Quicken Home and Business 2014 [Old Version]

After all the horror stories on internet I was worried but since Quicken 2011 was "expiring" I upgraded to Quicken 2014. On my not so new desktop with Vista, the upgrade went fine. Everything worked and I had no problems. So far there is absolutely nothing new in Quicken 2014 that I need, the functionality is the same. I don't want to track every penny I spend so the mobile app which I tried is not so useful for me. I use Quicken for all my banking, paying bills, tracking investments and retirement accounts, monitoring many accounts and a couple of rental properties (I don't use the rental version for that though), Quicken has a monopoly, there is no competitor for the type of use I have and I have used it since 1995 so it is hard to complain. The lack of multi-country functionality is a negative for me. I know it handles multi currency and I use that, but I would like to be able to select financial institutions from Canada and the US (and in my dreams a 3rd country) and download transactions from those countries. But I understand there are limited people needing this and no competition to give Quicken incentive to do it, so I live without it. Overall I still love the program and use it daily to manage my finances. So 4 stars. And i don't mind the forced upgrade every 3 years, it's like a user fee. So I do it every three years, never earlier because there is little added of interest for me with each upgrade. I sympathize with all the internet stories about problems with the program, but I can say that it works for me and upgrades have luckily been without problems.

I have used Quicken Home and Business for several years and update the software at least every 2 years. From my standpoint, the strengths and weaknesses of the program haven't changed much over time. I am most satisfied with the download capabilities, both for transactions and securities prices.I am much less impressed with (1) the program's ability to recognize the proper account to which I have transferred funds--I almost always have to correct this manually, (2) the flexibility of the report formats--I usually need to export a report into Excel and manipulate a spreadsheet to achieve a useful form for the results, (3) the inability to retrieve historical portfolio values on a daily basis from the report function--weekly is the best available option, and (4) the inability to perform any serious portfolio composition and/or performance analysis without reverting to an Excel spreadsheet. (Note: I am an investment advisor and a Chartered Financial Analyst with a PhD in mathematics, so I am probably a lot fussier about point 4 than most people are.)Bottom line, this product is adequate for the nuts and bolts of recording transactions and market prices, but Intuit seriously over-advertises its value as an analytic or tax-management tool.

I have used Quicken since V.2 for DOS, and haven't ever skipped a release. Needless to say I am a big advocate of Quicken. That being said, over time, Quicken has become bloated with numerous "features" that may not be of benefit to most users. As a result, the program has become quite sluggish to load and run, independent of data size. However it is still quite serviceable.Quicken has a deep suite of functions and maintains enormous amounts of information. One of the biggest improvements for me, as I move toward a truly-paperless system, has been the ability to attach scanned items to a transaction. Unfortunately, it appears that Quicken's previous (2013) ability to preview those attachments from within the program has either gone away or ceased functioning, forcing the items to be opened and viewed only in their native applications. The old previewer was great and I would love to get it back!I would also like to see Quicken remember, in addition to the check number of the last check printed, the NUMBER OF CHECKS REMAINING on the last sheet of three that was printed. This would be very helpful in sending the next batch to the printer - especially if the printer isn't located at arm's length from the user. It's nice to add "bells and whistles" but the basics still rule, as far as I'm concerned. Here's hoping that Intuit will focus a bit more on those items.