Quicken Home & Business 2010

I’ve been a Quicken user for almost 20 years and my last version was 2008. I was hesitant trying 2010 so soon after its release because I, along with many others, have been stung by bugs that have plagued earlier versions and have previously taken months for Intuit to fix. I’m glad I made the switch.

PROS

- 1 data file instead of 6 (plus an Attachments folder). It was about time! The single file at 101MB was a little larger then my previous files at 96MB.

- MUCH more resource friendly. The 2008 version frequently took up 1GB or more of RAM on my 3GB Vista Home Premium system. This version takes up only about 1/10 that. The many accounts I have (credit card, investment, banking) and the size of my file are probably atypical so your resource usage may vary.

- Faster loading of the application and updating of accounts. Hitting One Step Update is MUCH faster than before. One Step Update was the one action that slowed my system down and upped the memory usage quite a bit under 2008 and earlier versions. It still ups the memory usage but not nearly to the extent of before.

- More stability. 2008 used to crash intermittently – during One Step Updates. It might be too early to tell but so far no crashes.

CONS

- As other users have mentioned, the UI hadn’t changed much in many years. This version is certainly no exception. It’s still intuitive enough for new users to get up and running quickly. I’m not sure about MS Money users though (I tried MS Money a couple years back and I was thoroughly confused!).

- Memory leak? Previous version have suffered from this so it’s nothing new. When I first start this version, it uses 57MB of RAM. After having it up for an hour and running One Step Update a few times, the RAM usage went up to 140MB. The more updates I do, the more memory used without any signs of the program releasing said memory after the operations have completed. Still, the vastly smaller memory footprint doesn’t make this a real issue.

- Yearly updates. They’re always rushing a new version out the door every year and it shows. They should spend a couple of years fixing/overhauling things or throw more developers at it (i.e. have an elite team of developers working on a revamp separate from the team that does incremental annual updates).

Overall, if you have had resource issues and update problems, and/or like the convenience of 1 data file, then 2010 is worth the upgrade. If you’re perfectly happy with your current version then there is no compelling reason to upgrade other than Intuit shutting off online updates for versions over 3 years old (2007 users will HAVE to upgrade to keep downloading transactions from financial institutions and, if the past is any indication, you will have until April 30, 2010 to do so).
Rating: 4 / 5

I have been a Quicken user since 1995, and upgraded each year up until 2000, and then every third year. I knew that if the upgrade did not occur now, I will most probably have issues with One Step Updates for my banking / financial transaction downloads. Being a Home & Small Business User, unless a deal is available, it makes it hard to justify paying $100 every year or every 2 years. Anyway here are my first impressions after using it for a day.

I upgraded from Quicken Home and Business 2007 to Quicken H&B 2010. I had nearly 25MB of data in 5 Quicken 2007 files, plus another MB for Quicken Home Inventory. The install, software update took 4 minutes, including uninstall of the old quicken version. The personal data / online banking conversion to the newer version and one-step update took an additional 8 minutes. Like every previous version since 1999, Quicken added 5 icons to my desktop, including 4 weblinks to get Quicken-marketed products (message to quicken – stop cross marketing. its annoying).

The GUI (interface) is different from 2007, the software loads faster, less of a memory hog, and there are lots of bells and whistle (including tags for the transactions, different way to show upcoming payments etc.). There is always a learning curve when you use a newer version (after 3 years of using the old one) and so far what I see is a new paint job on an old car with newer version of older gadgets. Moreover they never upgraded the built-in Home Inventory Manager (which has the same DOS-Excel version since 1997), because they tried to sell a GUI-based buggy version as a stand-alone product and failed.

This was a required upgrade for me, but unless your quicken software is circa 2007 and prior, and you do not need to download your financial data, then there is no need to upgrade to this version.

I will provide another update after exploring what more this version has to offer.
Rating: 4 / 5

1. The UI is really poor, I was shocked when I started using it that any company could survive this long with such a poor UI. Many controls are homemade or hacks of the Win95 (1995!!) controls, they have unusal behaviors and are very annoying:

a) The scroll bar is the old Win95 version, on top of that it gives no indication that there is no where to scroll, like a real scrolbar, so if the screen is exactly full, it looks like you can scroll but nothing happens

b) They have 2 odd drop down lists, one is the Win95 version, the other is some homemade thing with art so tiny I cant see it (I am 50), very hard to use

c) Most the buttons are all squished down to a small size barely big enough to hold the text, again hard to see

d) Pressing escape, no matter how many times, won’t get you out of editing a transaction, ARRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

e) They are using some old style list for the transaction list, none of the columns can be resized

2. The transaction entry is the most horrible thing ever:

a) You ARE ALWAYS in edit mode, even on reconciled transactions, if your cat walks on your keyboard, good luck

b) Due to “a” you have to keep all the confirmations turned on, which gets old

c) There are no classic transaction forms, you have to use the inline entry in the transaction list, like tiny 9 point font made further hard to see because of the edit box borders crammed into the space

d) The transaction entry buttons hide the transaction below, the more recent one, hello?

