Another disappointed long-time Quicken user
938590
Like several other long-time Quicken users I have been very disappointed with the Quicken 2009 release.  I upgraded from 2006 which I was very happy with but now I am considering a search for an alternative checkbook management program.  Some of the disappointments:

1.  The "upgrade" option for existing users turned out to be more expensive than buying as a new user.

2.  The Savings Goals feature was dropped from Quicken Deluxe.  I found one online poster saying it was in the Premium version but Quicken support didn't even give me that much help.

3.  Both the program help and online help are very poor.  Quicken's user forums are frequently offline.

4.  The Home Inventory feature is a joke.  This tool hasn't been updated since the mid-1990's.

I hope these is a financial "Firefox" out there that can save us from these Intuit and Microsoft behemoths.
2106117
I had Quicken 2012 for a few years and was recently forced by Intuit to upgrade to Quicken 2015.  Quicken 2012 was relatively bug free for me but the upgrade to 2015 has been painful.  I have "connectivity problems" on a regular basis which I never saw with Quicken 2012.  Quicken asks you to reset your accounts.  I have 10 accounts and I've reset most of them dozens of times.  I usually get them all to work for a day and then I have to reset them all again.  The other problem is that the system is putting transactions in the wrong accounts for some reason and missing many transactions. This forces me to print out statements and check each entry an move it if it needs to be moved or add it if it needs to be added.  For example, Quicken is putting my wife's IRA transactions into my kid's 529 account.  Every month I am missing dozens of transactions from several accounts.  This is a total nightmare.  Not sure if there are really any other options but if you don't need the automatic download of transactions, I would consider tracking your accounts in excel if you have any proficiency.  Not a great option for me but if I can't get it to work after a few more weeks of trying, I'm done with Quicken for good.

My wife is wondering why I'm spending so much time cursing at the computer for the last few months. I've spent dozens of hours trying to fix the issues with this garbage software and haven't actually analyzed my accounts in months because I am spending so much time clearing everything up.

p.s. I wrote this entire review while Quicken was trying to "reset" one of my accounts for the tenth time and I still see the spinning wheel.  I am not a fast typist.
485391
This version is buggy (like all Mac Quicken versions have been), and is annoyingly short on features.  It will download the same transaction from my bank multiple times.  And I can't get rid of some auto-fill categories, no matter how many times I delete them.

What's worse:  Quicken Financial Life for Mac, due about the same time Quicken 2009 would have been available, is going to have even less features than Quicken 2007 for Mac (which was released in 2006).  Of course, that doesn't mean Intuit will charge any less for the "upgrade."  I'm sure QFL will end up being a subscription service, so Intuit can get money from the people who normally only upgrade every couple years.

I only wish there was a viable alternative to Quicken!  I've tried all the other Mac financial applications, and they're all lacking, mostly in auto-download capability.  Why can't somebody make a better application than this dog?
1380297
Many issues with Quicken 15 and they're still not all addressed. I am still debating a return to Quicken 13, the last truly good version. However, I realize I will have to make the change sometime so will try to see it through this time.
2447663
I have been a Quicken user for over 10 years. When my dad bought me this for my new Lion OS laptop, I started researching if he had mistakenly bought me a "basic" version of Quicken. You can't even import old data into this version! None of the features I used to use and love in the older versions are there. It's like Quicken asked their developers to create a brand new piece of software from scratch without any regard for what used to be effective.

So disappointed.
277267
I've actually been a user of MS Money for years and felt it was time to migrate to Quicken before I had a crash. so far I haven't really done much with Quicken because I apparently have some work to do in Money before I can import years of data. maybe I'll get it done this weekend since it's raining.
4888855
I actually have Quicken 2004 in my shopping cart and was ready to check out - until I read the testimonials.  Thank you everyone for the warnings.  I'll stick with Quicken 2000.
2733334
After spending several hours with the software this weekend, I have decided that it is not very user friendly, particularly the budgeting tools.  There is no easy way to set up a budget and track the spending against the budget, and determine that all expenditures have been applied against the budget.  The budget reports in the actual expense categories were inaccurate, as were the budgeted amounts in the budget reports; they did not agree to the budget that I had set. The budget kept trying to readjust my monthly amounts.  It would be helpful to have a simple and easy way to see total expenditures by category and net income for a specified period.

