Rating: 
Summary: Agreement with support issues...
Review: I have to agree that Intuit's support is dreadful. I am a programmer, and I develop software for a company in Switzerland sort of similar to Quicken/Quickbooks. I felt that I had found a bug in Quicken 2002 when it corrupted my financial datafile. Now Intuit's policy is to NOT charge you for support if you actually find a bug in their software. Thing is, I did find a bug in their software (this is what I do for a living), but I spent most of my time arguing with the support rep that a corrupted datafile is most likely a bug in Quicken and not something I could cause as a user. In the end, his conclusion was that some other program on my computer must have damaged the datafile, and I should "reinstall the software." I really didn't need their help to try this approach, and I certainly didn't need to pay for their advice. Intuit support is quite poor.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth The Price of Update
Review: I have used Quicken for about 6 years now and love most of the program. However, the 2003 version is no improvement over 2002. The didn't fix many of the bugs and added a few new one. For example, you still can't edit your ESOP transaction once you enter them. One of the new bug is you can't resize the search results window.Also, Quicken has gone way overboard with advertising. The software in now basically ad-ware, which would be ok if they didn't sell it to you. Finally, the business functions are so cripple they're almost useless. You can't even chose the columns or entries on invoices.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disaster if You Use CheckFree Bill Pay!! Don't Buy It!
Review: I have used Quicken since the 80's, and CheckFree since 1989. I've upgraded every year. I bought Quicken 2003 Home and Business the day it was available for sale. Big Mistake! It did not support CheckFree Bill Pay. I have maybe 100 payees, built up over the years. The Payee List was gone and CheckFree was not a payment option. Eventually, Intuit said that it posted a patch on it's website, but it didn't work for me! I signed up for Quicken Bill Pay, which is really CheckFree in disquise, because CheckFree said they had heard that if you converted to QBP in the 2002 version, then the Payees would transfer to Q2003. After many calls, waiting for Quicken Bill Pay to send me a password, I finally made the switch, retained my Payees, and then found that the software would not connect to Quicken Bill Pay!! Plus, you have to pay the phone call for Quicken Bill Pay support (an hour on the phone didn't solve it) where it used to be an 800#. The Q2003 interface isn't any great improvement either -- hard to find the things that used to be conveniently located on the side! ...
Rating: 
Summary: It's worth the upgrade
Review: I read reviews between Quicken and Money 2003 and decided to download the Money 2003 trial version. After agreeing to update my system and installed Money, it took about 25 mins to convert my Quicken data file. I been using Quicken since the DOS days so the data goes back 14 yrs. Launch Money and it was very slow like it try to load all the data in memory. I try to move between accounts and the reponse is unacceptable. It eventually locked the application and get error box if you want to send data to Microsoft. Money 2003 is not for long time Quicken users. I don't think it the size of the data, but the conversion is suspect. I will stay with Quicken 2003. It's a new interface with familar looks.
Rating:
Summary: great software to keep track of finances
Review: I'm running Windows XP Professional with all the proper updates on all of my programs, including windows. I have had no problems with Quicken Home & Business so far but rather have been enjoying it's new features. I particularly like the option of having account totals next to the account "tabs" for quick view to plug the info into my spreadsheets. The whole program works better at downloading and is just all around easier to use than the former version. I do, however, have two gripes with Quicken. One is the way they turned their entire payroll program into a service, and without that service, you lose all access to the payroll software. My other gripe with them is the fact that none of their Quicken software is multi-user capable.
To get multi-user capability, one must purchace their expensive and complex Quickbooks Pro or Premier. I can think of how many families could be advantaged by multi-user capable simple Quicken software. This would allow different members of the household to access the same files at the same time from different computers rather then everyone being required to use the same computer for all financial record keeping. Come-on Quicken, get with it! I thought that your products would be multi-user capable by now!
Rating:
Summary: Terrible Upgrade
Review: I've used Quicken along with CheckFree to pay bills for ten years. It has been an OK method to pay bills and schedule payments, and there is some limited but useful categorizing and reporting capability. There have been no significant new features for several years--just pointless cosmetic and not very helpful changes in the user interface. I don't need a package like this to manage my brokerage account; my broker has a better one.
This year I was forced to accept a "free" upgrade to receive the "exciting new features" with Quicken Bill Pay, which is operated by CheckFree. They really wanted to force me to use an Internet connection rather than an 800 number so they could save money. Some of the features in the "free" upgrade must be "unlocked" for a fee.
