An Introduction to Quicken Online
Published on - January 8th, 2008 (Modified on - October 14th, 2009) (by J.D. Roth) Intuit releases a new product today: Quicken Online, a web-based version of its popular personal finance software. I’m a long-time Quicken user, so when Jodi and Jim from Intuit offered to give me a preview of this product’s features, I jumped at the chance. Please note: I haven’t actually used Quicken Online myself yet, and I am not being compensated for this preview. (15 Feb 2008: I have joined a Quicken Online affiliate program — if you sign up by following one of my links, I earn a small commission.)
Geared toward new users
Jim began our interview by emphasizing that Quicken Online is different from the desktop version. “Quicken Online is targeted toward non-consumers of personal finance products,” he said. “There’s a large segment of people who do nothing around personal finance. About 41% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Quicken desktop products are for people who know they want to be better, and are willing to seek out help. Young consumers aren’t willing to do that, but they still have personal finance needs.”
Quicken Online’s basic philosophy is to take as much work as possible out of tracking your money. The software “learns on the fly” — when you categorize or rename a transaction, it remembers this for the future. It also learns from other Quicken Online users.
Like other online personal finance software, to use Quicken Online you must supply the username and password for each financial institution you want to track. Quicken Online connects to the accounts, and then aggregates all your financial information into one place. (Intuit does this all “in-house” — it doesn’t sub-contract aggregation to Yodlee or CashEdge.)
Quicken Online in action
Once Quicken Online is set up, it auto-updates with information from your savings accounts and banks every day. The software will assign categories based on past experience, though you’re free to change these at any time. As you’d expect, Quicken Online lets you run a number of reports. For example, you can get a quick snapshot of how you’re spending your money:
The program tries to encourage good personal finance by showing whether you’re living within your means:
Quicken Online offers a sort of social network for support. “From within any screen in the product, you can bring up Live Community,” Jim told me. “You can see questions and answers from other users and from support staff.”
The software automatically maintains two account balances for the user: the balance according to the bank, and the “real balance”. Most of us have learned that there are inevitable lags between when we write checks or submit electronic transactions, and when these events are reflected at the bank. The bank doesn’t always really know how much money we have. Quicken Online displays the bank balance, but it also tracks the “real balance”, the actual amount of money you have available. This is a Good Thing — I’ve heard too many horror stories from people who use their bank balance to plan their spending and end up overdrawn because of it.
Possible drawbacks
Quicken Online is not a complete personal finance solution. Not yet. It doesn’t offer any sort of investment tracking, and its reporting functions are more limited than what existing Quicken users may be accustomed to. Also, certain features we know and love (such as the ability to split transactions) have not yet been implemented. Some of these features are coming in future upgrades, but right now the goal of Quicken Online is to introduce new users to the concept of tracking their money.
Security concerns prevent many people from trying online personal finance software. I asked Jim how Intuit plans to deal with privacy matters. He assured me that user information is safe. Your account information is not retained once you’ve set up Quicken Online. “If somebody were to break in to the servers, they couldn’t get account numbers,” Jim said. “They’d just be able to see how you spent your money.”
Quicken Online is currently offering a 30-day free trial, after which there is a $2.99/month subscription fee.
Assessing the competition
“How is this different than Mint or Wesabe?” I asked. “Why would anyone pay for this when there are free solutions?”
“Good question,” Jim said. “For one, we’re advertising-free. We make money off the monthly fee. Mint makes money by selling you things.” Jim also stressed that Quicken Online has better connectivity. “And it has the best user interface over Mint and Wesabe,” he told me. “There’s better categorization. Once Quicken learns, it’s pretty easy. It’s just a better experience.”
You can use Quicken Online with your iPhone (or other PDA). Intuit also hopes to integrate Quicken Online with TurboTax Online for tax year 2008.
The bottom line
With so many web-based personal finance tools out there, which should you use? Nobody can answer that but yourself. Quicken Online looks like a fine choice, but if you already use Wesabe or Mint (or another program), there’s no need to change. If you don’t yet track your finances on a regular basis, give each of these a try to see which best fits your style.