3. The help matches older products, online setup is especially a frustration since most the help points to menus from past product versions that dont exist.

4. The online import is a nighmare, when setting up a new account there is no ability to select how much history to import, the system imports 90 days worth. This means if you are trying to convert a business on a particular cutoff date you can’t.

5. The signup process for online bill pay is like “security nuts gone wild”! Do they really need FIVE personal questions?

6. The online feature cannot link to equityline or mortgage accounts.

7. The online feature will not import the opening balance for accounts with no transactions within 90 days, even when they have money in them.

8. If you add an account that includes setting up a payment in Step 1 of the wizard, you won’t get to step 2, online billpay, you will have to find the menu choice. Don’t ask online help, it is for a different version.

9. Invoice entry is a cude small fixed size dialog in tiny fonts with crowded controls, there are no premade line items, you have to enter them over and over and…
Rating: 1 / 5

I have been a Money user for a decade or more. I use it for both business and personal finances. I liked being able to track all of my business expenses in one place and knowing how much profit/loss I’ve made since day 1. I was really worried when I read that Money was going off the market, and disappointed to find that there really aren’t any comparable products on the market. I decided to give Quicken a try, although I was scared by the negative reviews.

I had no trouble at all importing the files from Money. Everything transferred over, although I did have to spend a little time changing the name of some of the online banking services so that they matched Quicken’s. It also took me a little time to figure out how to set up the business side of things. But now that everything is set up, it’s running smoothly. There are still some things that aren’t great (when I have a transfer between accounts, it doesn’t automatically figure things out; I have to go in and adjust things on one side to put it in the right category then go delete the duplicate transaction in the other account), but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared.

Yes, Money is a little bit slicker in appearance. But Quicken doesn’t really look like something from 1994. Everything is in one spot, and it’s easy to see where the money is coming from and going to. I like that the business side has the tax categories for schedule C all set up. Of course it takes a bit of customizing to make it fit my own business needs, but for the most part I haven’t had any trouble at all.
Rating: 4 / 5

First, I would never have bought this product except for the demise of Microsoft Money. The only use I have for Quicken is to track my investments.

Second, Quicken Home and Business 2010 itself easily loaded on my Vista computer.

That said, my opinion is that for me converting Money to Quicken was a pain. Quicken kept coming up with error messages about open files, template.*, failure to recognize, etc. It seemed Quicken did not recognize the existance of Money on the computer. When I went to the help section, it gave me info for converting up to Quicken 2009, which is totally different, and totally useless, for use in Quicken 2010.

A tip: under file, go to file import and then to Microsoft Money file. Don’t be surprised to get error messages. Do not use the separate “Data Converter” program as it is for 2009 and older only.

Why can’t Quicken include a user manual on the disk or on their site? Why rely on “community groups” to possibly have a solution? Quicken can include promotional material for sale of checks and a credit card in the box but can’t include installation and use information?

How did I get it to work? I thought about installing the suggested trial download of Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe to see if that was a newer version that Quicken might recognize. When I downloaded it, it wanted to eliminate my existing copy of Money, which really concerned me since I didn’t have a disk for Money, as it was preloaded on the computer when I bought it. So I backed up the program to a cd, along with a data backup. I then decided to see if Quicken would recognize the Money on the cd for conversion and it did. So my Money data was converted to Quicken.

Now that it is there I must admit it is nice. I set up the desktop to open to my investment file and it updates the info well. I will continue to tweak the desktop to my preferences as I figure it out.

One of the big wastes for me is that Quicken wants to include all kinds of banking, credit card, bill paying, etc info on the program. No thanks, so I had to create nonsense files like my bank name being “none of your business bank.” Then I have gone back to delete as much of the nonsense as I have been able.

Bottom line: so far a good product but be prepared to spend time to set it up. I have about 4 hours into getting Money to convert.
Rating: 3 / 5