In addition, a majority of my assets and loans could not be populated through Direct Connect or Web Connect, and some could only populate through Web Connect.  If  using Web Connect, the added security benefit of Quicken vs. Mint is diminished, as, from what I understand, the Web Connect works similarly to Mint and continues to download account information even when a dedicated server is not supplied by the financial institution.  To me, this defeats the purpose of having financial management software on a dedicated computer.  Also, Quicken was unable to download my retirement assets, and my children's 529 account transactions. I find this curious, when Mint does all of this for free.

The bottom line is that without the benefit of Quicken automatically downloading transactions from my various accounts, it is inferior to the simplicity and accuracy of a properly maintained spreadsheet.
2933642
I've used finance programs for a long long time. I started with Manage your Money by Andrew Tobias in the early 90's and it did a better job than any version of Quicken I've ever used. I've only gone to Quicken because it is the "Last Man Standing", but for the life of me I can't understand why. The program is unwieldy and often provides misinterpreted data. For instance, it records transfers of money between accounts as expenses in your budget. I attempted to get support from Quicken - What a joke !
I use the program to monitor my portfolio, manage by checkbook and create and function within a budget. I wanted to compare how the portfolio was doing over time, but Quicken screwed up so frequently that I would end up having to start over every few months with downloading the correct balances, thereby defeating the whole reason for monitoring. The budget program seems to function more for the ease of the program than the user. The personalization options are meaningless. And after all of this that force you to "UPGRADE" every three years just to get the "benefit" of what you have paid for already. Quicken is horrible.
556262
I was a satisfied Quicken 2010 user and upgraded because Intuit notified me support for 2010 was ending.  I purchased directly from Intuit and they have asked me to comment on 2013, so here is what I think about their product:  I regret making the upgrade for three reasons.  1.  The data file did not transfer to the new program.  Intuit customer service was no help and it took about 10 hours working on two different computers to piece together enough of my previous data file that I could rebuild my budget profile.  2.  The budget tool in 2013 is inferior in many ways to the tool in 2010.  Even though Intuit says this is an improvement - don't believe them.  The ability to see an accurate sum of the rollover totals has been removed, the ability to move rollover from one category to another is gone (despite the advertisement to the contrary).  You can reduce a rollover amount from the previous month but you cannot direct where to add the adjusted amount as you could in 2010.  I am sad to say I had to create a spreadsheet to do much of this work for me because Quicken 2013 falls short.  3.  Quicken 2013 has added features I just don't like that I can't remove and has limited the user's ability to control the functionality.  For example, the program projects into my created budget bills based on past bills that I may have paid once and will not pay again for years to come - like buying a new front door or paying for a condo at the beach.  You cannot completely turn off this feature and must constantly skip "bills" as the program finds them.  It also does not let me have control of the budget fields the way it did in 2010.  No computer can accurately assess your situation.  At least in 2010 I could modify the numbers to make it work, but in 2013 many fields are locked.  I suspect the programmers wanted to add some ability for proactive budgeting but the way the system is designed, it is more functional as a record of what happened and less about managing your money in the future.  The bottom line:  I regret the purchase and have had to create a number of work arounds to keep my budget on track.
66639
Like other reviewers, I have used quicken for many years, and the 2002 program has a much nicer look and feel.  The install went well and was easy.  Unfortunatly, the program has some serious bugs, I also found the Net Worth, Balance Sheet, and other "Balance" reporting reports completly erroroneous.  I too was unwilling to pay 1.95 per minute to assist Intuit in de-bugging their code.  I was given the program by my bank and am attempting to get their help in getting Intuit to do something.  I am probably going back to 2001.  I would not recommend using this product until the bugs are worked out.
834061
I waited a long time to upgrade from Quicken 2014, as Quicken is notoriously buggy, especially with new releases. I'm not sure exactly what kind of QA they have, but it's definitely insufficient. So, after 2016 had been out for a while and had a few service releases, I finally gave in to the badgering notifications (which despite unchecking "show me this next time" kept coming back) and went to 2016. I definitely regret that decision. Bank downloads have broken for about half my accounts, and the reminders show lines of code instead of the actual reminders. One of my accounts won't download transactions (which happened in 2014 occasionally), but when I try to reset the account it tells me I can't because I have transactions waiting to be accepted. The problem is that the transaction count is 0 and I DON'T actually have any to accept. I've tried contacting Quicken support, which is a complete joke. Three days in a row of sitting in a chat queue for over an hour with no reply. (Despite their website claiming that the wait is 5 minutes for chat, an hour for phone) You also can't email support, you have to sit and wait for them. All in all a very disappointing and frustrating experience.
3321018
I have been using Quicken for more than a decade and have tolerated being forced to upgrade every few years simply because there is no better alternative to this B+ software.

