Intuit Quicken 2008 Home & Business Review

I love quicken and the ease of use for keeping all my financial stuff in one place. I actually had to update because quicken "retires" their versions after three years, and the online updates no longer work.  I actually preferred the older version (home and business 2005). Because of quicken retiring versions and making them inoperable I am beginning to get fed up with "forced" upgrades. If my program works for the activities I need to do I should NOT be forced to change.

On the point of the online updates, they still work great...but they are "hidden". You click on update, and you are supposed to still be able to work in quicken while the data downloads. But, it is actually a little confusing until you are accustomed to the change. In your account bar you see a little turning arrow telling you that accounts are updating, and then a red check when they are finished. Before it was more user intuitive, in my opinion.

 Supposedly this one works with paypal import, but it does not. You can work around that by setting paypal as a cash account, exporting your paypal data as a qif file, importing it into quicken.  qif imports will not work unless you have a cash account.

 I had hoped the upgrade would fix the stock quote feature, but it still fails much of the time.  If you google quicken and stock quotes you will find much written about this problem. It is a huge one. Quicken had me work around it by deleting a file they say got corrupted. This also deleted all my company stock price history. I forgot that, and when they had me delete the file a second and third time I lost it all again. This is private company, so I had to look back at the records and regather the information each time.

The year end conversion/backup does not work properly. I told it display only this years information, but all information remained. I worked around this by doing a file copy using the dates I wanted ( from Jan 1 2007 to present)..  I do not know if I mistyped, or if it imported incorrectly, but I only got the transactions from Jan 27, 2007....   but, I needed a more concise quicken data file, as I have used this program since dos days, and the file copy feature did the trick.

I had already read about the problem of it converting your old files, and had removed them from my computer. Don't neglect this step if you think you may have buyers remorse.

The new item that really bugs me is the way it highlights the last transaction I have looked at. It opens a drop down box that covers the adjoining transactions. (Say you are trying to look at  a series of numbers. Several times I have thought that one transaction was missing.... you have to manually highlight further down the page than what you want to  look at, so you can see all the figures you wish to see. I have searched for a new view, and there is no way to change this. It drives me wild.