Customer Reviews

Quicken Premier 2006 [Old Version]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

First lets not compare apples and oranges. I've used Money since it first came out but I think Quicken is a much more comprehensive application. Heck--they've been around a lot longer than Money. There's even a guide for it--that more than I can say for Money. Unfortunately, the program is not for your casual user. For example, if you use the converter to convert money files, it can complicate/mess-up your categories in Quicken. Quicken comes with its own set of categories and the converter puts them on top of the existing ones creating confusion. In some cases it doesn't even attach them to the correct category. That means you have to clean it up yourself. I know because I've been working on it for the past two days and I'm still not satified with the results. I even bought the 482 page guide to help me in the process. Each program has its pros and cons. Quicken has much better report/charts/graphs. That's why I'm trying to change over. If you're just starting and don't have a lot of historical information I would swap to Quicken. On the other hand, if you have a lot historical information (at least 4+ years) like loans, credit cards, etc. I wouldn't make the switch. A lot of things can go wrong and you'll spend hours trying to figure out what happened. Don't buy this software if you're not willing to spend hours trying to learn it.

I just bought Quicken 2006 (Premier). I had been using Quicken 2000 and wanted to update my ability to manage my investments. I was dismayed by the bad reviews here, but couldn't find a product that looked any better, so I bought it and hoped for the best.

So far, I've been very disappointed. I have had nothing but problems with the investment management functionality. When I set up my accounts initially, each time I went through the setup wizard I got different choices for no good reason that I could see. Even though I own the same mutual fund in more than one investment account, the wizard wouldn't let me do this and I had to set up with the accounts with zero balances then go back and enter my transactions outside the wizard. When I liquidated one investment account and tried to transfer the cash to a new account, Quicken asked me whether this was a contribution to a 2005 or 2006 IRA, and there was no way to say that this IRA was ten years old. Then, when I tried to set up to download my account activity, the main reason I bought this product, Quicken would only let me set it up on some accounts, even though the accounts that don't work are all with Fidelity, Fidelity tells me these accounts can be downloaded to Quicken, and I have other Fidelity accounts that I have been able to download in Quicken. I suspect that the problem is that my husband and I have four separate accounts with Fidelity with different customer IDs and PINs, but I can't verify that. In fact, Quicken has a "PIN Vault" to let you store your PINs for downloading, but it only lets you store one PIN per financial institution, not one per account.

I've tried to figure out all of these problems, to no avail. I started with Quicken's help. No help. I went to their web site and searched the knowledge base. When I have found documents that looked relevant, they were missing. Then I tried live help. Their web site lets you type in questions for the investment center and submit them, but then you get a message saying that investment center questions are too complicated for live help and to try email. In the meantime, the question you typed in has disappeared, and you have to re-enter everything. Then, every time I've asked one of these questions through email, I'm told that I have to call their technical support line, which costs $25 per call.

This product and the so-called support that goes along with it are a disgrace!

Addition: I've been using the program for a while now, and found something that I cannot believe. One of the most important functions of investment management is to track your performance, but Quicken (2006 and the past few versions) don't track the performance of any investment that you didn't own as of the end of last year. I confirmed with Intuit that they used to have this feature, but it often had problems, so they just got rid of it. So don't expect to track your performance correctly if you've purchased any investments this year!

I used and was happy with Quicken 2003. After being nagged into upgrading, I bought the 2006 version. What they DON'T TELL YOU is that it installs a proprietary version of QIF called OFX that will not work on many of your accounts. They charge the financial institutions for the privilege. They expect you, the customer, to pester your bank into using it!

What if Ford called your car in for a free upgrade recall but after you got it home you find that it will only work with a special FORD GAS? Would you feel a little ripped off?

This is what Quicken has done.

Worst of all, Quicken 2006 can no longer import some of my credit cards statements. I have to enter them by hand! With 2006, Intuit has removed the ability to import QIF for most accounts. Apparently, they want to lock in their customers and financial institutions to using their proprietary flavor of OFX (the replacement of QIF). This requires financial institutions to pay Intuit some fees and not all financial institutions agree. Why not use standard OFX? Note that Microsoft Money seems to not have this problem, because Microsoft uses standard OFX. I am no fan of Microsoft, but by being less greedy than Intuit they made a smart move here, and Microsoft Money now looks more attractive than Quicken, because it is more open.

I will be switching to MONEY.

Buried in the help data (where only a tiny fraction of displeased customers will find it) is the offer to accept the product back for a refund. I encourage everyone to do so. Duplicity should not be rewarded.

I finally decided it was time to upgrade from Quicken '99 (which I really liked) so that I could download stock quotes from the internet. Guess what - Quicken 2006 won't download preferred stock quotes, options quotes, or the pink sheet symbols for Canadian stocks! Quicken.com has all those types of quotes available, but they won't download into the program, making it largely useless for me. The only work-around is to create a Yahoo portfolio, download it as a csv file, then import it into Quicken. And even then, there is no "browse" to find the file. You have to manually type in the path EVERY DAY!

Downloading accounts from financial institutions is a great feature with one exception: The first time you log on to, say, your credit card account, the program may download hundreds or even thousands of transactions. If your account was currently up to date, you don't need these. There is an "Accept All" button, but is there a "Delete All" or "Do Not Accept" button? NO! You have to delete each transaction, one by one. I got to delete 447 of them. You can't even use shift or ctrl to select batches, it's just delete one by one.

These things really make me wonder what on earth the Quicken people are thinking.

Update 12/1/05
I'll go a little easier on Quicken now that I've had it for a month and a half. The things I complained about initially are still valid, but one star was a little harsh.

