Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Another Bad Product - Best Business Plan Software Critique

By Allison Henderson


So, I'm downgrading back to 2009 Deluxe and I guess I'll have to find a different financial package where Farm Operations are considered a Business. When I do download transactions, Quicken limits how far back. With another product I'm trying, I was able to get transaction much further back.

I originally switched from MS money to Quicken 2010. After spending close to 60 hours with the set up I called the customer service (in another country may I say). However the accounts that wouldn't get updated in 2008 still don't, despite Intuit's claim that they have hugely expanded the number of financial institutions that Quicken works with. However, the entire program is much, much slower to load, and features that I used regularly like the "update account" button are now hidden in menus making it clumsier to use.

It did miss a few that it labels as "unavailable". As far as I can tell Quicken offers at least the same choices of online banking that MS-Money did, if not more.

This evening, though, I've run into bug, after bug, after bug. This software is horrible. But this time, what they did, is plain outrageous. And I'm still out the $50 for that Q2011 that I had to junk. I managed to finally get it to work in terms of doing my IRA accounts, but always had to download transactions manually for other accounts. The 2008 software actually crashed my Windows 7 PC anytime I tried to add my Scottrade brokerage account, even after starting over with a fresh install of Quicken. You feel like you've been left high and dry after the purchase. Also, they don't have a fair upgrade policy anymore. But once installed, both my bank Accounts and my credit card account stopped updating. They were updating fine with Q2008; now Q2011 would do an online update, download, and then refuse the downloaded transactions as "unaccepted".

Things may have changed, but I gave up on them years ago because the experience was so painful. It was bad enough they just read the help file to me, but their having a poor command of English made it difficult to follow them as well. There are some differences that I like. It will let you save it anywhere at any time and you can browse for any drive you want. So after a week of "No New Transactions Downloaded", then only the most recent transaction downloads & the skipped ones are NEVER downloaded. This happens for 1-10 days at a time almost at a weekly basis. I would not spend a penny on it but unfortunately there are not any other programs in the market.




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