Customer Reviews

Quicken Premier 2009 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

I would not recommend this upgrade to anybody that downloads transactions from their financial institutions. There appears to be a major bug (well documented in the Quicken user forums) which prevents downloaded transactions from matching entries currently in your registries. So far Quicken refuses to acknowledge this problem even though many, many customers are experiencing it. This bug creates a totally manual system of matching downloaded entries which greatly decreases the value of even having downloaded transactions to begin with. I have been a long time Quicken customer and user and this is by far the most bug prone release I have seen. I would switch back to Quicken 2008 in an instant because at least the core product worked there. If you thinking about buying this product I wouldn't. You will regret it just like me.

Quicken really needs to acknowledge that they are renting this software to you for 3 years; you aren't buying anything that will work beyond that. They sunset their software every three years, crippling it to force you to upgrade to a newer version. I can understand not releasing patches, and not supporting a product, but there's no reason to disable features that are working just fine. I really wish Quicken would just be upfront, bill this as a subscription service, and charge us $20 a year. I don't really want to take the hit to migrate over to another solution for financial tracking, but if you can avoid getting tangled up in their web, avoid this product, unless you don't mind being forced to shell out more money every 3 years.

This was a pre-emptive upgrade due to Quicken's sunset policy. I previously owned Quicken 2006 and was happily running it on Vista. The good news: it's just as functional as Quicken '06, at least for the features that I use (banking, investing, property and debt). The bad news: I had to upgrade for no significant improvement to the software.

But anyway, don't believe the horror stories about online banking. I initially had the same problems as the other posters, but that was resolved for me in the update to R2 (which you will immediately download), and even prior to the correction was never as horrible for me as other posters describe. Yes, there is a bit of a learning curve, but all-in-all there is no significant difference between Q06 and Q09. This is both good and bad. The good is that the new version contains all of the functionality that I relied upon in Q06. The bad is that Q06 fulfilled my needs nicely... I only had to upgrade because of Intuit's sunset policy... there is no significant improvement to the software... even after three years.

So, don't be scared by the negative posters... it's actually the same Quicken you know (I can only speak from '99, since that's the version that I started with). However, do be scared by Intuit. Their forced upgrade policy is a matter of record, and with Quicken online I am seriously concerned that some... if not most.. of the functionality that I use and expect with the desktop version will soon be a thing of the past. This may or may not be a reason to upgrade to Quicken 2009 now.

First things first: I'm not a newbie, but rather a software engineer who used Quicken from the DOS days until 7 years ago, when I switched to Microsoft Money for the free integrated bill-pay. Neither am I someone who can't adjust to new software; oddly, I actually rather like the novelty. Go ahead, call me strange. Many do.

But Microsoft's discontinuation of Money, and imminent (for me) shutdown of online services prompted me to switch back to Quicken.

What a cluster-you-know-what.

I know better than to actually attempt migrating seven years of data, so I started with a new empty data file. I created a Quicken BillPay account, and attempted to point Quicken to it. And that's where the fun begins.

Some choice highlights:

- online Quicken BillPay requires a password up to 32 characters in length, with no mention of special characters. I created a password of 26 characters, all alphanumeric. When I attempt to set up Quicken to use the billpay account, it tells me that the password is incorrect. Turns out Quicken-on-desktop is limited to twenty characters for a password. Why would these two integrated products have different rules for password creation when they must share a password? A call to tech support (and I concede they were very helpful) resolved this, but why was this even necessary? During that tech support call, I also learned that while online Quicken BillPay will allow special characters in the password, Quicken desktop will not. Nice job guys.

- So I continue by creating an asset account for my wife's car, with an associated loan account. After more than 10 tries I give up. Why? Because when I attempt to post a payment, I get an error dialog that tells me "It is too late to send the payment...<snip/> The earliest day for payment to <snip/> is 1/29/2270. 2270?!?!?!? Changing the payment date fore and aft has no affect.

- OK, so I'll make the payment using my bank's (non-integrated) billpay services. While setting up the loan and the payment reminder, I'm prompted for address and account information. When I "OK" out of that dialog, the payment amount is now prepended with a minus sign. When I enter the transaction in the register, it's recorded as a *deposit*.

At this point, am I supposed to continue using this product? Would you trust it for anything? Am I supposed to manually verify every calculation?

This would all be bad enough if 2009 was just released and if I could expect a bug-fix patch coming down the digital pike, but guys, please - I have these problems on R6?

What a sad state for a venerable product.

I have been loyally using Quicken and upgrading every year since 1997. This year, I upgraded my Quicken Home & Small Business Premier to the 2009 version. WOW, what a mistake! First off, (we use this for business and have about 20 clients listed), accounts are NO LONGER listed in alphabetical order (in the bar on the left). This may not be a big deal but when you have a bunch of accounts setup, it makes NO SENSE to get rid of this. I tried MANUALLY re-ordering everything, but the interface is extremely slow and cumbersome. After 20-mins and being only partially done, I gave up. NEXT, 2009 imported my data file from 2008 but mis-categorized everything. When you try to re-assign the category, I couldn't find it. I called tech support and she couldn't figure it out, either (and acknowledged it could be a bug). Also, when you setup a NEW customer account, the category option for invoice account is missing. I could only call it a cash or savings account. Again, in case i was missing something, I called Tech Support - they didn't know - said maybe a bug.

After a week, I sent the software back and then, since I couldn't use the up-converted data file in my OLDER version of Quicken, I had to spend 2-hours re-keying a week's worth of entries.

WHAT A DISASTER. Quicken, you really blew this one!

I had used Quicken until 2006 and it worked well then. Bought Premier 2009 and paid full price for it.

Installation appeared to be all right but the program kept crashing every time I used the password vault. Called quicken support multiple times and spent at least 10 hours, and finally it was I who figured out the solution. The password vault was crashing because the password for one of my credit cards was too long and it caused the program to crash. Now I cannot use the keyboard to move between transactions, whether using the tab or enter button. Spent another 5 hours with customer support and they found no solution.

There are other bugs as well. This program is not worth more than 10-20 dollars most, given the amount of heartache and pain it has caused me. I would return it but I have trashed the original packaging it came with.

Please do not waste your time or money on this useless buggy software.

I agree with the previous reviewer - even with October's R2 update, most banking transactions is not possible to download in registers; many investment transactions are not downloaded either.

Quicken 2009 is completely useless for downloading transactions. I, too, have used this product for years so I am familiar with it. The 2009 version doesn't accept my downloaded transactions at all, it doesn't even deny them, it just acts as if I had never downloaded at all. Very weird and very frustrating. I want my money back - this is horrible.

I've been using Quicken for many years. I generally upgrade every two years to see what's new, so I went from Premier 2007 to 2009. I haven't seen any new feature that means anything to me, the UI is less appealing than the previous UI, and 2009 had an annoying bug that they just fixed in r3. In summary, I like Quicken, but if you already have it, stick with what you have.

I have been using Quicken since the DOS version and am therefore very familiar with it. There is a rule that most Quicken users live by: Don't upgrade until at least Revision 1 is released. There have already been many bugs found with Quicken 2009. Just do a Google search and you will read about them. This has been a pattern with Quicken for several years and they don't seem to learn from their mistakes. I found it interesting that one of the positive posted opinions is from a beta tester. Given the number of problems with this new release, I would suggest that Quicken find them some new beta testers.