Quicken Starter Personal Finance – Start taking control of your money – 1-Year Subscription (Windows/Mac)

After our prior budgeting software became subscription based, we figured if we had to subscribe to something we might as well go with the most well established option. Couldnt go wrong with Quicken, right? Could not have been more wrong. Fortunately we were able to cancel during the first 30 days for a refund. The PC version of the software is outrageously buggy. Theres a handful I can easily reproduce using the build I downloaded from their website in Jan 2020: * Randomly after syncng to the cloud and exiting the program, when I come back in, certain budget categories have had various months budgets overwritten by the latest months budget value (ex: starting a fresh budget in Jan 2021, I edited the Dec 2020 budget values to show the amount carried forward from own old budget, and then would randomly find other months in 2020 overwritten by other values). * If I filter the transaction view and theres a small number of transactions, one of the displayed totals is wrong. It leaves out the last transaction. Thus I cant trust the totals - a pretty serious issue for budgeting software. * Also in a filtered view, if I edit a reconciled transaction and then click no to the warning about editing it (to cancel the edit), the entire transaction becomes invisible (looks like it was deleted, but if you reset the view it comes back). * Also in filtered view, occasionally upon editing, the transaction overwrites either the first transaction in the view or the transaction immediately before or after the edited one, replacing it with a copy of itself. * And, also in filtered view, the last transaction in the view sometimes does not show the correct flag for manual entry, cleared, reconciled, etc... We also tried the Mac version, and while we didnt try it long enough to know whether or not it had the same bugs, we quickly discovered it wasnt usable for us either as there was no way to roll one months budget surplus or shortfall in a given category into the next month automatically (what Quicken calls rollover - a PC only feature). Other crazy things... If you have both the PC and Mac version, you cant delete an online copy of a budget created by the other platform. You also cant delete the online copy of the currently open budget. There doesnt appear to be a way on the website to delete online budgets. And online you dont seem to be able to edit account sync configuration for your bank or credit accounts. If you review their release notes for the software, they often have multiple releases per month which include bug fixes, and some of the fixed bugs are even more outrageous than the ones we experienced (one recent one involved syncng causing categories to get deleted and require you restore from backup). This doesnt give me a lot of confidence there arent many other bugs waiting to cause issues. Not sure how Quicken, which has been around for so long, can be such incredibly bad software, but it is. So very disappointed. Maybe something that happened when Intuit sold it back in 2016. Either way, avoid it like the plague. We went with You Need a Budget, which is a considerably better experience, though they are a bit rigid with their methodology (things like you cant roll forward a negative amount in a budget category... something we used to do all the time to track IOUs where we were owed money).

I had previously subscribed to Quicken Premier, but purchased a Organize your Money Starter edition on 30 December 2020 as my Premier would expire in January 2021. I have been trying to install the new purchased edition and have called Quicken twice with no success. They reported both times that I had to purchase Quicken through them and not Amazon. This is very poor service. I cannot activate my new program even though I have the activation code.

Wonderful financial tool. Worth the money.

I am used to this particular banking software. I don’t like that you have to pay for it every year but that seems to be the trend. It works well for me

I had been told that intuit had dropped the subscrption but not true. I would sell this if you really want to use it.

Tech support is very good

This company is trying to get to a full subscription model -- they are working with banks to ensure that banks only keep 90 days of transactions available online. You need to use Quicken to download the complete historical record of your transactions. What a complete shakedown. Then there is the whole issue of version and password which is horribly broken in bizarrely confusing ways. Do everything you can to avoid this product.

Used Quicken as a check book register for over two decades. Quicken started to demand an account a few years back and offered services I do not want or use. I only use the register function and resented the account creation requirement. As my renewal period approached for Quicken Deluxe, bought in 2020, Quicken forced one NAG screen onto my display. After the renewal period came and went, Quicken forced a second NAG screen onto my register view that obscures needed information. I can work around this but Quicken harassment of my register view is maddening. I own the software. I do not need or desire the other services. Ill be contacting my state Attorney General with a complaint over Quicken forcing NAG screens onto my register view. Quicken tech support was useless. If you are only using the register function of Quicken, I suggest you do not purchase Quicken.

Easy to use for personal needs. Requiring a yearly subscription is stupid. Always wasn’t like that. Older versions didn’t require a yearly subscription. People don’t use the subscription services so don’t charge them for it. I don’t use them. Need to allow users opportunity to choose what specific services they want.

Excellent software, easy to use.