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Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

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Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#51

If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop functioning tomorrow, I'd be scr…

You might be interested in You Need A Budget (YNAB classic, the non cloud version)

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#52

If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop functioning tomorrow, I'd be scr…

Nothing listed athttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_sof... does what you want?

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#53

I'm just not going to put all of my financial records in once place under one vendor in the cloud. On the other hand, I'm not going to trust Quicken after years of neglect and no sane way of getting my data out. I used GnuCash for a few years, and was generally satisfied with many parts of it, yet it was horribly broken in some ways. And it isn't easy to get data out, even though it can use a native XML storage forma…

I'm curious how you are organizing your data. Do you have one file per account (checking, credit card) or is it all in one big file? I've looked at ledger a few times and get a little overwhelmed, part of it though is because Quicken is so easy since it downloads everything.

There are tools for OFX download and import - there's a larger ecosystem site here: http://plaintextaccounting.org

Ledger supports an "!include" statement that works exactly how you'd think it would and is super handy.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#54
post #51

If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop functioning tomorrow, I'd be scr…

You might be interested in You Need A Budget (YNAB classic, the non cloud version)

I've used both. YNAB is not even close to a replacement for Quicken.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#55

Private equity firm, huh? First round of layoffs w/in 6 weeks.

From what I've heard, the Quicken team is already pretty trim. It's just not growing and not in the cloud, so it doesn't align with Intuit's overall goals. The private equity basically just bought a discount annuity.

FWIW, they didn't reveal the terms, but they did say that they expected around $500m from all three divestitures, and Quickbase and Demandforce are bigger.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#56

If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop functioning tomorrow, I'd be scr…

I use Moneydance for my business, and I like it quite a bit. It's geared towards personal finance more than small business, and the double-entry accounting stays out of the way if you want it to, though it was a selling point for me. It has some functionality to auto-download bank/CC statements, but none of my banks are supported (except for US Bank which charges), so I download and import monthly, which isn't that big of a hassle.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#57
Doing my taxes this year, I find it amazing how incompetent most financial software is (including Quicken).

For example, take a simple task: download all your financial data for the last year. Log into your bank's site. There is no button for "last year". You have to laboriously enter 01/01/2015..12/31/2015. Then you're given a choice of formats. Download ALL of them, because sure as shootin', Quicken will only import one of them, and that's one is different for every different account! (Stunningly stoopid.)

Then try to get the statements, just try, my pretty. There is no "get me all the statements from last year." Nope. You download them one at a time, and some of them download to the same file name! So it's clicking around, then rename the file to "January 2015", then repeat for the next one, etc.

Oh, you wanted the tax 1099 forms? That's a whole 'nuther section on the web site.

Buy anything from Paypal? This is the killer. Paypal lists the payee as "Bob". Your credit card statement lists the payee for the same transaction as "Carol". The credit card downloaded data file lists the payee as "Ted". And, Quicken somehow calls it "Alice". Can you believe it in 2016? Naturally, you cannot download the full information about the transaction anyway. Download the CSV file, and Paypal randomly leaves out information you have to manually edit back in, like the item description which appears on the web site but not in the CSV data.

And why does my bank list the payee for a check as "Check 236"? The bank knows who the money got sent too. It's all on a computer.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#58
post #54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in You Need A Budget (YNAB classic, the non cloud version)

I've used both. YNAB is not even close to a replacement for Quicken.

I've also used both, and I agree: Quicken sucks. The easiest way to explain the difference in fundamental approach between Quicken and YNAB is this: Quicken looks backward, and YNAB looks forward.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#59

If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop functioning tomorrow, I'd be scr…

What is super sensitive that you couldn't export to something like Mint? They don't store your account numbers on their cloud after you've completed the link.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#60
post #55

Private equity firm, huh? First round of layoffs w/in 6 weeks.

From what I've heard, the Quicken team is already pretty trim. It's just not growing and not in the cloud, so it doesn't align with Intuit's overall goals. The private equity basically just bought a discount annuity. FWIW, they didn't reveal the terms, but they did say that they expected around $500m from all three divestitures, and Quickbase and Demandforce are bigger.

Yep. I read that they doubled the size of their Mac team. My first thought was, "what, from 1 to 2?"

Anybody happen to know how big the Quicken team is?

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