I’m better off using one of the free personal finance products online. I bought Quicken H&B 2011.
I did remedy the issue by attempting the process again. If you have been manually downloading transactions previously and want to now add the account to one step update, you will come across an option to “link to current quicken account.” I tried to update it many times and failed — either crashed during updates or updates completed but all the account values remain unchanged. I uninstalled and reinstalled and the same problem persists.
The new version was supposed to run faster and work with twice the number of financial institutions. But this is not what I experienced. At first, several accounts that used to update would now fail. Customer service was NO help and said they would “escalate” the problem.
Love the tracking feature for monthly expenditures. Well worth the money. The result is that you have to babysit the process for fifteen or twenty minutes just to confirm each account independently. I switched to use this after using Microsoft Money for many years. Not only is this product unintuitive and clumsy, the final straw is after generating reports finding that the data is wrong.
But I did receive a notification (one of their popups) indicating that I needed to upgrade, otherwise I would not be able to get my transactions from my financial institutions automatically. I have been fighting with the new software to do exactly that.
I also enjoy the categorizing of each expense. Broader choices also mean better record keeping.
I just got finished customizing my home screen in the 2011 version, and that helps, but still, I don’t like it as much. I owned an older version (2000). I am still receiving OL-221-a errors when trying to manually download like I always have since 2001. There is actually no way to directly contact Intuit by phone anymore. This software is great – as long as it works, which it doesn’t half the time. If you have accounts with Bank of America in Washington where there are two accounts linked for each bank account you’re going to run into problems. All records made the upgrade successfully. I miss the reports by tag as was provided in previous versions.
It also runs A LOT slower. With the discontinuing support of Microsoft Money my husband and I needed a new source for our home bookkeeping system.
Now, they may give 10 % if you make the effort to push it. Garden Spades.
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