Home & Business includes all the business features you need with the ease you want. And because it's from Quicken, Premier Home & Business provides familiar, user-friendly approaches to manage your business finances. Quicken 2004 Premier Home & Business includes all the business features you need with the ease you want. And because it's from Quicken, Premier Home & Business provides familiar, user-friendly approaches to manage your business finances:

• Create customizable estimates and invoices
• See where your business stands at a glance
• Generate business reports and graphs, including Schedule C
• Automatically track taxes for Schedule C
• Track accounts receivable and payable
• Track vehicle mileage, jobs and projects
• Write checks, print checks, or pay bills online
• And more!

Also includes everything in Quicken 2004 Premier to help you optimize your personal finances:

• 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.
• Schedule when you want Quicken to download your financial data so that Quicken is always up-to-date with your latest financial data.
• 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 your net worth over time with the Net Worth Monitor. View the breakdown of your net worth by cash, property, or stocks.
• See the average annual return for your entire portfolio and individual accounts compared to selected benchmarks for key periods (e.g. 1, 3, or 5 year).
• Schedules A, B and D tax reports.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Buggy with Confusing Interface...newer doesn't mean better!, September 12, 2003

By 

Irene Bevilacqua "irbrenda" (Staten Island, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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

I have been using Intuit products for many years, especially Quickbooks Pro and Quicken Home and Business. I must say that with each new version, it does not get easier...just more complicated and buggier. I am probably one of the few who have successfully used Quickbooks Premier Contractor 2003, but I can't say the same for Quicken Premier Home and Business 2004. I have spoken to tech support and they said they've had no problems at all with this software.

I found the interface very busy. What happened to my simple checkbook register where I write checks? There's now a "Home" column on the lefthand side of the register that lists categories. It took me awhile to find my personal checking account listing. That "Home" column is permanent, something you cannot delete and it takes up too much room. At least with the QB 2001 I could "X" out the bottom pane. There's no hope with this. You can expand the register box, and kind of shrink the annoying column. It's a busybox!

I have a problem with delayed response from the keyboard. The words are delayed by about 2 seconds as I'm typing...very annoying. And if I hold down the Backspace key, it stutters backwards to erase something.

I placed a call twice to Intuit. First rep said she never heard of this. I told her I have. Told me to uninstall the software, copy CD to harddrive, and reinstall in Safe Mode. Said it would correct the delayed typing, since she felt that no drivers would load and I should use "Custom" installation and put it in a new folder. Didn't work. Don't waste your time. Same problem exists.

Called again and second tech said that Quicken 2004 doesn't like my computer. Gee, thanks. He said it's something in my database that is causing the delayed typing.

I told them when they get enough calls from irate customers, please put out a patch, that it isn't just me I'm sure. I told them from what I've been reading, their new improved software stinks. QB Home & Bus 2001 worked flawlessly.

My advice: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I should have listened to myself

51 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Intuit Stumbles on Quicken 2004, February 9, 2004

By A Customer

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

A major player in the personal finance software arena for years, Intuit and Quicken has helped thousands keep track of their personal finances. I have been a Quicken user since the early days (Quicken 1 and 2), have upgraded to new releases over the years and have always been very satisfied with the Quicken product.

Quicken 2004 Premier changed all that.

The release of Quicken 2004 was advertised as allowing you to get instant answers to questions like "Are my investments outperforming the market?" and "What is my return for the past 1,3 and 5 years?" Unfortunately, after upgrading from Quicken 2003 to Quicken 2004 Premier, the question I was asking most was "What happened to my data?"

Quicken 2004 has corrupted my personal finance information on four separate occasions (I know, "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" ... I don't want to even think about "fool me four times...").

My financial books include four checking accounts, several credit card accounts, some loans, several investment accounts, and a smattering of other accounts. No account type is immune to corruption.

In my checking accounts, one major problem is that Quicken 2004 insists on making up numbers (really, really, BIG numbers, like as big as your computer can handle), creating transactions with random dates to go along with the made-up numbers, and then inserting these transactions in the register. At one time my calculated net worth was too large to display (I wish ...); another time I owed more than the United States GDP. On another occasion Quicken 2004 erased all of the transactions from one checking account, strangely keeping a balance that looked to be about right. In another account, I have been overdrawn once due to a Quicken 2004 error.

In the investment accounts Quicken 2004 decided to change the ticker symbols of some stocks in the investment accounts to unknown symbols on more than one occasion. It's not clear when this happened; it may have been during the updating process when prices are downloaded into Quicken. This caused trouble not only in evaluating the portfolio, but the reconciliations of the accounts were very challenging, because I was never sure if the difference was due to my error, or if Quicken had changed a symbol in one of the dividend re-investment transactions (which it did on two occasions).

