I think the story here is that it is much better to do business in the web space where the user pays monthly, her data is stored (locked?) in the cloud and she can be costantly upsold features. Compared to the desktop space, where the user pays a one-off price, stores her data locally and in general does not update her software.
Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
71–80 of 110 posts
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#72If 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…
Same reasoning here. Like my financial data local. I also use own toolset using ledger cli for reporting and entry. People developed tools to convert CSV from banks to ledger format.
Using text only and my own toolchain I can setup how I want. Get reporting how I want it. You just need some time for the initial startup.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#73Doing 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 impor…
If only there was a web plugin or some other web client software that could login to your bank account for you and fetch everything you want, in convenient formats, with nice labels. It would support the weird interfaces of thousands of different banks (and PayPal)...
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#74Doing 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 impor…
What gets me is when I see software designed this way and then start imagining how much money was spent developing it, and fellow software architects sitting back with their arms folded staring at the screen thinking what a good job they did.
sitting back with their arms folded staring at the screen thinking what a good job they did
Isn't that a basic job requirement for a software architect at BigCo?
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#75Doing 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 impor…
What gets me is when I see software designed this way and then start imagining how much money was spent developing it, and fellow software architects sitting back with their arms folded staring at the screen thinking what a good job they did.
Yes they used several UML diagrams, several design patterns. They couldn't code a line of it but the drawings look nice
This is so close to reality it hurts
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#76Doing 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 impor…
I remember our bank changing our account type (Number stayed the same, they just changed the fee structure) so they expunged all our transaction history from the site, we could only request paper copies be sent out.
I ended up scanning them all, writing a script that split the images up and OCR'd them, then formatted them correctly into and importable format in a single file. It turned out to be much faster and easier than the CSV data provided by the bank (Actually having transaction descriptions on your imports helps!). So much so that for the next couple of years instead of getting the CSVs from the bank, I got PDF copies of our paper statements and fed them into the same script.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#77Doing 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 impor…
If only there was a web plugin or some other web client software that could login to your bank account for you and fetch everything you want, in convenient formats, with nice labels. It would support the weird interfaces of thousands of different banks (and PayPal)...
I'm not sure if you are being coy but didnt Zenbooks get sued or attacked by some banks for doing exactly that?
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#78Doing 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 impor…
What gets me is when I see software designed this way and then start imagining how much money was spent developing it, and fellow software architects sitting back with their arms folded staring at the screen thinking what a good job they did.
Every year I call up one or two of their tech support numbers, and suggest they add a button labeled "download everything I need to give to my accountant for the last tax year." Every year they are astonished at this suggestion, say what a great idea it is, and next year nothing has improved.
Am I really such a unique snowflake that nobody else even thinks of this?
Maybe I should patent it. It's obviously not obvious!
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#79Doing 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 impor…
I remember our bank changing our account type (Number stayed the same, they just changed the fee structure) so they expunged all our transaction history from the site, we could only request paper copies be sent out. I ended up scanning them all, writing a script that split the images up and OCR'd them, then formatted them correctly into and importable format in a single file. It turned out to be much faster and easie…
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Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#80Doing 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 impor…
If only there was a web plugin or some other web client software that could login to your bank account for you and fetch everything you want, in convenient formats, with nice labels. It would support the weird interfaces of thousands of different banks (and PayPal)...
Plaid basically does just this, though as an API. And it doesn't support thousands of banks but just a few major ones.