Quicken 2004 Premier

Rating:
Summary: No Problems
Review: After losing data when upgrading to Quicken 2001 and getting a "Too Bad" response from support I was pleased with the upgrade to 2004 Premium. I did not have any issues upgrading and was able to add online access to additional accounts with no troubles. The User Interface is different and took some getting used to but it is easier to navigate across various areas of my finances.

Rating:
Summary: Year 2004
Review: Do not bother with Quicken 2004 Premier. Program will not open with operating system date set with a CY 2004 date. This problem started January 1st 2004. Intuit says they are "aware of the problem". Now, fifteen days into January 2004 no fix is available. I've used Quicken for over ten years.
VERY DISAPPOINTED in support from Intuit.
Send me an email ([e-mail]) if anyone has a fix.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Service for Buggy Products--Suckered by 2003 version
Review: From my experience with upgrading to Quicken 2003 (on Windows 98 SE), I have become disenchanted with this product. While my experience is only with versions 2003 and earlier, their response to my complaints does not lead me to expect improvement in 2004. Through the years Intuit has added more bells and whistles, made the product fancier, but at the expense of making it less usable. Worse still they have neglected to fix some nasty flaws in previously existing features.

When I upgraded to 2003, I immediately lost the ability to do transaction downloads in the background while I use other Quicken features. This is not a "bug" ; once you careful study their web based support material or start using the upgrade you find that transaction downloads in the background are no longer an option! Furthermore, if you use another program while Quicken downloads transactions, because everytime it finishes one step, the Quicken download pops into the foreground.

The new interface for reports is awkward and confusing. If you try to change the customization of a saved report, it insists on making a "new version" of the report instead of replacing the existing one. While this in many cases is a useful feature, your "saved report" ends up as the original with a clutter of re-customized reports. Supposedly you can disable this feature, but my attempts have failed.

Furthermore, there are clitches in the reports' interface with Microsoft's windowing system. In Windows 98 SE, Quicken frequently appears to lock up when Customizing reports because the customization window becomes invisible. Hitting the enter key the correct number of times will step you through the invisible options and often get you out of the customize mode. If you don't recognize that this is happening, you must kill Quicken with the task manager and restart it.

Finally, most annoying, Quicken has serious difficulties matching transactions from web-enabled downloads. With some institutions, transactions are rarely matched with any hand entries made in the register. This means you must manually match or delete the downloaded transaction.
Worse still, with other accounts, Quicken 2003 will match a downloaded transaction from 2003 with a manual entry from years ago as a "near match." In these situations the "unmatch" function does not appear in the menu. If the transaction is accidently accepted, instead of deleted and manually entered, you will have fun sorting through back statements to get your position correct. DejaNews users detail this problem in posts from as far back as 1999.

To add insult to injury Intuit refuses to acknowledge this as a bug in my correspondence through the Tuscon BBB (after Intuit refused to acknowledge other communcations). They maintain the function is working as designed! Their attempt at rectifying my complaint was to offer me the opportunity to pay to speak with one of their technicians! A non technical person called me from Intuit's President's office and explained this to me. She refused an offer for me to step through this issue with their technician to demonstrate that the problem was not merely an issue of the institution using duplicate transaction IDs.

If you think my ranting is unreasonable, Microsoft Money's reviews prove that one can write a personal finance program that will not anger as many users! My next upgrade may be to Money!

Rating:
Summary: Works great, stable so far, nice features
Review: I admit that I was put off by the reviews here, so I checked with Intuit's free, responsive online chat to ask some questions before buying. They had answers to my concerns, so I ordered. It turns out that none of the problems affected me. My January version may be more stable (release 3), or it's because I validated my old Quicken 2002 data file before upgrading (Validation is a file operation under the File menu that fixes errors). But I'm loving this version. The interface is different, but must be more intuitive because I've figured it out without consulting "Help". 401K's are a breeze to track now, my small hometown bank works online with this version, investments and performance are better tracked. Overall, it takes me less work and gives me a better picture - and no bugs yet after 2 weeks of power-using. Validate and backup your file 1st, then give Q2004 a try.

Rating:
Summary: Better than Microsoft Money 2004!
Review: I bought Microsoft Money a week ago because of the reviews here and had nothing but problems with it. Wouldn't even connect to my E*Trade account or bank account, only Fidelity. Fidelity had no problem connecting to the E*Trade account and bank account but Microsoft's answer is it was E*Trades problem. Sorry, but I write software for a living, immediately dumped it and downloaded Quicken 2004 Premier. Have had no problems with it running on Windows XP SP1, was all setup and connecting to all my accounts in less than an hour!

Rating:
Summary: Do not upgrade!
Review: I consider myself to be a Quicken "power user" and have been since 1991. Quicken Premier 2004 is awful. I just upgraded from 2002 Deluxe (skipped 2003). My PC has a Pentium 3, 1 gig speed, 256k memory. It's not enough to run this product. The program is such a memory hog that the PC locks up continually. I need to open the Task Manager, close everything that is running in the background, and can have no other apps open in order to work in Quicken. The changes to the interface in the securities accounts are drastic, unnecessary and not user friendly. Entering securities transactions is much more troublesome. You can't hide the Quicktabs bar anymore, thereby losing a lot of screen space. My custom toolbar is gone and you can no longer create custom icons for the toolbar. To recap, too much of a resource hog, no longer user friendly (and I am a CPA) and less available customization. This is an upgrade?

