#Why Is Quicken So Bad? Manual Transactions That

Quicken 2003 and later versions are available for Mac OS X. Apple has clearly shown a penchant for wanting to jump more into gaming with releases like Apple Arcade.The bad news is that the transfer isn't perfect. Whereas the iPhone and iPad have taken a strong lead in mobile gaming, their desktop counterparts still lag behind. That Macs are bad at gaming is something of a hilarious irony in todayвЂ™s gaming world.

This was all precipitated by вЂњThe Quicken Disaster of 2008вЂќ when I reformatted my hard drive a month ago and completely forgot to backup the last five years worth of quicken data. This is probably 10% a reaction to the state of the economy and 90% a reaction to having a child and realizing how little money is left over at the end of the month. IвЂ™ve been slipping into an OCD spiral with regard to our finances lately.

I sort of welcomed the chance to take stock. IвЂ™d heard of sites like Mint.com and Quicken Online before, but had kind of ignored them since I already had a five year investment in Quicken. (Hey, IвЂ™m not claiming to be a genius) I started to dive back into reformulating my financial profile and realized I had never really thought much outside of the Quicken for Mac bubble.

I check graphs and formulate alternate budget scenarios three or four times a day. To say that IвЂ™ve become more obsessive about my financial profile would be a vast understatement. The reason it failed financially is because it sucked.Thusly, this has kicked off one of the most annoying and frustrating comparison exercise of my life. Simple basic features were missing, others didn't work, support was abysmal, and it was never improved. 2) Why does Quicken Essentials suck-No, it sucked, and you need to stop tying to defend it.

Charge EVERYTHING! Put every insignificant purchase on the credit/debit card and I get an automatic and current view of where my money is. This led me to the reverse philsophy on debit cards. Enter my bank account info, it sucks data down, renames the ugly bank-speak to something pretty, categorizes based on community (or my) input, and presents some pretty graphs. It seemed to be the answers to my prayers. Mint.com was hard to figure it.I started with Mint.

Debt (money toward paying short-term debt) Bills, subscriptions, mortgage, etc.) Recurring (generally predictable costs e.g. Good because IвЂ™m paying attention, bad because none of the sites can really follow through with a perfect system.In addition to knowing how much money IвЂ™ve spent on haircuts in the past year, I want a fairly simple view of five general categories of expense: A good thing, right? Yes and no. So, now I care more about where my money goes than I ever have before.

Dining out, shopping, entertainment)This allows for easy budgeting and keeping things straight. Discretionary (variable costs that are more optional e.g. Groceries, fuel, dog food)

I also want my wife to get these reports and have an account where she can login and view the data. I want those reports to show how much of the spending is coming from me, how much from my wife, and how much we share responsibility. I want those reports to be pretty, with useful graphs. I want to set up a simple budget for a week, and have the system e-mail me daily reports on all those targets. I want to visualize the weekly targets. Translate monthly targets into weekly targets, and then to daily targets.

You can define a set of tags and apply those to individual transactions. You can add subcategories (given a recent system upgrade) but not top-level categories. ItвЂ™s strength is in its flash-based pie-chart graphs that let you drill through your costs like its nobodyвЂ™s business.

ThereвЂ™s no way to anticipate checks or future bills No way to do pending or future transactions вЂ“ all I can see is whatвЂ™s been spent. YouвЂ™ll also find about 10 responses from Mint staff. The support sucks вЂ“ read through the Mint forums and youвЂ™ll immediately be greated with 4.7 million posts about banks that donвЂ™t work and features that are buggy. When you fix one, it fixes all of them. Mint remembers the names that you give each transaction (most transactions from the bank look like this вЂњANGEL AS KINKY DOLLHSE- AXGHBD0001923вЂќ) and the categories you assign it.

ItвЂ™s too many clicks to get to the tags to make that useful. Well, yeah, but you have to do them one by one. Create tags for the five general categories. CanвЂ™t Learn Tags вЂ“ Ah, you say.

All I can do is set a boundary on the first and last day of the month. CanвЂ™t do anything other than monthly budgets вЂ“ this really sucks. So, I canвЂ™t do what I really want: create a budget for Discretionary expenses. CanвЂ™t budget based on tags вЂ“ The budgeting system is OK in general, but it canвЂ™t budget based on tags at all.

They have really good budgeting features and show you your monthly averages. Like Mint, they also learn your transaction mapping to readable names and categories. Lame.Summary: Mint has some great potential, but itвЂ™s budget visualization and lack of advanced tagging features really torpedoes it for my purposesQuicken seems like such a dinosaur, but itвЂ™s interface has improved since I first looked at them months ago. All I can see is all costs sourced from me, and all discretionary expenses.

Why Is Quicken So Bad? Manual Transactions That

No Transaction Splits вЂ“ Huh? Costs are all in one of the already crippled categories. No Subcategories вЂ“ What? You canвЂ™t do Auto:Fuel and Auto:Repair costs. This is IMMENSELY useful since I normally just do all this in my head. It shows very clearly how much cash you have left over when all your future obligations for the upcoming budget cycle are met. They just added a new feature on November 21st (2008) that shows a line graph of your available cash for the next two paycheck cycles (yeah!) that takes into account all your upcoming transactions. You can add manual transactions that havenвЂ™t made it to your bank yet.

The lack of subcategories, splitting and multiple categories is still too limiting to be useful.Wesabe takes a bit of getting used to. Budgets are monthly вЂ“ CanвЂ™t choose a budget cycle on anything other than the 1st through the last day of the month.Summary: Quicken is showing some potential. Why would you want to? There are no subcategories! You canвЂ™t drill down into them.

The line graph can be put into Yearly, Quarterly, Monthly, (wait for it) Weekly and Daily granularity. Clicking on any of the tags brings you to a good summary page that shows a line graph at the top with all the transactions listed below. ThereвЂ™s a tag cloud on the sidebar so you can see the relative ratio of your expenses. I could tag something as вЂњHaircutвЂќ and вЂњDiscretionaryвЂќ at the same time. Tags are categories and categories are tags.

You canвЂ™t do anything recurring and you canвЂ™t define any time-based bounds to the goal. When you get to that level, the goal completes and you start another goal. You set whether you want to get to a value or stay under a value. You set a prose goal, say вЂњsave up for my hair transplantвЂќ and tie tags to the goal. The budgeting gets the biggest suck вЂ“ seriously, itвЂ™s almost not there.

You can do some rather powerful boolean searches in your transaction list. EDIT: Thanks to the comment from Marc Hedlund, CEO of Wesabe, it looks like I missed this in the documentation. A minor annoyance, but itвЂ™s a little less useful. This makes using tags for sub-categorization difficult. CanвЂ™t get the intersection of tags вЂ“ like Mint, thereвЂ™s no way to say вЂњshow me all the discretionary expenses that are attributed to meвЂќ.

I mean, finding things that didnвЂ™t get assigned to one of my five most important categories. Finding untagged items is difficult вЂ“ I donвЂ™t mean completely untagged items, though thatвЂ™s buggy, too. I want to be able to tab through things without my mouse. Tagging could be a lot easier вЂ“ it takes a lot of clicks.

Why Is Quicken For Mac So Bad?