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What a disappointment and extremely misleading on their part.If most of your accounts are at the same bank, don't waste your time & money with Quicken. It is the same as it was in 2006, you have to MANUALLY enter EVERY transaction, only now they will title it as 529 instead of generic investment. I will not be able to use Quicken to manage my son's 529 because I simply do not have the time to enter twice-monthly contributions from the past 2 years because each contribution involves purchasing 7+ funds every time. I was forced to upgrade from Quicken 2006 - not happy about that. It is much easier to log onto the websites and check your balances that way, considering how expensive and limiting Quicken can be. Unfortunately, it is really your only option for personal money manbagement besides Microsoft Money - and it is better than Money. It is a decent piece of software, I haven't had any glitches. However, I was EXTREMELY disappointed to discover that the new Quicken does not support updates for ANY 529 plans, unlike what it leads you to believe on the box.
Expect Quicken 2009 to be useless in the near future and good luck shelling out $30-$70 for the newest version. It is certainly fastest and clearest to file your statements and receipts and tally them with a pen and calculator. Inuit has shown themselves to "disable" the software after a few years and force you to upgrade to newer versions. Quicken software has continually deteriorated over the last 7 years since the 2002 version. (I am not normally so mean, but this software is horrible) The automatic downloads of credit card data ALWAYS have issues with dates and payments that require manual correction. Quicken 2009 is a bug ridden mess that takes more time to get transactions fixed then it does to manually check out everything by hand. It is probably faster to just type them in by hand.
I tried release 6 and it was still slow and crashing. I installed Quicken HB release 1 and it seemed to work fine. So far it seems to be stable and fast. Last week I went back to release 1 and I'm not upgrading any more. Then they came out with relese 2 and I was having problems matching downloaded transactions. With release 3 it started to crash doing "One Step Update".Release 4 and 5 still crash, but now it it runs much much slower.
This process is only about 60 percent successful. It installed easily for me, and everything seems to work well and quickly. While there is an automatic conversion to move your data, it works poorly. You should expect it to be time consuming and to require learning. Your tax data for the old transactions is still preserved in old accounts, and all new transactions will record in the new accounts you established in Quicken.
All the transactions do move, so you won't lose data, but you will have to make adjustments to recreate the categorization you had set up in Money so you can track expenses which are tax deductible. This is easy enough to do, just very tedious.A second hassle associated with the conversion is that the converter makes all accounts "checking accounts" even if they're not. The converter takes your Money files, turns them into an Excel spreadsheet, and then moves the data over to Quicken. Once that is done, you still need to review each transaction, one by one, to insure the tax assignment is correct.
I can see why Quicken crushed MS Money in the marketplace - and it just wasn't a case of more advertising.So if you are like me and being forced off MS Money, just pick a time when you have an extra day with nothing better to do than set up a new financial system. Be prepared to spend HOURS getting your new Quicken files to look like your old MS Money files. Solution: zero out your existing credit card accounts (but don't delete them.). Any complaints I would have about the way Quicken works would be minor quibbles.There is one HUGE problem that anyone transitioning from MS Money should be aware of, though: file conversion. After reading all the very negative reviews of Quicken 2009, I was very apprehensive about the transition from MS Money, which I had used from the beginning without problems.
So all your credit card accounts are now labled as "checking accounts" in Quicken after the conversion. Rather than transferring over ten years worth of transactions from Money, I told the converter to only go back as far as 1/1/2008. The interface isn't perfect but it is pretty good. The problem with this is that your bank will not recognize the accounts when you try to do the download. It picked up all the data for 18 months with no problems.Maybe I am too forgiving about the data conversion being so cumbersome.
Fear not.I did not have the bad experiences with Quicken 2009 itself that others are reporting. Nothing crashed. This isn't the problem you might expect. Then your bank will recognize the new accounts and download the transactions from this day forward. and transfer the balances into new credit card accounts you create in Quicken. When you lauch the converter, it asks you to identify the accounts you want to transfer and the date range for the transfer.
Any accountant will tell you that changing financial software is a huge deal. But once the files are setup correctly, I do like the way Quicken works and displays data, even though I am still learning the Quicken way of doing things. With Money going off the market, there are a lot of us who will be making this change.
It IS awful. Downloads from financial institutions that support downloading work well, once accounts are properly setup. The Quicken Tax Reports pick up all accounts, both new and old, so don't worry about losing tax data.The last hassle is that Quicken can only accept about 10,000 transactions in the conversion (they claim to be working on a fix).
This process took over five hours, just to do my transactions for CY 2009. I am not sure Quicken can be blamed for this problem, since Quicken cannot be expected to operate identically to Money, but this problem is a huge time killer. You can accomplish this by opening "Tools" and then the "categories" tab in Quicken and then modifying the lables and by changing items to match the IRS category lines you want them associated with.
I agree with the comments of other reviewer's about bugs present in this software that make it practically unusable. Like many of the customers who have had or are having problems with Quicken Deluxe 2009, I was forced to upgrade to Quicken 2009 after my bank dropped support for my Quicken 2004's, import file format. After spending several hours on the phone with Intuit's tech support, which included installing then re-installing Quicken, and applying several fixes, I am still not able to print reconciliation reports, import downloaded transaction files from my bank, or print my checking account register.
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