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).

Its so easy to keep track of your Income & Spending

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

Basic

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.

I have been using Quicken (Intuit), for years. I purchased 2020 back in Nov. I was using Home and Business - but since their subscription ran out, Which I never used - now I cant use it at all. 25% of the screen is a renewl box that wont close unless you pay them for the use. I called and spoke with a no english person - said he could take care of it very quickly and I could start using Quicken - at 103.00 per year. I explained to the rep that I have macular degeneration in both eyes, and the ir box was taking up my space/ I have a 36 in. monitor and still have to blow everything up by 250% rto be able to add. This should be against the law to force people to use your products, and if you dont pay their fine. Maybe I should hire a lawyer for discrimanation and disabled blind person. Guess scam artist are all over - but big companies like Quicken get by with it.

Decreased flexibility of use. Can no longer file-save with a new filename (retaining previous file and name). Tech support was good talker, but poor listener. Lost previous version when helped me save with a new filename. He then insisted that I wanted a new filename. Talked to supervisor. Showed me a clumsy workaround. At least he understood the issue.

Although documentation is not clear, my impression was that I could continue to use the Starter version after my 1-year expiration as long as I only needed to enter my deposits and checks. I have never used any of the on-line services. As it turns out, unless I renew, I can no longer use the product and all of my history is not available. Tech support chat confirmed this today. Not happy with these folks.

I thought I was buying a permanent checkbook program. Instead, I received a one year subscription.

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.