What is great about recent versions of Quicken compared to older versions is the online updating. I will never again have to balance my checkbook. I just log on to Bank of America and every transaction is downloaded into Quicken. Same with credit cards and brokerage and mutual fund accounts. Saves hours of hand entry, if you're the "perfect records" type like me. This is really what I upgraded for, and it works well.

Some stuff is kinda dumb tho. You're cruising along updating accounts and suddenly Quicken says, "unable to detect internet connection". Weird. Just hit "ignore" and it goes ahead and updates the account. And it always compares your online mutual fund shares to your shares in Quicken, and makes you deal with discrepancies of .000000001 shares, which is so stupid.

Ultimately, it's a good product - it's just that the software writers need to get out into the real world a little more.

I've been using Money 2002 since it came with my laptop. I decided to upgrade to Quicken 2006 Premier and it's awesome. In typical microsoft fashion, I found Money to be quirky, hard to navigate and the general interface to be not pleasing.

I have seen some people post complaints about switching from Money to Quicken, but I had no problems and switched 2 checking accounts, a savings account and a retirement account in 15 minutes. The only reason for me to keep money is for a record of old transactions.

As good as this program is, don't pay $80. Google it and you can find it for less than $40; less than $30 if you do a little research.

Overall, I think Quicken Premier 2006 is a pretty good product. I've been using financial software for about ten years and would not be able to get by without it. I started with Quicken which I used for several years and then switched to MS Money for 2004-2005 (Money looked more attractive and I thought Quicken had lost its edge).

I have to say I like both programs. Even though Money is a very attractive program in terms of its overall visual appearence and experience, I went back to Quicken for 2006 for the graphs. Quicken uses has a larger variety of graphs, incorporates nicer colors and its pie charts don't have 50 million slices for every expense. Setting up was a snap. It took longer to install the software than to download my bank, stock brokerage, IRA and 529 account balances (unfortunately I could not download my 457 plan with The Hartford). For me switching was easy. I don't worry about importing/exporting data from one program to the other, I just start over. If I had needed my old Money data, I probably would not have switched. I think it is theoretically possible to export data, but after reading these reviews about how much fun it is, I didn't bother tryingt.

I like how the Quicken acccounts are organized on the home page and being able to see Net Worth right away. Loading Quicken, you go straight to the home page instead of that annoying Money startup page. As for storing all of my financial accounts and data on microsoft/intuit servers, I'll pass on that. That's just plain creepy.

Bottom line- Quicken has better graphs/reports and has a better home page than Money, even though Money looks good.

I am a longtime Quicken user - more than 10 years. I decided to upgrade from Quicken 2003 to Quicken 2006.
- Installation did not go smoothly. 2006 could not recognize my 2003 files. I called support. It turns out there is a known issue sometimes with conversion from previous versions. I had to uninstall 2006, re-install previous version, call again the technician etc... so much for the 'easy upgrade' that is advertised.
- After installation, my desktop was cluttered with icons advertising various products such as credit cards and online banks.
- After one week of usage, the software had frozen several times my computer and I had to reboot every time. I can't recall Quicken 2003 ever crashing.

Worst of all, Quicken 2006 can no longer import some of my credit cards statements. I have to enter them by hand! With 2006, Intuit has removed the ability to import QIF for most accounts. Apparently, they want to lock in their customers and financial institutions to using their proprietary flavor of OFX (the replacement of QIF). This requires financial institutions to pay Intuit some fees and not all financial institutions agree. Why not use standard OFX? Note that Microsoft Money seems to not have this problem, because Microsoft uses standard OFX. I am no fan of Microsoft, but by beeing less greedy than Intuit they made a smart move here, and Microsoft Money now looks more attractive than Quicken, because it is more open.

I give 2 stars because if you're lucky (no crashes and your financial accounts statements continue to work), the software has useful features.
Overall, the upgrade was a source of so many problems that I would not recommend it. Use caution. If you are a new buyer, you should investigate Microsoft Money.

I use Quicken for investment and personal financial management, so I part with the $60 each year to stay current. This year's upgrade has some nice features making it easier to take advantage of online or email statements from financial institutions (including attaching cleared check images to financial transactions). However, the process seems to require too much manual copying, pasting ,etc to be of much interest. If I was a casual user of Quicken 2005, I'm not sure I'd find value in moving to this year's edition.

I purchased the download version (it was the same price as the CD version). Intuit's website specifically said it was the exactly the same as the CD version. HOWEVER, it is NOT the same. There are several multimedia portions of the program that simply do not function. An error message occurs when you get to those portions. Of course, you can still use that feature of the program by clicking past each message, but it is annoying. Every other click, the message occurs.

I contacted customer service, both through Intuit's live support and via email. The answer was the same "just continue to use the function." In other words, just ignore the messages. They want me to continue to ignore the messages (somewhat like they ignored my problem.) Both contacts with them, the answers were worded ALMOST exactly the same. Very "pat" answers.

I will not purchase Intuit products again.

I wasn't very happy at being forced from Quicken 2003 by the sunset provisions. But with the $30 rebate for Turbo Tax and Quicken purchased together I was able to get a good bottom line price for an upgrade to Quicken 2006 Premier. Now I'm delighted with the asset allocation feature of Premier. As a believer in asset allocation of one's investment portfolio I was finding it extremely difficult to mechanize in practice. A single mutual fund frequently includes several asset classes in various proportions. Quicken automatically looks this information up for you, along with all your individual stocks. In addition, Quicken allowed me to easily enter the asset class breakdown for my savings plan at work. Now I have a complete view of my investment allocations and can make appropriate adjustments going forward. As a DIY'er I don't think I could have solved this problem by myself without resorting to the on-going expense of a financial planner. This upgrade was the best $30 I've ever spent.