Rating:
Summary: Don't even think about it!
Review: I first bought Quicken Basic back in 2000, upgraded to Quicken Deluxe 2002 and loved, simply loved, tracking my quite modest bank accounts. Then, with the thought of "new and improved" flashing through my mind, I bought a copy of Premier 2004, not knowing what lay ahead. It installed OK, but I couldn't open any data files from the old system, and to top it off, my computer basically blew. I'm going to have to reinstall everything. Call it a coincidence, but I'd had no computer problems whatsoever before loading the Quicken CD-ROM. Even XP's "System Restore" didn't work.

Be forewarned, especially if you're running Windows XP. Intuit/Quicken has royally screwed up on this one.

Rating:
Summary: Do Not Upgrade
Review: I had been using Quicken 2000 which worked fine. The interface is decent and it did everything I wanted. I was suckered into 2004 by a good deal and some rebates. Worst mistake I made. The interface on 2004 (is bad. Quicken has decided, arbitrarily, to reduce the input screen, put banner-type ads on the bottom, and in general, not allow you to determine the look or functionality of the program. Plus, in importing my data from 2000, I found several errors that I had to manually fix. Who knows what else is lurking in there. My advice, don't upgrade. Intuit needs to take a different approach to how their program presents itself and what you're able to do with it. I hate this program and can't wait to dump it.

Rating:
Summary: Bugs, bugs, bugs....
Review: I had been using Quicken 2002 Basic for a couple of years and it seemed to work fine. Like one other reviewer, I decided to upgrade because of some rebates and the lure of being able to better track investments that Basic did not do... Well to start, it took all of about 3 DAYS to finally get my 2002 data file converted! No "easy upgrade" there... and I was converting from one Quicken version to another, not from some other program to Quicken. The program kept crashing and locking my computer. I had to delete and reinstall the program at least 5 five times. I finally called Inuit. The solution... uninstall 2004, reinstall 2002, go into my 2002 data file and make sure there were no saved graphs or reports that contained more that 12 months of data (my current file has about a 5 year transaction history). Once that was done, I had to backup that file, uninstall 2002, reinstall 2004 and reconvert the backup file. Still, if you set any graph in 2004 to a period longer than 12 months (i.e., use the "earliest to date" menu selection with dates that go back more than 12 months) the program will crash. The net worth graph on the "Overview" page shows complete nonsense (don't know what data it's displaying, but it's not net worth) and there is no way to customize or change the graph on this page. If you CHOOSE to enter transactions manually, the reminder box letting you know you can download transactions from the web continues to pop up every time, even after checking the "don't show this reminder again" box... very annoying. Intuit says it is aware of these problems and it "will be fixed shortly"... I hope so. How did this even get released with so many bugs? Better to stick with an older version.

I also agree with other reviews about the large number of adds. At least in 2002 you could turn off the add bar. No such luck in 2004... all of these things take up space.

Rating:
Summary: Investors Beware!
Review: I have been a faithful Quicken user and updater for at least 7 years now. The first 4 or so years, I would look forward to the next release and felt I got value for my money.

Unfortunately, around Quicken 2001 I started to question the value of the updates. Not only were the features less impressive, but they did not do much more for my main area of interest - tracking my stock investments.

I have more than one investment account and found both Quicken 2001 and 2002 to be less investor friendly. I held off for 2003 but figured that Quicken 2004 may be worth a shot (and I wanted the Quicken "Write a Will" program that went with it).

I have just spent a week trying to get the @#$@% Quicken 2004 program to work. I didn't have trouble with the program crashing as described by earlier users, but I could not get several features to work.

For example, there is a "Printer Setup" tab that is supposed to let you change the font size of what you print out. It would gleefully take my input, but it would not actually change the font size, even after I deleted and then reloaded Quicken 2004. I contacted an on-line Quicken help-tech and the tech's answer was "I have worked on my resources (?) and conclude that it is by the design of the program." When I asked "What does that mean?", he replied "You can not change the font". Oh...OK, silly me!

I spent untold hours trying to remove 0.000003 shares of Pfizer from my Quicken account. I was unable to do it even with the program's "Adjust Share Balance" feature, which works basically as "if all else fails, cheat!" So I guess I would now have to carry that 0.000003 of a share with me to the end of time.

The screens ARE confusing - there has to be a better way to do this. (Actually, I know there is - just look at an old Quicken 1999 or 2000 screen.) To help me with the mess, I bought the book "Quicken 2004 for Dummies", but it just touches lightly on investments. Definitely not worth buying if your are an investor.

Quicken 2004 does let you set up a fairly flexible Portfolio view to monitor all your accounts in one window, but if you try to look at just one account, you are faced with 3 or 4 "canned" views that can not be changed. Grrrr....

Of course, you may not be missing that much. Quicken lets you select such neat things as 'P/E ratios' and 'comparison's to market indexes' which would be really useful, but despite endless downloading of data, I could not get the program to actually show that information on the screens. Maybe if I called Intuit's help phone at $1.95 per minute they would eventually tell me that "it's by the design of the program" that I will not get that information to display and that maybe in Quicken 2005 it will actually show up!

So, to summarize my grumblings, my advice to investors is to carefully protect your old pre-2004 copy of Quicken. Don't even think about getting the Quicken 2004 version - do you really want to trust your detailed investment data to such a buggy, poorly conceived program?

- Ron, confirmed Quicken 2000 user!

(PS: Those of you who were Quicken users back when dinosaurs ruled the earth may remember "Investor Insight", an optional tag-along program that Quicken used to support. It was a great product for its time and would allow you to do such simple but helpful things as write notes which would show up on your individual stock graph as little icons. When you clicked on the icon, you could read the note. It was great way to store reminders to yourself such as "watch-out for the upcoming earnings announcement" and "sell at $XX". Sigh... that was the type of thinking Quicken needs to rediscover.)