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.