Quicken Deluxe 2006 [Old Version] :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

Synchronizing Financial Institution data is a bad joke

2007-02-11
My 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.

And the third choice is...

2006-08-27
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!

Quicken Deluxe 2006

2006-08-15
It 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.

A less extreme view

2006-08-03
Seems 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.

Great Software!

2006-07-29
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.

Adware - Intuit should know better

2006-07-19
Quicken Deluxe 2006 is the right way to take charge of your financial life. Achieve your goals without the headaches of searching for every receipt and old check. Whether you're planning some investments, trying to increase yoru savings or just avoiding falling into debt, you'll have the tools you need to make it happen. The simple, step-by-step interface allows you to plan for everything from tuition expenses to a new home. It even supplies instant answers about how your investments are doing. Quicken Deluxe also simplifies your taxes, with built-in Schedule A, B and D tax reports.

Quicken is NOT compatible with QIF imports!

2006-07-17
Think real hard before you upgrade to the 2006 version. Yes, Intuit a.k.a. Quicken invented "QIF" (Quicken Interchange Format) but now you CANNOT Import QIF data from your financial institution. While many companies offer the "Web Connect" format which works fine (only a few glitches with some transactions), if your banks and credit card companies only offer QIF download format and you use this feature, then save yourself some aggravation and DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT! Check out other financial software. Maybe after we all convert to Microsoft Money Intuit will see the error of their decisions. Why would a company remove working functionality from their product is beyond my comprehension. Quicken user since 2001. I doubt if I upgrade on the Quicken path again unless they fix this.

Low rating because of lack of true innovation and lots of bugs

2006-07-16
Quicken has tons of great basic features, and some fairly advanced ones, too. I wouldn't do without it, and I have been a loyal customer for 10 years, upgrading faithfully.... and now I am getting p**sed off.

Why? Because Quicken is more interested in stoking the upgrade hamster wheel cash cow, than in fixing bugs and adding features that would TRULY be useful to real world people. I need FEWER bells and whistles, and more features that actually add true value every day, rather than something to add to a marketing bullet list of "whiz bang" features that really don't help much at all.

For example, I have been requesting a register view option that would allow me to see Category AND Memo in the One Line Display mode! My monitor has 1920 pixels across (3 times the original VGA reolution in width), and Quicken 2006 STILL FORCES ME to toggle modes in order to see either a lot of transactions per screen, or all transaction detail visible -- I can't have BOTH. For cryin out loud, why not?

Ok, another thing... the Paycheck form is really, really buggy. In Quicken 2006, even after online bug fix updates, you can't reliably edit a Paycheck entry in your register. Either you end up with some kind of strange entry duplication, or, when you attempt to edit individual amounts in the split, the input focus isn't handled correctly -- you can't edit the number just by clicking on it. You can work around that by clicking Edit next to the field, but to me, this is a FUNDAMENTAL bug, and they shipped this s**t with the bug present. And, in the meantime, I'm invited to "Rate my payees" using Zipingo, whatever the hell that is! (Why is this in my personal finance software anyway?)

Finally, I'll give you another example of a lingering bug that has existed in the last THREE releases, and they're not gonna fix it ever, I bet... when you download data, and it attempts to match register entries to the downloaded transactions, there are times when the matching isn't correct... either the wrong item matches, or it decides that there (incorrectly) is no match. You would think that pressing the Match Manually menu item for that downloaded data entry would give you a chance to fix it. Sorry, you are wrong; at least 50% of the time, Match Manually doesn't work! You see a transaction in your register which is a PERFECT match to the downloaded one, in date, amount, and unreconciled. You think that item will appear in the list of choices, and you'll simply click on that one, and the manual match will be complete. But (as John Belushi would have said) NOOOOOOO.... that unreconciled transaction you have your eye on DOESN'T EVEN APPEAR IN THE LIST OF POSSIBLE MATCHING CANDIDATES! Very clearly, the bug that is causing this phenomenon also causes the failure of the automatic matching. Sure, there is a work around, but again, there is a mindset of "pump out new, but mostly useless, features" over "make version N solid, then work on version N+1".

One of the things that annoys me to no end is Quicken's inability to swiftly and conveniently handle today's modern mortgage loans. ARMS, Indexed loans, 30/10/1 ARMS, etc, etc... they are all too common, and Intuit has done JACK SQUAT to improve Quicken's ability to handle these kinds of loans, with Option ARM payments, interest rates that vary monthly, and so forth. The best thing one can say about it is the tiny amount of functionality that is present at least seems to have no bugs.

I haven't had time to investigate alternatives... and I suspect that this juggernaut is just coasting on market share at the moment. They have a great franchise, but now the arrogance is showing. Is Microsoft Money any better? Is there anything out there that can top Quicken? If there is, I will be willing to pay for it, for I am sick of Intuit's attitude towards its customers on this particular product.

UPDATE 12/2006: I have a new "feature" to tell you all about -- the Quicken Tax Planner feature! Uh, I mean bug. Here's another area where the product is so riddled with bugs, it's unusable! This feature provides a multi-screen data entry process whereby you can put in your tax estimating information (or have Quicken extract it for you from your data), then Quicken will estimate your year-end tax situation: will you owe, or have a nice refund? Forget about trying to get a decent answer from THIS thing... it won't even "remember" the data you enter as you click around in the multiple screens, trying to get your numbers entered and perhaps doing a little "what-if" game playing. You'll get a DIFFERENT answer with each attempt! There's no consistency because the program simply *does* *not* *remember* what choices you made and what numbers you entered... it will -- seemingly at random -- revert to some default choices and/or data. In the end, it seemed to be telling me I owe $8000 in taxes. I got my TurboTax 2006 product, entered the same data into it, and the result? I owe only $800. Two products, same company, same data, very different results. Since Intuit "guarantees" the results of TurboTax, I can guess where they're spending their QA dollars. Certainly, it's not on Quicken!

Quicken 2006 is Broken

2006-07-06
I have run Quicken accounts since 2000.
From 2000 to late 2005 all my balances, both stock and bank, have been fine, and generally everything else was accepatble.

Prior to using Quicken, I used Managing your Money (MYM, remember that one?) and a Schwab software package back to the early 1990s.

Since I "upgraded" to Quicken 2006, both my stock and bank accounts have gone out of whack. In over 15 years of using personal accounting software, I have never experienced the kind of problems I have now encountered.

Quicken help has been of no help at all - Quicken help is now outsourced to India, and the people I contacted (and which you would need to contact) dont use Quicken, so they don't really know much about it. In my case, I got instructions about how to use the "command" button to fix a problem (I use a Dell PC - command buttons only exist on MACs), then I got instructions about how to export to QIF files and import back (which of course, duplicates the account entries).. Basically, there appear to be indexing (and other) problems that are not easily resolvable from any Quicken menu entries.

Just my opinion, but after 5 years of relatively smooth Quicken operation, the waters have gotten awfully rough.

I can't help but think this is because the software development and help was outsourced.

Whatever the reason, now the system seems like it is falling apart.

Quicken review

2006-07-04
Works well enough, although it seems to be challenged by multiple accounts with same credit card bank.