Quicken 2005 Premier [Old Version]

by Intuit

Product Features

• Optimize investments, monitor worth, and view complete financial picture
• Instantly connect to bank and credit card sites with a push of a button
• Easy-to-use investment area looks just like a broker statement
• Track investment holdings; intelligent and tax-smart investing insights
• View average annual return for entire portfolio and individual accounts

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00029J1RW
• Item model number: 283647
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 28, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,562 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #14 in Software > Personal Finance > Investment Tools

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Quicken Premier 2005 helps you invest, monitor, and prosper in minutes! With over 100 feature improvements to the most-used features, Quicken Premier includes all the features of Quicken Deluxe plus exclusive tools to help you optimize your investments, monitor your net worth, and see your complete financial picture in minutes.

Features:

• Instantly connect to your bank and credit card sites with a push of a button. You'll have complete, up-to-date records without manually entering your data. Connect to more than 1,800 financial institutions.*
• Setting up and staying on top of your investments is easier than ever with an investment area that looks just like a broker statement.
• 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 (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 loses, or when taxable events occur.*
• Schedules A, B, and D tax reports help you to stay on top of deductions, interest, dividends, and capital gains.
• Investment sale optimization tool helps you to figure out what securities to sell based on criteria you set, such as minimizing capital gains taxes.

*Online services require Internet access and are subject to change. Services vary among participating financial institutions or other parties and may be subject to application approval, additional terms, conditions and fees.

Product Description

Quicken 2005 Premier offers smarter categorization of your spending, better management of your categories and total control of your investments. Its exclusive tools help you invest, monitor your net worth and optimize your return Back up and archive your Quicken files and export to an Excel spreadsheet more easily

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Much Different, But a Little Better, September 10, 2004

By 

David A. Lessnau (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quicken 2005 Premier [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

Per my usual procedure, I upgrade my copy of Quicken every other year. From what I can see, Quicken 2005 has hardly changed from Quicken 2003 (not necessarily a bad thing). Some things that I have noticed as being different are that:

- The program seems to load just a tad faster than before. On my 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 computer, my 19MB Quicken file changed from loading in about 2 seconds to loading in about 1 second. Insignificant, but noticable. On the esoterically theoretical downside, the Quicken 2005 upgrade process changed that same file from 16MB to that 19MB.

- The upgrade process suggested that I change my investing account so that the "checking" side of the account was reflected in one account instead of its existing two accounts. When I agreed, it processed the account and told me it didn't work right. Instead of reversing the change, it told me to restore a backup and leave the account as it was (unfortunately, it wasn't very specific about which account had problems or what they were). Not a big problem (since Quicken automatically made that backup when I started the upgrade). But, it could have been handled better.

- It appears that it's no longer possible to enter investment transactions directly in an account's register: you have to bring up a form dialog and enter the data there. If you enter such transactions only rarely, this isn't much of a problem. However, if you batch process a bunch of these, using that form gets tiresome pretty quickly.

- Unlike Quicken 2003 Deluxe, Quicken 2005 Premier allows you to set up scheduled transactions like dividends/interest in investment accounts. I'd have been happier if the program had noted dividend payments in the data downloads and automatically set up such quarterly scheduled payments. But, still, this is a good thing.

- With Quicken 2003, I was getting frequent error messages about my brokerage uploading data for accounts which didn't exist in Quicken. Those messages seem to have disappeared.

- When Quicken 2003 tried to download a quote for a stock which didn't exist in its data base, it popped up a warning screen and stopped the download until you accepted it. Quicken 2005 continues on without user intervention (a good thing, to me).

- The Quicken 2005 icon is UGLY and non-professional. I guess it's supposed to be a yellow dollar sign on a red-filled circle. Unfortunately, it looks like the "S" on Superman's outfit.

- Intuit seems to be practicing some type of "version-creep." From what I could decipher from the box and from Intuit's web site, I had to buy Quicken 2005 PREMIER to get the same investment capabilities I had in Quicken 2003 DELUXE. It's apparently a way of sneaking in a price increase. I don't mind the price increase so much as the fact that if I hadn't examined their table of capabilities, I would have automatically bought the DELUXE version and been unable to do the things I did with the old version. Irritating and potentially very bad from a customer-retention viewpoint.

- As others have noted here, Intuit is in the process of phasing out the use of QIF files. As I've never downloaded such things from my financial institutions, that doesn't affect me. The only worry I have is that this is yet another attempt by Intuit to lock people into their program (i.e., no data exchange). I haven't tried it yet, but there is an option to export REPORTS to Excel or to the clipboard (EDIT: I've now tried the Excel export and it's just the old export to a tab delimited file -- nothing new). If I could do that with an entire data file, that would be good. I'm not too sure about doing it with only what you can generate in a report, though. Also, as a work-around for importing QIF files to Quicken, I've seen messages that if you create a CASH account as a temporary working account, you can import your data there and then use Quicken's MOVE command to get the data in the proper account. Not elegant, but usable if you need it.

- I don't use the service, but from some articles I've read (do a Search on CNet), Intuit has changed the service it uses for online bill paying. It used to use CheckFree. With Quicken 2005, it uses Metavante. This, alone, doesn't seem to be much of a problem. But, the Quicken 2005 install process AUTOMATICALLY, and WITHOUT NOTIFICATION, changes your existing CheckFree account over to Metavante. Some people are rather upset about this (I would be too, if I used that service). There doesn't seem to be any way to opt out of, or reverse, that change.

All-in-all, I'm happy with the upgrade. It's not earth-shattering, so I don't recommend everyone run out and buy it. But, if you feel it's time to get a newer version of Quicken, there's nothing blatently wrong with this version and there are a few nice additions.

109 of 120 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars QIF files not supported !!!, August 6, 2004

By 

Shkshk (Pflugerville, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quicken 2005 Premier [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

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.

52 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars No QIF Import !!!, August 5, 2004

By 

txsp "txsp" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quicken 2005 Premier [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

Being a loyal Intuit Customer, I went and bought the latest Quicken 2005 Premier version. While trying to upload data for one of my new accounts, I noticed that the new Quicken does not support the QIF Import anymore for Checking, Savings, 401k and brokerage accounts. They only support the OFX format for these accounts !! Not all the institutions that I deal with offer OFX downloads.... You may want to check the following Intuit link to see if your financial institutions support the OFX format ...

http://www.intuit.com/personal/quicken/qif/