Quicken is on the surface a very comprehensive tool for managing your finances. It takes a good amount of effort to enter the information to get started, and a good amount of effort to maintain it - but it is worth it. All financial information, up to date, available on the screen. This is an incredible help with organizing finances, preparing taxes, scheduling bill payment.

My favorite part is the network connections to many financial institutions, which downloads account updates in one click and walks you through accepting the changes. I only wish that this feature was smarter to automatically categorize downloaded entries, based on my previous category settings - eg. when I make a credit card purchase at a supermarket "Vons" and categorize it as "groceries" it would automatically categorize all future purchases at the same merchant as groceries. Currently I have to do it by hand (even in 2001 Deluxe) and there is no interface to do it easily.

Entering data is helped by decent auto-complete mechanisms for every field.

The deluxe version has some additional smarts for tax planning, and for tracking employee stock options, which I use a little bit.

OK, that was the description of what is good about the product. Here's what I hate about it:

1. Outrageous tech support. If you want to call tech support, you gotta pay $2 per minute. Supposedly it's free if it's a known problem, but try calling about anything that looks like a bug, and they'll collect your credit card number, and at the end of the call they get to decide if it's a known bug or not. If you want to know how often they admit to a known bug, try checking out the newsgroups - and I assure you, it is not often... I had a problem where Quicken would not start. Called tech support, gave them credit card number, not only they could not figure out what to do, they say it's not a known bug and I will be billed... All their tech could suggest was to reinstall Quicken, which I had done before the call. Only after the call I browsed around the newsgroups to find the answer: Quicken did in fact start, but its window for some reason was not visible unless it was maximized. In the non-maximized state it was moved off the screen and minimized so that it was completely invisible. I was able to right-click on the Quicken icon and select move, then I moved it with the arrow keys onto the desktop, I was able to resize it - voila - after wasting several hours and paying their tech support for no help, I can use it again.

2. Unstable, crashes, GUI hangs, etc. In addition to the invisible problem above, I've gone through numerous crashes in 2000 and 2001, inability to tab through fields, GUI hangups, etc. The invisible problem is not just that I moved the window off the screen - you can't do that even if you wanted to. This is something that other Quicken users have experienced.

3. Pop up menus can be annoying - you have to go through many unnecessary confirmation and suggestion dialogs, some of which you can and some you cannot disable. My most annoying is the "congratulations" dialog after reconciling an account...

4. The investment piece does not offer option quotes. I do a lot of options investing and this drives me crazy. Everyone else does option quotes but not Quicken (any version). I can't get my portfolio value in it...


Recommended: No