Customer Reviews

Quicken 2005 Deluxe [Old Version]

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(79)

 

 

If you have the 2003 Deluxe version stick with it. It is the last Intuit version worth using. I regret upgrading to 2005.

When installing Quicken 2005, it removes Quicken 2004 from your system, converts your data and you will not be able to go back. If you do decide to upgrade, make sure you make a backup - you will want it.

(...)
Intuit's claimed benefits for Premium are misleading - nothing of particular value is offered.

The "over 100 enhancements" they claim to have made to 2005 are nebulous and difficult to find. Subjective as well.

I am a professional financial advisor and have helped people for years with their use of Quicken. Out of concern, I persisted and actually manged to get through to a manager in product development on the telephone. She was surprised I got through- and she was too busy to talk with me as she was getting ready to leave for the weekend.

I have several sugestions for upgrading the product and expanding their market- but since they don't matter to Intuit- no need to bore you with the details. You would never see them anyway.

The qif problem is real. They are pitting their customers against the finance industry. It doesn't look like a work around is in the near offing. I looked at Money several years ago and thought it was way below the quality of Quicken. I haven't been back since but have now re-thought. Quicken should talk to the Work Perfect people about competing with Microsoft- uh I mean Word What or something like that? Let's see - they didn't listen to their customers either - then of course there was Lotus 123 - but I don't remember what that was for......

I have been a user of Quicken and CheckFree for bill payment for over ten years. I received a "mandatory upgrade" of Quicken Premier 2005. I learned after the fact that Intuit has taken over the CheckFree feature under the same QuickenBillPay name.
There are two tech support areas now--one for the BillPay service and another for the Quicken software.

First, I had a problem "transitioning" to the new service.
It seems the "old server", "new server" and Quicken itself were out of synch with regard to the bank account information.
The software gave error messages warning not to use Quicken for bill payment until the problem was resolved.
The first person in BillPay tech support was unable to help me and referred the problem to Quicken tech support. A week passed and they never called.
I was told to pay bills directly through the web in the meantime. I was able to login and schedule two time-critical payments.
After receiving no response, I called and went through the whole process again. This time I was required to change the bank account information in Quicken to agree with the account information in BillPay. There were two discrepancies: one account with a number that I didn't recognize and an obsolete routing number that was ten years old. The invalid account number was deleted and I was required to change the routing number in Quicken. This time the "transition" worked. However, I was told that payments might be routed incorrectly because of the obsolete routing number and that I should go to the web and correct the routing number. To do this I was told to add the account as new with the corrected routing number and and delete the old account.
It turns out this canceled all of my pending and repeating payments, including the time-critical ones.
Not only that, the software created a new file of transactions and now some account information is in one file and some in another and they can't be merged.

I find this is very typical of Intuit's software. It's never properly tested and the alleged new features are worthless to me. The user interface changes each time and features that should be routine require relearning and sometimes no longer work.

I have used many versions of Quicken over the years, upgrading regularly, but stopped at Quicken 2002 after seeing 2003, 2004, and 2005 get panned on this site and elsewhere.

However, Intuit has backed me into a corner by discontinuing support for 2002 as of April, so had to decide between this and Money, which is also universally panned. Better the devil you know that the devil you don't, so Quicken 2005 it was.

Before getting into the software, let me mention that Quicken's "sunset policy" is garbage. It is one thing to quit supporting a product--you cannot find good people that want to help consumers with old software. However, to actually turn off functionality? That is inexcusable. If class action lawsuits were not a complete waste of time for everyone but the lawyers, I'd be out there drumming up a list of victims of this exceptionally poor business practice.

That aside, on to the software itself... I originally thought it wasn't that bad.

I have over fifty different accounts, including banking, loans, investment, 401(k), etc., etc., and they all upgraded perfectly. I was also given the option to merge my linked investment and cash accounts, which simplifies tracking (a nice new feature for those of us who are not hardcore accountants).

The user interface is slightly different than previously, but not radically so, and allows more flexible customization. With very little effort, I was able to get rid of most of the annoying "buy our products" links Intuit insists on including.

However, a month of use has brought forth some problems that are making me strongly consider going back to a spreadsheet. Some examples:

--There are a number of hard-coded rules to prevent you from doing something Quicken does not think is a good idea. For example, it is not possible to transfer securities from one account to another at all unless the accounts are of the same type-if not, as in the case of transfer from an ESPP account to a normal brokerage account, you need to "sell" the shares, then transfer the proceeds, then "buy" the shares in the destination account. I would say that rules out the possibility of using Quicken for tax purposes.

