Saturday, January 26, 2008

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. 

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