The transition was a nightmare and required several calls to what turned out to be CheckFree tech support. By the way, don't forget to get on the Net before you use this package. If you aren't logged on and attempt to do anything signficant, it will crash and you will have to reboot. At least I have XP. I shudder to think what would happen with earlier versions of Windows.
The user interface is significantly worse. The 2001 and earlier versions were relatively simple minded. Good. I want to pay bills, not play mystery games with the software. This thing has numerous bugs and requires ten steps to do what could be done in a keystroke in older versions. Some things, such as changing the dollar amount of a periodic payment, can no longer be done. They now require you to completely delete the old name and address and re-enter the entire thing. You can't use this for mortgage payments with an escrow account. At one time you could set up a recurring payment and it just appeared on schedule in the check register. Now you are required to download it from the Net and "approve" it. This is a complete waste of time. Not only that, you'd better "match" these payments with ones in your register. Otherwise you will have the same payment duplicated in the register.
Every time I open the software it demands that I register the product, demands I also register for its web site, and demands that I download my account data from my bank (horror), which does not support this software. These demands continue even after I gave up and registered a name.
I manage software projects and I would be embarrassed to put out things like this. I have never tried Money so I can't say if it is any better. But this is terrible.
Rating:
Summary: Buggy Quicken 2003
Review: I've used various versions of Quicken for well over ten years, upgrading just about every year. Quicken 2003 is a huge dissapointment. I download transactions from my financial institutions and then reconcile the online balances. For some inexplicable reason I periodically get the error message "The total of the previously cleared items in your register no longer matches with the ending balance of your prior statements." I very much suspect that Quicken 2003 has a bug in its reconciliation module and that this problem is not due to operator stupidity, as I never had this problem with past versions of the software. Technical support for the product is miserable.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible!
Review: If you are looking for a software to help you with your personal finance - this is definitly NOT IT. Registration process required 7 phone calls to Support, because first 6 times i was disconnected. Chat support was very not helpful. After registration was completed and product started functioning... i was hoping it would go back to simply not working. My fairly simple finance and bookkeeping process was now more complicated then ever. What used to take me 15 min every Friday now turned out to be hrs of just trying to figure out how to enter a transaction and why every time i enter amount i PAID on my credit card my checking account balance goes UP? Additionally, i do not want to be reminded about "benefits of going online with Quicken" every time i'm trying to work with my bank online. All in all - if you never used any programs to do your finance - stick to paper, if you did - stick to what ever you used before. As a side note - if you are planning on using this to run your business - let me know, i'll be there to buy it after quicken is done with it.
Rating:
Summary: Got XP? Forget Quicken 2003!
Review: If you're running Windows XP, Quicken 2003 isn't for you. Yes, the interface has grown clunky -- the mark of software that's piled on so many bells and whistles that it's become morbidly obese. But what good is any financial software if you can't print reports? With XP, you cannot. Quicken 2003 simply crashes and closes when you hit the print command. "Windows XP is bad at processing 16-bit printing," a Quicken service rep told me today. His advice? Remove the latest and greatest HP printer drivers and install drivers for Windows 98. Of course, full-featured printing will suffer with most every other application on my computer, and XP poses serious obstacles to such a ploy since Win98 drivers are not certified for XP, but Intuit offers no other solution. When I pointed out that I run a lot programs and that only Quicken won't print in XP, my exasperated tech rep sighed, "I know, I hear that a lot." Publicly, Intuit is clearly in denial. There's not a clue about XP printing problems to be found on Quicken's support site. It's sad, really. Intuit once brought personal and business accounting into its full glory on the PC platform, but they've stumbled and fallen flat today. ...Unless you're one of the few still running Windows 98, forget this retro dinosaur.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Trust Intuit
Review: Last year Quicken Home and Business made a $12,000 error in the balance reports for my tax return. We found this error ourselves during an audit. When we requested a fix from Intuit, the reponse from The Office of the President at Intuit was, "Sure it's a bug, but Quicken is sold AS IS with NO WARRANTY. We don't guarantee that our software does anything at all, so we're under no obligation to do anything to help you. We will, however, give you a 5% discount on the upgrade, which *might* fix the problem." (Yes, that's 5%, not 50%) My recommendation: if you need a reliable accounting package for a small business, look elsewhere.
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