Quicken Online: Back to Beta

I was really looking forward to Quicken online, but the disappointment grows: first it's buggy like hell (Intuit acknowledged this and extended the trial period) and second it's so limited in features that I don't really know what it's for.

Officially it's labeled as an entry level product for people who have basic needs in financial management. Well, I can't imagine how anybody gets something useful out of this product. In my opinion the most basic need is to monitor transactions, categorize your spending and generate reports about where your money went. 

However Quicken Online is actually unable to help you with that:

• You cannot monitor your transactions, because QO will categorize them automatically, which may be, naturally, incorrect. After it's categorized nothing tells it apart from any transactions which have been reviewed. So, for example, if QO feels that it recognizes a fraudulent charge on a credit card, it will literally hide it among the other transactions. 
• You cannot categorize spending, because there's no split feature. I don't know anybody at Intuit thought they can get around this. Do they expect that we sort our products at the check out an pay each category separately.
• There are reports that show how much you spend in each category, but you cannot download them or print them.

QO is a nicely done web application, but the current feature set is by far not sufficient for any kind of financial planning. 

Still Missing the Sync

Apple's new product announcements are always fun to watch, because you never know what is going to happen. Steve Job's keynote on Tuesday was especially fun, because two new products were actually free software updates and the MacBook Air seems to be such a niche product that it doesn't send me to re-calculate my budget.

Still I think, something is curiously missing in Apple's shiny digital world and the MacBook Air highlights it, given that for most people it will be an addition to their main desktop computer: how do you get the data from your main Mac to your laptop. Of course you can copy files, but this does only work for document files, for example Word files. It does not work for the “library” style repositories that the iLife applications use. For example iTunes, which just got a revamp to support rental movies. Yes, you can sync the movies to watch them on your Mac, your Apple TV and your tiny iPod or iPhone screens. But you can't take it on the road on your laptop and it's 13” or more screen. Same goes for photos, where you have to maintain a separate repository on each computer.

So, Apple, you solved the syncing of persona data between computers pretty elegantly (however pricey) with .Mac. Can we now please have an universal sync that keeps certain files, including the data of iTunes, iLife applications and pro apps like Aperture available on our laptops, while we are on the road?  

Quicken Online - First Impressions

As a long time power user of personal finance software, I've been waiting a long time for a web-bases solution. With the availability of the new "Web 2.0" technologies, there's just no need anymore for installing a clunky local application on a single machine. Especially since there's no really satisfying personal finance program available for the Mac. Now, since Jan 8th, the wait has an end: Intuit released its Quicken Online site and I registered on the very first day (after going through "site unavailable" messages for a couple of days).

Now I was prepared to live with reduced functionality, but Quicken Online covers only a tiny little part of what I'm used to. It seems that most of the work for the initial release went into the connectivity to the banks, which is truly impressive: the list of supported banks (in the U.S.) is endless and I could register all my (non-investment) accounts within minutes. QO would then download 90 days of transactions and try to categorize them automatically, which works pretty well. After that QO would refresh the accounts automatically in the background on a daily basis, so you would look always at a current balance.

Add some simple graphs and reports, a way to add future transactions and text message or e-mail bill reminders based on automatically recognized recurring transactions and you have pretty much the entire app. That's a decent starting point, but obviously still a long way to go.

Here's what I miss the most:

• Splitting transactions. I can't think of a reason how they could miss this. Officially this decision was made, because they wanted to assign transaction automatically, but that doesn't really make sense. Reality is, that there are transaction that fall into multiple categories and for the purpose of budgeting and controlling your expenses you have to split them accordingly.
• Security. I appreciate all measures to keep my personal data private, but logging in could be a little more convenient. At least the login page should allow the browser to fill in user name and password automatically.
• Accounts that are not backed by a bank. Common wisdom would say that they are much easier to implement than bank-backed accounts. So why are they missing, preventing me e.g. from tracking international accounts.
• Transfers. You cannot transfer money from one account to another, for example to pay a credit card bill. You have to enter the transaction two times, which is silly.

There's missing more of course: a budget function (I haven't seen a good one in any software, so I don't care too much), more reports, more graphs, import/export function and support for investment accounts. 

So let's see where this one is going. Supposedly there's a lot of interest, so hopefully Intuit throws some resources at Quicken Online and implements more features quickly.