How I Learned To Love Quicken Deluxe and Give Up on the Past

I read in the article, “At various times from 2014 to the present, I also tried Banktivity, Mint, Moneydance, Xero, and others. None met my requirements…”

I’m curious…what were those requirements?

Earlier in the article, there’s a bullet list of what Quicken 2007 did for me. I should probably have been more explicit in saying—“i.e., that list above”—but that’s what I meant.

Some of the packages I tried were poor or didn’t support at the times I tested them having a mix of personal and business accounts, some didn’t provide summary and transaction reports that could be derived from hierarchical categories set for each transaction, some didn’t support all my financial institutions.

I would get in some cases about 90% to where I wanted and then realize I was sunk. Xero, for instance, is very powerful, but business focused, and I found its configuration through the web just to test it out so frustrating and cumbersome that I gave up—and that didn’t include the issue that I believe I couldn’t have imported my old transactions.

The joy in this conversion is that Quicken Deluxe includes pretty much everything I need; the transition had a few hiccups, but once solved have not been a problem; and I can pull the tax and other financial reporting I need. I was able to build a report and test it against previous spreadsheets I’d assembled for paying quarterly taxes and they matched exactly. A good sign!

I think that my question got lost in my reciting my history of dealing with financial apps, but I’ll ask it again here: why do people feel that Web Connect (the ability to have the financial app directly link to bank and credit card accounts) to be vital?

I find it to be a security risk to have the connection information maintained in the app.I’ve never had a problem downloading the data in Quicken format and then having the app merge the data into the appropriate account. Having payments not automatically upload for my register does result in a slight bit of duplicate activity as I must manually activate my bank’s payment facility and, essentially duplicate entering the bill pay information. However, if something goes wrong, it’s much easier to troubleshoot and identify the concerned parties than if the app automatically submitted it.

So, again, I curious why some folks find Web Connect essential?

Mostly to avoid repeating tasks that a program does well and I frequently fumble. Gathering data for daily review from sixteen individual accounts is a task Quicken does well.

I honestly prefer to enter my data as well, although when in a rush the web connect comes in handy.

I bought Quicken a few years ago to try out. Data entry was so archaic that I gave up on it pretty quickly. There were a number of others things I didn’t like, but that was a big one for me. Enter, tab and a lot of other things didn’t work the way I expected them to.

The subscription model is a HUGE turn off for me as well.

There was a time where I thought it would be great to be able to record receipts on my phone and have them sync to Quicken when I walked in the house, but I no longer think that. I am pretty sure I used that Palm extension someone mentioned, many many years ago.

I’m still using Quicken 2007 on a Sierra machine.

Diane

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Quicken tracks retirement investment, mortgage, credit cards, personal, and business accounts for me, and I have access to my children’s various accounts (they are minors) to which I transfer allowance and we manage educational spending. So I accumulate 100-200 transactions a week. It was getting to be quite a burden manually! Downloading files is ok, but I am managing about 25 accounts (although not at 25 institutions), so the web connection option is invaluable for my purposes.

While I think there’s a point of risk introduced here, I don’t find it sufficiently worrying compared to all the other points of risk I can’t control!

I hate to keep accumulating them, but I was burning honestly in the $1,000s a year of my billable time (or my private non-working hours) with the previous versions.

Once we got through initial setup with Xero, it has been a joy to use for business accounting. But it wouldn’t be appropriate for personal accounting—among other things, it doesn’t support retirement accounts.

I suspect that how much Web Connect is a requirement or not depends on how many accounts and transactions one has. A few and it’s not that big of a deal to enter everything by hand. Glenn’s level I can see it being necessary. I’m somewhere in between, and could probably live with entering every transaction manually, but downloading them saves a bit of time, and also is more accurate.

