Quicken Premier 2006 [Old Version]

List Price: $79.99

Features:

• Comprehensive personal financial management software
• Optimize investments and maximize return; receive investment alerts
• Monitor spending with quick reports, charts, and graphs; stay on budget
• Find ways to save and invest; optimize returns and avoid April 15th surprises
• Investment-management tools for defining goals and balancing portfolio

Accessories:

NeatReceipts Scanalizer Professional 2.5 Mobile Scanner and Software

Customer Reviews:

Incorrect Securities Matching Algorithm [Posted on 2006-09-25]
If you plan on using Quicken to track investments beware that they will assign improper prices for any security that you hold where you have more than one class of that security.

When you address the issue to Intuit you might as well be talking to a monkey, in fact you probably are.

I went to the extent of deciphering the Quicken OFX log which showed that my financial instituiton and quicken were downloading proper prices, but that the quicken pc software then matched those prices against the wrong security. The first respons I got just said that I could send them the problem again, the second said to go to the quicken web page to get the price, and the third told me again I could get help by either phoning them, emailing them, or doing a on-line chat. This was after my third email with detailed explanation, copies of their OFX log, and copies of their price files, all showing the problem.

I'll probably try money but given its reviews I am not hopeful.

MSMoney user looking to switch - forget it... [Posted on 2006-11-05]
I bought Quicken Premier 2006 thinking the software must have a utility to convert an MSMoney file to Quicken format.

In the old days they did; however, it appears (after some internet message board research) Intuit is now focusing resources on improving their Quicken product for new users.

In other words, if you're a Money user and you're looking to switch, you have to download a third party conversion utility. In my case the utility crashed every time I tried to use it.

Intuit's help desk told me the backup plan is to convert accounts within Money one at a time over to Quicken format, then import. I didn't have much luck with the backup procedure either and ultimately decided Money was not that bad.

Interestingly enough, when I open Money the "File" menu includes a utility to convert an entire Quicken file to Money format. I don't work for Microsoft or own their stock, but in this instance it seems they have cornered my market (users of one program looking to switch to the other).

If you're looking to switch from Money, unless you want to start fresh or manually enter a LOT of transactions into Quicken, forget it...

Review of Quicken 2006 [Posted on 2007-01-11]
Easy to install, easy to use (as most Quicken products are). Too expensive for a year old version. Limitations with running separate files on the same PC that I'm still working on.

Bottomline: Quicken remains the industry standard for home and small business financial needs.

Quicken - Don't Do It! [Posted on 2007-02-02]
I hate to come down so hard on a program that is so widely used, but my experience with Quicken has been awful. At first I thought it was because I was simply used to other (easier to use) money programs. But I have suffered with Quicken for three years now and I am giving up and moving on.

The top three problems with Quicken:
1. Typing-in the date of a new year (for example moving from 2006 to 2007) automatically starts the new year and silently wipes out all cleared transactions for the previous year. This alone makes this (or any program) unusable. The one thing that no program can ever do is silently delete massive amounts of data without a confirmation, backup or even telling you it is happening. Because it is silent, you exit the program normally, create a back-up of the session and, in the process, overwrite your previous back-up. You lose all of your history with no way to recover it.

2. Reports seem flexible at first, but flexibility brings complexity. The problem is, there is no way to browse categories (their name for where you spend your money) and see a quick summary. You have to run a report every time you want to view an account or category. You can create them and save them, making it relatively easy to rerun them, but you have to rerun them. You can't simply browse and see the status of categories (how much did I spend on gas? food? postage? Christmas? etc.) nor can you quickly see which have had activity or not this month (handy for seeing if you forgot to pay a bill).

3. Creating split transactions is harder than it needs or ought to be - it is a click machine. The number of steps (or clicks) required to do simple things doesn't seem so bad at first. But once you start entering a list of transactions, you find it to be onerous. If a split is the same over and over, that's easy. If it changes each time you visit a store (like, say, Costco), it is a pain.

I am not a novice user. I have used personal computers since the early 80's for business and pleasure. No program has caused me the irritation and frustration that Quicken has. I have worked extensively with their customer support and they can't recover my data.

2006 premier proves usefull [Posted on 2007-05-17]
I have been using the 2006 Premier purchased in late 2006. As you might expect you must install the disk mushware and then register the product. Then you get to the "update check" where my dial-up must download for hours the latest edition available for what was paid for. I do not know the history of Intuit, but I think it is comparable to the biggies in that the proliferation of product is no reflection on the evolution of quality. I mean I've trained my WIN95 machine to do things and would never dare to update fearing the demolition of the system.
Quicken does some things very well. I have only one preferred stock in my portfolio so no problem. I could never set up a corporate bond in microsoft and Quicken maintains the tradition. You must sort of push the transactions along manually. Quicken has a "Help". In addition, I purchased 2 books that allegedly fill the chasm of no support. Forget it. One book in its umpteenth edition apparently assumes the knowledge of the previous tomes. I think the umpteenth and one edition will review the currant updates and promises.

Quicken is a great help for portfolio management and I know people using the accounting software for a long time. My biggest beef is the inability to print a list of translations. When monitoring an account over a year with hundreds of various transactions. looking at a few through a narrow window is nonsense. The list of accounts does not go away no matter what you want to do. When looking at my checking account transactions, I doubt that 5% of the entire screen is work space for me. Like 'My Yahoo' the company promos can not go away. Carefully consider that Yahoo is FREE.

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