As for myself, I’m perfectly happy with the desktop version of Quicken.
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I have been using Quicken online for about 3 weeks now on a free trial basis, and though I really would like the product to work out, I’m afraid I’m going to have look elsewhere. It’s fairly buggy — log-in can be problematic, sometimes it won’t save manual updates to an entry, accounts initially did not refresh easily. And it can’t seem to obtain the check numbers from my bank — I have to enter them manually, which can be very confusing. Also, you can’t export your data to a spreadsheet or print it out. That makes me nervous — your data is forever hostage to Quicken.
I really wish it worked better, because when it does work, it’s really just about good enough for what I want to do. You can track your ongoing credit card purchases in one place to keep your upcoming balance in line, you can enter future transactions to get a look down the road at your cash flow, and the charts present a pretty clear picture of your spending. I could probably live with the bugs until they are fixed, but I’ve received no assurance from Quicken that the check number issue will be fixed, though they say they have referred it up the chain of command. The inability to export my data is probably the dealbreaker though.
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So, to follow up from the last post, I asked Quicken again if they could resolve my problem with check numbers. Here is their response:
Dear Mark .,
Thank you for contacting Quicken Customer Care.
try to download transactions again in a brand new file because there could be possibility of the damage in the file
The problem I see with this answer is that any manual changes I made to entries after they were downloaded — categories, names, etc — would be lost if I downloaded them into a brand new file. Not a big problem now, but what if this happened after a lot of data & changes had been entered?
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Your customer support is terrible. Your online support doesn’t help resolve my credit card payment issue and directs me to the phone support, but the phone support doesn’t support “Quicken Online” because they aren’t trained. You obviously created a product without building out the customer support aspect.
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Quickbooks supports printing dunning letters from the database … but only for MS-Word users.
Any company small enough to rely on Quickbooks is small enough to use Open Office.
It’s not that OO can’t read the *.doc file that Quickbooks makes … QB looks for MS-Word and, not finding it, refuses to create the file at all.
That’s a BIG minus in my book. I’m using QB now, but when I out grow it I won’t be looking to upgrade it.
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Quickenonline does not support their customers at all. My bank account was updated and kept current, within Quickenonline, up to a point. Then there was some hiccup with the update process, which they have refused to address. My bank account now is not updated at all, making their service totally un-usable. I have requested help four times and left numerous feedback, and they have ignored them all.
I was running Mvelopes at the same time, for comparison. Mvelopes had the same hiccup with updating, and at the same time; but they cleared it up right away, and my accounts are all current with them.
Quickenonline’s lack of service is very disappointing.
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Thanks for the review. I was researching this program to possibly use with the iPhone but appears they still have alot of features to work on.
They have been adding tracking investments now which really is not a priority for me on a mobile platform. Still waiting on useful features like tracking my cash withdrawls to catergorize the money spent more effectively.
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Mvelopes= GARBAGE and will not refund your advance payments, you can still use the useles service until expiration.Why though?
Mint=kinda nice and free,
Quicken online=Fair, no reports or exports, uggh
Yodlee=very nice, kinda plain, greatest connectivity.
Buxfer=could be great someday, not yet there, free.
Seems someone could fix up a website hit eliminating the shortcomings of these finance sites. Quicken did in quicken DOS and is still riding the idea.
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[...] An Introduction to Quicken Online at Get Rich Slowly [...]
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I wish I could combine the portions that I like of each. I was happily using Quicken online until a couple of weeks ago when they completely redesigned the site – for the worse. Many of the features I used have been handicapped and the new stuff that was added isn’t useful in its current state (a “what’s left” view that only supports one account is pretty useless, at least for me).
I tried Mint, but it doesn’t support one of my primary accounts (or one of my investment accounts, or one of my loans). I like the layout and feel of Mint better, and I really like the ability to split transactions. However, another problem I had was that when I classified a negative transaction (say a rebate) to a category, it isn’t subtracted out when viewing charts of your expenses, so it looks like you spent more than you actually did.