On the security risk, there is some. However, Quicken stores login information in the keychain, so those passwords at rest are as secure (or insecure) as everything else stored in your keychain. Further, many financial institutions have a separate path to log in to download transactions that Quicken uses, so if you turn on 2FA, Quicken will still be able to download transactions but if someone manages to steal the login information, the most they could do is download transactions, not the stuff you’d do through the normal web login (transfer money, buy and sell securities, etc.) So IMO, the security risk is pretty low, but obviously others may feel differently.

This is an excellent point. My credit union, most credit cards, my retirement fund, etc., all have a 2FA requirement that is IP/device locked. So if someone grabbed my Quicken file and so forth, they would still need either my authentication app or phone # to log in elsewhere. Even if Quicken poorly secured the logins, my credit union and a few other financial sites are very very sensitive to “fresh” logins, so they would likely have to validate through 2FA, too.

Not with regard to Quicken, but with Xero, anyway, I consider the automatic connections to be access to the “truth.” I don’t assume there could be errors in the statements, and I’d hope that error handling would reduce the chance of mistakes (I accidentally re-uploaded an old Apple Card statement to Xero and was helpfully told that it had already been imported). But statements just don’t feel as connected to the real data behind the scenes.

In the end, the simple fact is that for me there’s more significantly more effort in downloading and re-uploading statements, which I’m forced to do with the Apple Card because there’s no automatic access to that account. It might be on the order of only 5-10 minutes per month, but there’s an additional cognitive load (I have to remember to do it each month) too. If that were scaled across all my accounts, it would have a non-trivial impact on my time.

There’s always a security question in such situations, but I don’t hear frequent reports of people having their accounts hacked through automatic connection technologies like Web Connect. It may have happened here and there, but if it were commonplace, I think we’d all know. My belief is that banks protect that sort of access really well, since exploits would be an existential problem.

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I’ve been a Mac Quicken user since 1996. I distinctly remember waiting with bated breath for the Quicken 2007 release so that I could finally upgrade beyond Snow Leopard.

I made the jump from Quicken 2007 to modern Quicken in early July 2021. In my case, I had no choice as the Q2007 database went unstable and became easily corrupted. I used a recent stable database backup(!) for the conversion process.

In fact, I had been preparing for this transition since September 2020 when I purchased a Quicken subscription. I performed several trial runs to see how well the conversion would work and how the new interface and reporting compared. I had stayed with Mojave on my 2018 MBP specifically so that I could run the Q2007 database conversion locally (upgrading to Catalina or Big Sur requires a remote conversion as @glennf discussed). I was convinced that the conversion worked, but I still preferred the look and feel of Q2007 and the familiarity of common operations and reporting that kept me efficient. So, I continued to use Q2007 fully aware that I would abruptly run out of runway as soon as I needed to move to (in my case) Big Sur.

The irony is that the conversion in July did not go as smoothly as those trial runs last year. Quicken had advanced a major version to v6 during that time. When I ran the (local) conversion with v6, the primary checking account was completely unreconciled with ramifications for several other accounts. My first reaction was that I was either doomed to start from scratch (going forward) or that I would have to invest untold hours making corrections without any certainty of success in the end.

Fortunately, all was not lost. After digging into the account, I noticed some double accounting associated with a mortgage refinance. I recalled having issues with that account not properly entering monthly payments (principal & interest didn’t adjust automatically for each month). Amazingly, I was able to delete just ONE month’s double entry transaction of the old refinance payment (the 1st payment), and the checking account updated to match the original Q2007 database perfectly. Having an engineering background, it was as close to MAGIC as I’ve ever felt a software program has accomplished. Those with a huge time investment in their respective Quicken databases can appreciate how much of a relief that was for me. It’s as if a massive domino rally reset itself after fixing a single domino. Glorious.

I still miss the charming personality and familiarity of Q2007, but I recognize that progress in this case requires compromise. I’m thankful that Q2007 was a remarkably solid performer well past it’s expected lifetime, giving modern Quicken enough time to mature into a useful alternative on the Mac.

