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 - Synchronizing Financial Institution data is a bad jokeMy wife thought getting Quicken would make getting our financial info together and keeping it updated a breeze. We got this in late 2005 and started setting it up in January 2006. After entering loads of information and trying to get the online update to work with all of our various banks / credit cards / investments, it now sits idle, a year later. A total waste of our money and time. If you think that this is some well designed program that will make keeping tabs on your finances simple, think again. I have an accounting background, I am comfortable with collecting and collating financial information. Quickbooks just doesn't handle the easy quick update data well, and it still requires that you be diligent and enter transactions and categorize expenditures. If you have the discipline to do this, and you are already doing it on spreadsheets, etc., then you may like Quicken. If not, you'd better be prepared to invest even more time into organizing and categorizing your finances. Rating: - And the third choice is...I've been using Quicken since 1990, though I'd hesitate to say I'm a loyal user. Oh how I wish there was a company to come out with an alternative to Quicken or Money! Like the two internet services available locally, both are expensive and both provide poor service, but they are the ONLY TWO AVAILABLE. JayD's review below, "A less extreme view" is so true. So is the one by "Jo Gusto." The 2006 version of Quicken implemented a feature that rendered my carefully maintained database of investment accounts tied to on-line downloads utterly unmanageable. I probably would have gone back to the 2005 version, but I know that Quicken eventually disowns previous versions and makes it impossible to download tranasactions AT ALL! Us Quicken users are like Charlie Brown who always thinks he'll be able to kick the football only to have it pulled out from under him by Lucy. We buy the new version because SURELY they will have fixed the bugs only to find the old ones AND some new ones! Aaaargh! Rating:  - Quicken Deluxe 2006It is not much different from my 2004 version. Somehow though I have double records of some accounts. Some accounts have reappeared that were hidden. Overall it still works for my checking and other accounts. There should be some way to get rid of the double accounts without losing the other one. I'm not as pleased with the last two versions as I was with earlier ones. Rating: - A less extreme viewSeems you either love Quicken or hate it. I'd like to give an unbiased review, if that is possible. If you look at reviews in magazines, they basically recommend quicken or Microsoft money by a nose over the other. I think you have to take this with a grain of salt. I mean, how much advertising money do these two giants pay those mags? I've been using quicken over a decade. It seems each new yearly product offers more bells and whistles, a few design changes, but not too much else as far as useable programming. I liken it to car upgrades. They basically change the shapes and lights, but the bottom line is you just want it to get you back and forth where you need to go. The most noxious thing about quicken is the cost. When you already have a functioning version that does what you want, there's no need to pay 60 bucks just to say you've got the latest version (unless you've got money to burn. If you did, you probably don't need this product!) These companies that give you 20-30% off aren't exactly doing you a favor when you don't have to buy the product at all. Secondly, the lack of support of its previous product used by banks was the ultimate in customer disservice. This essentially forced an upgrade upon its users (myslef included). Customer loyalty be damned! Third, it seems each new version has more glitches, at least according to numerous individual reviews. That's a sign the company is putting more into getting you to buy the product than working on the product to make it better. There is no excuse for this (Symantic, are you listening?) Fourth, there are clearly a few minor things they could do to make the product better. Do they get any customer feedback and try to add it to the next version???? ((Case in point: whenever I download mutual fund data, certain funds get reclassified. Can't they come up with a reliable way to lock features on certain accounts so they can't be changed when you download internet data?)) That said, I continue to use quicken, but to get around their mistreatment of their customers, I tend to buy only after the product has been out a while and I can get it at a discount of 60-80%. For instance, I bought 2004 in 2005, and I bought 2006 a month ago. I read the bad reviews and just wanted to see for myself what the problems were. I always save a copy of the previous year's data, since you can't go back without deleting and starting from scratch with an older version. I'm satisfied with the 2006 version, but it doesn't do anything more for me than 2004,2002, or 2001 for that matter. Bottom line, read between the lines of the reviews. A five star, I'd take with a grain of salt. A one-star indicates a faulty disk or a customer dissatified customer, probably for one of the reasons I mentioned above. This is still an above average product, but Intuit certainly doesn't command customer loyalty based on the way they operate. Rating:  - Great Software!This is great software. I had the "new user" edition for a couple of years, then bought this. It is a lot different, but I'm sure I will learn it like I learned the other.
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