Anyway, I’m still looking for the right product. Or maybe I’ll just develop it myself. (If only I had the time…)
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Try “You Need a Budget” software for budgeting (a $50 one-time subscription fee, I believe): http://www.ynab.com. It is wonderful. I’ve been using it for 2 years to help my elderly mother’s finances, and it has been absolutely fantastic. It’s simple enough for her to use, and is very strong on the budgeting functionality, unlike others that are out there!
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Sigh. … Quicken. — I’ve been a Quicken user (desktop version) since the early 1990s. My current version in Quicken 2006 Home and Business. I run Quicken virtualized on Linux in Windows 2000.
I get a pop-up in Quicken saying that online download of transactions and price updates will cease in April 2009.
So, I look at Quicken 2009. It suggests that it *might* run on Windows 2000. I send a support question to Quicken as a direct question: will it or won’t it run correctly with all functions on Windows 2000. The answer came back an unequivocal NO.
Since I’ve converted to Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 at this writing) and the only Windows hosted application I’m still using is Quicken, that means I need to find something to replace Quicken.
I’m investigating GnuCash right now. The initial account set up took a while but now that it’s up, it’s working well enough.
I’d like to solicit suggestions from this thread on what else is available. My requirements are simple: either Windows 2000 or Linux hosted; QFX either direct or via download capability; investment tracking; stock and mutual fund price updates via QFX. — Thanks in advance for your help
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Here is the bottom line…Quicken is at this point, geared to win people over from Mint.com, Wesabe.com, Vodlee, Mvelopes, ect. It’s not there to sync with your desktop version of Quicken or bring the greatest finance software to the “cloud”, not yet at least. I’ve tried Quicken, Money, Quiken Online, Mint, and YNAB.com. All of which serve a purpose. Quicken understands the concern of not being able to do everything its desktop version does but as I write this I bet they’re working on the paid “cloud” version of Quicken personal finances. The logic is simple, why would Quicken build a “cloud” version of its product when people are just getting used to ONLINE banking. There must first be trust of putting your finances online. I know many of you already use bill pay services through your bank or transfer funds via online banking but most are not there yet. Thats the purpose of Quicken Online, to lure those without purchasing and installing software.
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I’m not asking for the full featured desktop version. I just want some basic functionality. Quicken Online was serving its purpose just fine until they screwed it up with their “improved” version.
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Amanda,
Its not in the best interest of Quicken to make a free product that do what your asking. Yes, soon you’ll be able to split transactions but Quicken won’t give the ability to track investments for free. Your their primary customer who purchases the desktop software. How will they make money if the main features of the desktop version are online? Again, they are trying to get people used to logging in transactions, looking at spending reports and when that person finally purchases a home they look to a more comprehensive product like desktop quicken. After reading your posts it sounds like your looking for quicken deluxe 09. Trust me when I say this it will be the best 50 bucks spent in a long time. Quicken will eventually come out with a cloud version but not until people are confident enough to bank online. There are still millions of desktop users who would never put their finances in the cloud. It just a matter of time though and quicken knows it. Quicken online is to gear people in to it.
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Actually, I just want the old online version back!
I don’t care if they track investments. (I only mentioned those because Mint does, but doesn’t work with mine.) I just want them to go back to the online version they had before they messed it up. They changed the interface and it was all for the worse.
I actually have the desktop version, but I liked the online one (before the change) better. What I really want is a quick check of my overall financial picture, not an in depth analysis tool.