PJ

For anyone interested in switching away from Quicken, there is a long list of alternatives, including some that are free, here:

Macintosh Accounting Software
http://www.macattorney.com/accounting.html
Item#4

One more comment… here is a link that compares Banktivity to Quicken.

For me the best part of Quicken was that it looked like my checkbook. Quite honestly the multi-pane model of modern software is unintuitive and works poorly with my cursor control devices, especially my Wacom pen. I love being able to move through the windows of my different registers without having whichever one I was using close. Mail comes up as a list. I don’t use Tabbed browsing in Safari, and iTunes is a big PITA because if I touch an alphabet key to move through a list of “songs”, half the time it is in the wrong column and I find my list of playlists moving instead of the list of “songs”.

Despite working with later versions, which seem just plain ugly, for my own accounting I’m still using 2007, and hanging on to my mid-2012 MacBook Pro.

There are too many other pieces of subscription software involved in moving on, and at my age I’m not sure it’s worth it anyway, but connectivity issues hover about in the background, especially with peripherals.

Well, I’m not the only one looking, apparently. Still looking for some type of formal migration analysis:

I went through the same process several years ago. I started with Quicken on Power PC in 1993 and I still used Q2007 on Mac. I resisted upgrading my OS but at the same time I knew the writing was on the wall and also tried a number of alternatives. I paid for iBank once since I think it was the closest option but still was awkward for me and just didn’t work.

In 2015 I bought the updated Quicken Mac and fully switched and other than a few hiccups in transferring account data (easily solved with a few investigations/comparisons of data discrepancies) the process was pretty painless. The conversion process for all the other alternative programs had the same issues or even more for me (mostly adjustment balances with no categories). Quicken Mac provided the better conversion for my data.

When the subscription model came out (2017?) I hesitantly signed up. I am not usually a fan of this pricing model, but the new Quicken team have used the revenue to continually improve the product which I am happy to see. I am a happy customer now.

I do still miss the easy Net Worth and Income/Expense options from the Q2007 version, but there are alternatives in the other parts of the current version.

I too have made peace with the new Quicken but miss one q2007 feature: easy transaction export and import. My partner and I both maintained separate q2007 files; To prepare annual tax report I exported transactions out of each of our two Quicken files - and then imported both transaction exports into a new Quicken file - from which I built the consolidated reports for the accountant. Can’t find a way to accomplish the same result in the new Quicken Deluxe…

Under the hood, Xero is just a general ledger, so depending on your needs you can still track your retirement accounts on it (although it won’t necessarily be able to have a bank feed to them). I’m happy to expand on how one might do this if you’re interested.

I’ve ranted about this elsewhere, but I do find the insistence on being able to keep old (meaning, say, more than 5 years old) transactions “live” in your personal finance software mystifying. If I really want to keep that stuff for that long, exporting to a spreadsheet is more appropriate than keeping myself chained to any one program’s file format, IMO. I treat my personal finances like a business in that respect - at the end of the year, I close everything out, run the reports, put them in secure storage, and then begin the new year as a new accounting period. I’m not saying I would intentionally throw out old transactions just for the sake of throwing them out, but I definitely wouldn’t let “But how will I know how much I paid for a slice of pizza in 2003” keep me from changing to software that works better for me today.

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It’s a bit like the opposite of boiling a frog (although apparently that is a myth). I only realized that I’d left all my transactions captive somewhere when it was too late. I could have exported or run reports to extract data and I did. I have a number of business and personal debt spreadsheets that have salient data.

But it does sometime happen that I need to remember if we had certain work done or who a contractor is or if we paid someone back an amount we promised in full. Being to scan 20+ years of data is far better than 5+. And unlike paper records, which I have rarely had to take recourse to over the last many years—typically only to find car loan or mortgage details I’d forgotten—it’s several times a year or more frequently that I look for this kind of old transaction-related data.

As you say this, though, I think I will do a full report dump to have offline at the end of future years. Because a PDF is easier to search if I don’t need to generate a customized report, but am just looking for one thing!