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Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

computerworld.com

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

#91

Post by FollowSteph3 »

WalterBright wrote: post #78
jrcii wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing is different people have different tax needs. Some people have very tax filings while others are very complex and some things can't be downloaded at all. It would be great but it's just not possible. FYI I work in a related field and I can tell you some tax filings are complicated!

Also not every source generates valid data files :(

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

#92

Post by fucking_tragedy »

jrcii wrote: post #66
WalterBright wrote: post #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 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.

I feel like those are the codebases that still cause you to wake up in a cold, guilty sweat 5 years after last modifying it.

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

#93

Post by fokz »

troymc wrote: post #73
WalterBright wrote: post #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 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've been using Mint for this purpose and so far it almost meets my expectation. The automatic categorizing works well.

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

#94

Post by JangoSteve »

FollowSteph3 wrote: post #91
WalterBright wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing is different people have different tax needs. Some people have very tax filings while others are very complex and some things can't be downloaded at all. It would be great but it's just not possible. FYI I work in a related field and I can tell you some tax filings are complicated! Also not every source generates valid data files :(

Just because it's difficult to handle 100% of use cases doesn't mean you can't easily solved 80% of use cases. The suggestion the parent and grandparent comments are making is simply to add a button which combines the previous year's statements (understanding that not everyone's fiscal year matches the calendar year) with all the documents that are already in a separate section named "tax documents" into a single download. More generally, they're just suggesting things like naming the file for January's statement as e.g. "2016-january-statement.pdf" instead of the same generic name as every other month's statements.

Saying that those suggestions aren't valuable or worthwhile just because 100% of use cases can't be accounted for probably isn't the best way of deciding which features should be implemented (and if it were, then it seems like most of their current features should have never been built since they rarely seem to handle even 80% of use cases).

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

#95

Post by JangoSteve »

my5thaccount wrote: post #85
WalterBright wrote: post #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 impor…

Just wait until the payee has a comma or a quote in the name and you download a CSV and the programmers can't even properly format a CSV and it's broken in Excel.

Makes you wonder what part of their system might be susceptible to a payee name like lil Bobby Tables.

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

#96

Post by pbreit »

WalterBright wrote: post #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 impor…

And banks like BofA only provide 13 months of statements so if you do your taxes in March, you're out of luck.

The $99 drive sitting on my desk could store the complete records of BofA going back to the beginning twice over (without compression).

I just don't get it.

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

#97

Post by vram22 »

mwill wrote: post #76
WalterBright wrote: post #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 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…

Wow, that's a quotable story, and says a lot the status of our field as a whole.

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

#98

Post by vram22 »

JangoSteve wrote: post #95
my5thaccount wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until the payee has a comma or a quote in the name and you download a CSV and the programmers can't even properly format a CSV and it's broken in Excel.

Makes you wonder what part of their system might be susceptible to a payee name like lil Bobby Tables.

For those who didn't get the reference:

https://xkcd.com/327/

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

#99

Post by WalterBright »

FollowSteph3 wrote: post #91
WalterBright wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing is different people have different tax needs. Some people have very tax filings while others are very complex and some things can't be downloaded at all. It would be great but it's just not possible. FYI I work in a related field and I can tell you some tax filings are complicated! Also not every source generates valid data files :(

It certainly is possible because every banking site has a fixed set of downloads for a particular year. There's no problem at all putting them in a zip file and making that available for download.

For example, for a checking account there are:

1. The monthly statements 2. The transaction data in CSV, QIF, QXF formats 3. The tax filings (1099) 4. Overdraft notices, safe box bills

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

#100

Post by WalterBright »

TheCondor wrote: post #82
WalterBright wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we built that software, how far would we be from not needing accountants?

Collecting the data can be automated. Classifying it, not so. I.e. what is a business expense, what is not, etc., all require knowledge that is not reasonably available to the computer until a human classifies it.

For example, I fill up at a gas station. Is that for a business purpose, or not? The computer cannot know. An awful lot of such decisions need to be made.

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