So I recently upgraded from Quicken 2011 (which was working tolerably) to Quicken 2014.  The look and feel of the program is exactly the same as the three year old Quicken--no changes or improvements that I can see.  However, the new program is clearly not ready to be released as it is filled with bugs.

Most annoying is that when I try to download transactions from my bank, credit card or brokerage house, the program immediately crashes. Quicken customer service, although happy to talk to you, is hapless. I have spent about 5 hours on the phone installing, uninstalling, copying and validating files--essentially beta testing this program which I spent $75 for-- all to no avail. Promises to get a call back from 'level 2'to resolve have been lies.

If you have a working version of Quicken, do NOT upgrade to this version. Am trying to figure out how to get my money back.
4669942
I can't adequately express just how dissapointed I am in this new version of Quicken.  Like so many I've been a loyal user for years - ~15 years in my case - and for about half of that time each new version got better.  Then things started to go downhill.  Several times I have tried new versions only to quickly return them for the 30-day money-back guarantee.  Now I had to upgrade from 2005 to 2008 to maintain data download.
Sadly, 2008 is awful.  My data was corrupted in the conversion process, but this didn't become clear until after I'd been using it for a week.  Now reconverting the old file and reenter all that data would be painful - and I should never have to do it in the first place!  Online downloads are broken.  Old features that I valued have been removed.  Existing features have been modified in ways that make them less useful.  There are no REAL new features - just cosmetic changes that I would just as soon do without.
I'd give it 0 stars if Amazon would let me!
I don't know what to do now.  I'm fed up with Intuit and Quicken, but it seems I have no where else to go.  Money sounds just as bad if not worse, and I'm not aware of any other alternatives.  If you know of one, post it here.  I'm ready to move on!
3910147
Purchased the upgrade from Quickbooks Pro 2008 to 2009 for the "improved" Online Banking functions. Frankly, I find the upgrade to be disapointing at best (Even after the first "fix" has been applied to regain *some* of the previous version's functionality). The addition of "renaming rules" for downloaded transactions is in no way intuitive or an enhancement to the previous version. In fact, the user is not able to even establish renaming rules directly. You can only edit rules that the program decides to use according to some hidden criteria. As a former user of Quicken Home & Business 2006, Quickbooks Pro has been a step backwards in functionality for Online Banking. Quicken allowed the user to create renaming rules and edit transactions on the fly after downloading from the bank. Frankly, having spent nearly $200 for each version (2008/2009) I feel like I've wasted almost $400 to gain a clunkier interface, slower performance, and extra reports.
332519
I like many have been a Quicken user for many years.  My tendency has been to upgrade every 2 or 3 years just because the versions only changed slight (not enough to warrant paying $50+ a year for).  We haven't used Quicken for a few years and decided to go back to using it to keep track of our financial lives.

The mobile sync is the reason we went ahead and purchased this release.  The wife and I miss the days of using Pocket Quicken and syncing information back to the PC in the house so that we could keep track of what we were doing outside the home.  With both of us now carrying smartphones and tablets, the new way of sync'ing seem to fit what we missed.

But, it has been a major issue.  Not from having issues with duplicate transactions or split transactions being deleted or corrupted.  I can get the mobile sync to work at all.  I've just spent an hour on the phone with support (if you can call it support since Intuit is using folks out of India), and got no where.  All I was trying to do was sync a couple of bank accounts and a cash account.  The cash account worked fine.  Tried to add a couple of bank accounts and Quicken would stop responding.  Support had me going in a scripted circle of validating the data file, removing the cloud account, adding accounts back in.  The last step was to remove the cash account since accounts are suppose to be linked to a bank account.  Really?!?

I'm very disappointed in this release.  Intuit should have done a better job of making sure the mobile sync function was working before releasing this product.  Looks like someone said "Screw whether or not it works.  We have a deadline to meet!"
2741228
I had owned 2008 Quicken for 6 years before I finally decided to upgrade. The reason I decided to upgrade was because the 2008 version would not connect to my bank accounts and overall intuit stopped supporting it in any way since 2010.
The new version being 5th or 6th after 2008 is barely any more functional. Looks extremely similar with some cosmetic changes.
But it has a ton of bugs. It included opening balances on its own where it wasn't... on multiple occasions when I downloaded transactions from bank accounts. It duplicated transactions for several accounts for no reason.
It sometimes shows incorrect online balance after download.
I think they just feel too comfortable that there's no real competition, which I don't understand why. But that's the only reason I gave two starts... nothing to compare to.