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Amanda,
I’m looking for the same in webware. Mint came very close but you can’t enter transactions in the future! I’ve read many reviews about Mint regarding the lack of that simple feature. I dont mind Quicken Online but I dont like how cleared transactions are dumped into the cleared transactions section without review. Sometimes they dont match an upcoming transaction and you’ll end up deleting the upcoming transaction because it has already cleared. It’s a simple workaround but that a huge feature I value in the desktop version of Quicken. Everything gets dumped into downloaded transactions of each account and its up to you to accept or manually match the transaction. It’s a control mechanism that the online version lacks. I have all loans, credit cards, savings, and investment accounts tied into desktop quicken online. Most are updated automatically when I open the software. I can see in a split second where I stand. I recently began testing Quicken Online so I dont know what the old version was like but so far I don’t think its ready for the current Quicken user. As I mentioned before its purpose is to lure people into Intuit’s products. This is just my personal opinion. Intuit’s management really stinks they need to stop producing versions every year and slow down to forecast. It seems like the more and more version they produce the more disatisfied people get with their products. They recently removed the starter edition of Quicken and pushed the Online version. This just tells you they just dont understand their audience. They dont want to lose market share to some tiny start up like Mint.com. What they need is to create a sync between the desktop application and online. This could act as a backup of QDATA and give users basic functionality while on the go. If you could quickly add transactions, see your total in each account, cash flow forecast throughout the month, and budget report wouldn’t this solve the issue. I’d say so. If you go onto the quicken community so many people ask the question “why doesn’t quicken online sync with my quicken”. Those poor fools sing up thinking its going to sync. Why not it’s what people expect in this fast pace information era. Heck, look at successful Google. They’re working backwards trying to make desktop products out of webware. It’s the future of computing. I understand the complexity of programming that must go on in-order to create a “cloud” version of quicken but to bring some basic features that we’re looking for online from the desktop would really help those like you and me. Amanda I’d stick to the desktop for now. Keep and eye out for future product offerings from Quicken.
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I have been trying the free quicken online, and I am sorry but I dont see any value in this product! What do people like about it??
Maybe I dont understand how to use it but I went through and categorized all my transactions and it gives me “GOALS” but this is not budget! Infact, I WANT to spend MORE on my credit cards (to pay them off) rather than spend LESS on them. I like Mvelopes better but it was too slow and expensive. ….so..for now I still have my trusty spreadsheet!
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Three weeks into Quicken Online – and I’m dumping it. It is a nice thought, but riddled with issues. The worst of which is the inability to consistently get data synced with your financial institution. You may successfully get Quicken Online to link with your accounts, but then either never get transaction data or a generic “unknown” error. Their outsourced Tech Support for the product is essentially non-existent as you will get nothing more than generalized form letters back and never any resolution. Quicken recently isolated their community forum for the online product from their paid products, and based on the number of complaints and issues in the Online forum, one can take a stabbing guess as to why. Sometimes, things are free for a reason.
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Fair warning – ChuckO is a spammer. Google for that exact text, he has pasted into the top 10 Quicken Online reviews that Google returns. Take his comments with a grain of salt.
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I just bought Quicken Home & Office 2010 at Best Buy on Haun Raod in Menifee, CA. It will not take my primary Bank Checking/Savings account info. The data and response entry windows are jumpy and inconsistent, the program looks like something a ten year old kid wrote and the box had been opened before I even bought it.
My Windows “Money”, which cost me nothing, does most of what Quicken does and the “Money” cost me nothing.
My primary reason for buying this product ($99.95) was to get all of my accounts on one page. I can’t do that because Quicken will not accept half of my financial institutions. I am returning this software to Quicken for my money back…I hope.
I took this item back to Best Buy but they wouldn’t return my money because the item had been opened!!! (They also treated me like a piece of doggy doodle) How would I know it didn’t work unless I opened it? I smell a rat there. I am going to go thru the long drawn out complaint process against Best Buy which will probably avail me nothing except the satisfaction that I wasn’t an easy mark one more time.
I got had by Best buy several years ago when I bought a two thousand computer from them, paid them to set the computer up properly, which they didn’t do resulting in over $800.00 in phone charges which the smarmy manager refused to consider helping me get some relief for even though it was their fault and I had loads of evidence to prove it. The problem with being “had” by a big company is that they have all the power and I have none…and they know it.
That’s really infuriating.
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