--Upgraded 401(k) accounts for those accounts that do not provide the number of shares simply cease to function. The first time that you attempt to use the Update Wizard to indicate your new account value, Quicken creates COPIES of all the existing securities, appends "-401k" to the end, and shows double the value of the account. You cannot delete the old transactions, as you would lose all transaction history. An hour of technical support resulted in the following brilliant suggestion: "Uninstall 2005 and reinstall your 2002 version, then re-enter all the transactions in the account (six years' worth), and upgrade again. That might solve it."

--In general, 401(k) accounts no longer provide accurate information. When updating the account from a statement, Quicken no longer creates automatic buys based on your new balance. Instead it creates bizarre "placeholder entries" that show that on Day X, you owned Y shares of something, but not how the shares got there. Apparently, it is intended that the user now goes back and manually creates the buy transactions that were created automatically in the past.

--When attempting a download from my bank, every transaction that I had before the upgrade to 2005 comes back over and over again. For example, I attempted to download my bank transactions from the past month and received every transaction since the account was opened. Hoping for a one-time glitch (surely once I cleared them out it would not happen again!), I spent a half hour right-clicking and deleting the duplicate transactions. On my next download request, all 487 of them came back.

--If you hold shares in an ESPP account, the name of the security has "ESPP" appended to the end of it, so it is treated as a different security than any shares of the same actual stock you may already hold (even if the shares are in the same account, and were placed there before an upgrade). So instead of showing 1000 shares of XYZ, you get 500 shares of XYZ and 500 shares of XYZ ESPP.

In summary, Intuit has extorted their customers into upgrading. Having done so, they did not fix any of the obvious software problems (why does the cash flow forecast choke when one has too many schedule transactions, but is perfectly happy to estimate how much money you will be spending???). At the same time, they introduced a number of rather obvious bugs. They provide pay-only support (other than for a very limited number of issue types that they will address on Web Chat if you live in the Pacific Time Zone or are willing to work on your problem at night). The consistent approach to support is "uninstall the software and reinstall it and re-enter all your work."

This is a very, very poor piece of software, and a very poor company. It is a shame Microsoft or someone else cannot get their act together and make something better. A spreadsheet or pen/paper would be better than this.

Intuit has really ripped off anyone who buys the new Quicken 2005. They suddenly (without warning or notice) stopped supporting the QIF format, and almost no financial institutions are compatible any longer. This is extortion by Intuit to get customers to pressure financial institutions to switch to OFX format and pay Intuit big bucks.

This should be the end of this product. Everyone should demand refunds and contact the Better Business Bureau immediately.

DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT.

But, it didn't work out. I purchased 2005 hoping it would fix my number of problems from Q2004. This was not to be the case. Long story short, I lost over 5 hours of my time on the phone with "Tech support" in India, I was finally able to speak with a specialist with Intuit who informed my there was nothing wrong with my file and they could not figure out the issue. I went through far too much with Q2004 and don't want to deal with the program anymore. I have returned Q2005 and will buy money when it comes out in a few weeks. This is all too bad as I really liked quicken, but the simple fact is, its a bad program with far too many bugs for this former beta tester and user of over 11 years.

I was an early adopter of Quicken back in 1992 when you could get the program to fit on one floppy disk. I bought the program every year even though most of the upgrades were minor, the main advantage was improved transaction downloads. Now with their latest upgrade 2005 they have taken a huge step backwards. My credit union and 2 of my Banks no longer work to import transactions. When I called my bank and credit union they told me the following.
"This is something that we have looked at doing previously, and unfortunately not enough members use the Quicken export feature to make the cost for adding the OFX export feature feasible at this time. We currently recommend using a previous version of Quicken or switching to Microsoft Money. Microsoft Money provides this export feature for free to financial institutions with online banking services. We can only hope that Intuit will realize that their pricing strategy is making them lose market share to Microsoft Money.
Best regards,"

My Banker went one step farther and offered to buy me the latest version of Money. Apparently Quicken has managed to really piss my bank off.

So alas, I must change, I refuse to lose the ability to download these transactions. My suggestion is don't buy this program unless Quicken turns from the dark side! Returning the program for a refund has been no picnic.