A few of the shortcut keys that Quicken power users have grown accustomed to, no longer work in Quicken 2004 (hitting the space bar to select a check during reconciliation, for example). These are known errors and "will be fixed in the next release". At least that's what I was told when I discovered the issue in Release 1. It has not been fixed as of Release 5.

I was given the above information on one of my several attempts to get help by calling customer service. I was helped by "Jennifer", although I suspect her name was really Neeraja, or Srividya or something similar. Customer service appears to consist of very bored people, who are very far away, reading answers in OK English off of scripts to solve problems you did not call with. I was told once to reload Windows (I did not). Most of the time, I was told to run the File/File Operation/Validate option within Quicken 2004 (I did several times). I don't remember ever having to run that option on earlier versions of Quicken; I'm not sure it even was an option with Quicken 2003. On another occasion, I was questioned quite closely about the type of printer I had. Apparently, printers have become notorious corruptors of data in Quicken 2004. So, who knew? (I'm joking -- they're not). In no case, did the call to customer support solve my immediate problem.

Sending in questions via email was better in the sense that I did not receive any wrong or useless information. In fact, I received no information at all. All emails went unanswered. Bug reports are never acknowledged, but they never have been.

Running Quicken 2004 requires some serious horsepower. Intuit will tell you Quicken 2004 can run on a Pentium 200 or higher machine with 32 MB RAM and 75MB hard drive space. I originally installed Quicken 2004 on a spare Pentium 233 MHZ machine with 100MB hard drive. Big mistake. When I fired up the software, the lights in the house didn't exactly dim, but I bet they wanted to. Quicken 2004 is unbearably slow on machines below the recommended 300MHZ limit, and I wouldn't put it on anything less than 700Mhz. Quicken 2004 seems to be doing a lot of disk I/O and window rendering and all of that thrashing around costs performance points. My copy of Quicken is now installed on a Dell Dimension 4600, 2.79GHz, 512RAM, 111GB free hard drive, Windows XP Professional. As you might expect, speed is no problem.

On the plus side, Quicken has done a nice job with the charts and reports. So, even if the numbers are wrong, they look marvelous. The screen gets real busy, though, what with the Menu Bar, the icon bar, the Quicken Home side window, the main register window, the transaction window and the maddening Inuit advertisements (`Try Turbo Tax - the #1 tax solution year after year") at the bottom, all showing up at once. Intuit will tell you that Quicken 2004 works with a Super VGA (800 x 600). It will, but the recommended 1024 x 768 with 16 bit color monitors will make your life more pleasant. Again, the numbers might be wrong, but at least you'll have a shot at seeing them.

So, what's a body to do? Well, I'm digging through my files looking for my copy of Quicken 2003. I'll revert back to that. It worked fine, no funny stuff, had almost all of the features of Quicken 2004 and it was stable. In the meantime, I'll keep watching Intuit to see if they fix the new version, and begin to understand what customer service is all about.

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Rear View Mirror vs Future Looking, January 9, 2004

By 

Jack H. Redwine "eniwder" (Kansas City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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

I have been using Quicken since 1994. Only draw back / problem I have had with the product is its lack of "forward looking" capabilities in the area of Budgeting and Cash Forecasting. I was excited about the apparent future looking cash forecast capability of Quicken 2004 Home & Business. However, after using it / testing it extensively, I found it to be buggy. That is, it produces a result with extensive calculation errors. It was difficult to get Quicken support's attention on this matter. I finally got an answer, after attempting to get a relevant response from Quicken for better than 10 weeks, and it appears the identified bug does not have enough priority to get fixed. If there are greater problems than this one (problems which get the higher priority) I'm a bit concerned about what additional product errors are there which the user is unaware. However, my testing and detailed checking hasn't identified any additional out and out computation errors. I would advise users to check the results from the planning features carefully for reasonableness.
In summary, Quicken Home & Business 2004 seems to be ok for looking back, looking where you spent your money (rear view mirror)... but use caution when looking to the future.
Also, I found technical support much more difficult to use / to get now than it was in past years. I contacted Quicken no less than 8 times and got incorrect and / or bad information from their call center which I expect is Off shored to India based on the three phone calls I had with them. Communication was difficult and frankly two of the individuals who tried to help me didn't understand this area of Quicken at all. I was finally transferred to a very articulate English speaking support person who explained that this bug has been given a very low priority and that it is likely that this bug will not be addressed.
This review sounds more negative that I intended. On balance Quicken is a good software package. Although I am very disappointed that Quicken does not work in this area, I am not aware of any other product that provides this cash flow forecasting capability. I will continue to use Quicken because, other than this feature, I think the software works well and is among the best out there.