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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

#101

Post by WalterBright »

fokz wrote: post #93
troymc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quicken attempts automatic categorizing, but botches it so badly I have to fix 90% of them manually.

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

#102

Post by WalterBright »

pbreit wrote: post #96
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.

That's especially aggravating because the IRS can audit your return going back 3 years. And you're right, it's a trivial amount of data to store.

I had a lot of trouble with Paypal because it kept insisting that the transaction data I requested was "too large" for it to handle. It was about 40k of data, less than the web page it served telling me that.

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

#103

Post by cgrinds »

isomorphic wrote: post #15

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…

Likewise, I've moved to beancount http://furius.ca/beancount/ and the awesome fava https://github.com/aumayr/fava 21 years of Quicken data converted to a lovingly crafted text file. Ahh.

Also a big fan of Moneydance http://moneydance.com and have written a budget plugin for my family's needs

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

#104

Post by orionblastar »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #63
yitchelle wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazingly Microsoft Money Sunset is still available as a download and free to use. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/result.aspx?q=Money+p...

How does it compare to Quicken, and can it still download transactions?

The download transactions used to require access to a website that I think Microsoft took down that would connect to banks.

Most banks had to provide an API for MS-Money to download data from them, and not all banks support that API anymore.

You might find that some banks still provide MS-Money format files for download that you can import.

Here is how you used to do it for an unsupported bank: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/836196

Some banks still support MS-Money others do not.

MS-Money will take QIF or QFX files and import them I think.

Even if your bank does not support MS-Money file formats you can find a converter here: http://ms-money-file-converter.en.informer.com/

I think Quicken is more advanced than MS-Money. It has been updated to modern technologies while MS-Money is frozen in time and a legacy app.

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

#105

Post by orionblastar »

thepangolino wrote: post #6
orionblastar wrote: post #2

Quicken is good when it works with your bank, I have a bank that doesn't work with Quicken and only exports to an older Quicken file format that is no longer supported. I remember when Microsoft Money was Sun downed, I thought Quicken had beaten them. But it seems Inuit still has financial problems and sold Quicken.

You touched on something I've always wondered about: what's up with all those different transaction data formats? What's wrong with simple CSv files?

CSV files are good, but sometimes they contain blank data and spaces that mess up importing them. I used to work as a federal contractor importing text files into databases by downloading them via FTP or Web Sites on a federal Intranet.

I would import them into Oracle, SQL Server, MS-Access, Clipper, etc and sometimes had to write a custom program to import the files.

I would work in a Unix environment as well and had to run AWK and SED to remove blank spaces and other problems that would cause invalid use of null errors in a database that the column couldn't be null. Sometimes the CSV file didn't follow the database validation rules, like using text in a number field, etc.

We also had fixed width files. Stuff from an IBM Mainframe that was in EPISODIC that had to be converted to ASCII. Then when it converted some of the characters in the file had to be edited because they were illegal control characters that had something to do with DASD JCL/JECL control codes.

But a CSV file is basically one database table with a bunch of columns in it that you import, separate the data with commas.

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

#106

Post by orionblastar »

jessaustin wrote: post #69
paulryanrogers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSV is strictly a single table, so it cannot normalize the data. You can end up with a lot of them or a lot of columns and empty cells.

I'm drawing a blank on the normalization that would be relevant for transactions. Do you mean something like "the sub-sub-account determines the sub-account which determines the account"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

You find that database armatures usually store everything in one table. The professionals break things up into different tables using normalization.

For example you usually have a table with names in it and an ID, and then you have a transaction table that has the ID in it plus the transaction with a foreign key going back to the table with names in it. Could be names of each account or checking or savings account with an ID assigned to them.

Thing is you could be downloading more than one account and you don't want them mixed up into one CSV file. You want them separate in normalized tables. Now you could just have a CSV file with Account ID in it and then have a separate CSV file with the name of the account with the ID in it. But that just gets confusing.

What if you are a business and have several accounts you want to download and process? You don't want them all mixed up together. Yeah there could be sub-accounts as well that have an ID as a foreign key and then another Foreign key to the main account or sub-sub account etc. When you get into accounting and you have sub accounts and sub-sub accounts to track spending you have to have a way to figure out how they work.

Here is an example of tables with sub accounts: http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t1855...

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

#107

Post by darryl42 »

JangoSteve wrote: post #94
FollowSteph3 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dow…

My brokerage account allows me to search for statements and then check off the ones I want to generate a PDF for, they then get combined into a single PDF. Of the three banks I deal with it was the only one with this feature made catching up on my statements so much easier.

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

#108

Post by jldugger »

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)...

GNUCash supports QFX and OFX, but banks seem unprepared to actually support an API endpoint like that. End result: Mint and whatever systems my retirement funds started using to 'plan your retirement' ask for username and passwords to other accounts. A rare few banks allow for OAuth style read-only tokens, but it's not like my 403b is selected based on security principles.

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

#109

Post by jldugger »

pbreit wrote: post #96
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.

Oh, they store it, you just have to pay extra for a complete record. In a more perfect world, this is because it takes effort to retrieve your history from offline storage.

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

#110

Post by jldugger »

scentoni wrote: post #89

Does anyone here use http://www.gnucash.org ?

I do. A few years ago I put together a presentation on how to use it effectively for personal finance: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CUSct3YGvpVdKI_D_jCI...

The long and short of it is that GNUCash rests upon an ancient bed of Scheme and C, and so isn't quite ready for the cloudz.

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