This is a big drawback !!. I upgraded to this version but cannot use it based on this limitation. In fact, I learned from Fidelity Investments ( www.401k.com) that QIF is no longer supported in Quicken 2005 ::--

"You can download your selected transaction History Period: 05/08/2004 to 08/05/2004 from NetBenefits to popular personal finance packages such as Microsoft MoneyTM or QuickenTM. The download file created uses the Quicken Interchange (.qif) file format. Please Note - the Intuit Quicken 2005 personal financial management software will no longer support the use of the QIF file formats."

While I agree that Quicken did phase out the support of QIF files (http://www.intuit.com/personal/quicken/qif/). But if Financial Institutions are not willing to support QFX, we CANNOT use this product. Downloading transactions is a core part / basic layer for using this software.

Also in case of Fidelity, they do not allow QFX connection to their 401k database but they do allow QFX data transfer with their Investment accounts. So I agree to some extent the fault lies with these financial institutions.

But my main point is that if I cannot download my 401k transactions into Quicken 2005 ( given the QIF limitations ), how do I use this version ?

Again Fidelity is just an example. I am sure there are many more financial institutions.

Maybe waiting till Quicken 2006 will give Quicken sufficient time to work with financial institutions to ensure QFX is supported across the board.

UPDATE :: In response to one suggestion to blame Financial Institutions v/s blaming Quicken, we are playing Quicken for a useable product. Financial institution are NOT selling any products. Finally, it about whether you can use a product or NOT. -- for which downloading transactions is the MAIN input into this software.

I have been a Quicken user for probably 10+ years. When I converted to 2005, old deleted memorized payees reappeared with no way to delete them again. Quicken math has been improved to display 5 shares @ $5 / share = $23.48 instead of the desired $25. For math errors, there is no on-line help or chat help. You have to pay $25 to help debug their program - and it's only day 1!

Intuit has removed the ability to import QIF files (for most types of accounts, i.e. checking, savings...) with the release of Quicken 2005. My financial institution only supports downloading transactions in .QIF of microsoft Money .OFX files. This is infuriating! Quicken 2005 is now useless to me. It's been a long time since I've been this frustrated with a piece of software. I'm switching to Microsoft Money immediately.

Whether you will love or hate the new Q2005 depends on which financial institutions you use and how well your software installation goes. If you only download from one financial institution, and it is a large nationwide bank, and your installation goes well, you will probably be happy with the new Quicken upgrade.

However, Intuit has switched file formats and bill-payment companies. Those of you who presently use earlier versions and have successfully downloaded data from multiple financial institutions into Quicken will probably find that one or more of your accounts won't automatically update any more. In addition, if you loved the customer service you received from CheckFree, prepare to be disappointed in Metavante, the new bill-payment service that you will be "upgraded" to when you install Q2005.

But if you have problems, as I estimate about half of users have, the worst thing you will experience is not the two-week downtime or the manual entry of your financial data; the worst thing will be the arrogance of the customer service you will receive from Intuit and Metavante.

You will be told, over and over, that only a "handfull" of customers are dissatisfied and that tens of thousands have gone through the process successfully and without problems - this in spite of the fact that Quicken 2005 has a 1 1/3 star rating (out of 5) here on Amazon.

You will also learn that Metavante will not return e-mails and will answer your call with "customer service" people, not techs, who will then try to relay your info to the techincal assistance department, who will then relay a prospective solution back to the "customer service" people, who will then send you a form-letter e-mail instructing you to call back and talk to a new "customer service" person, who will then put you on hold, look up the technical department's response, read it to you and then listen while you explain that the proposed solution was already tried previously. The "customer service" person will then tell you that he or she will re-contact the technical support people and be back in contact with you at a later time, meaning that you will again get a form-letter e-mail instructing you to call back, afterwhich you will wait on hold, talk to another customer service representative..... well you get my point.

This process will continue until you give up, call Quicken and convince them to give you the instructions to uninstall Q2005 and reinstall Q2004, afterwhich you will have to manually enter your data, since Metavante won't work with Q2004, and CheckFree won't be available after March 1st, 2005.

Some of us here on Amazon find this "upgrade" extremely disappointing, since we have been vocal advocates of Intuit, Quicken, and Checkfree for over a decade. Now we find out that we cannot get the benefits that we have grown accustomed to, and that as of March 1st, 2005 we cannot use ANY Quicken with CheckFree, no matter how much we are willing to pay.

Today is February 27th, 2005, and I still don't know what to do. My only advice is to wait to purchase Q2005 until after Intuit addresses all of their problems. Based on the experience detailed here on Amazon, I would guess that you have about a 50-50 chance of having a successful installation and being able to download your transactions into the software - slightly better than the odds of winning in Vegas.