hlslaughter's dashboard

Chelsea, thank you for your patience and diligence in helping me resolve this. JJ in support was very patient and friendly. We eventually solved my problem by setting up Quicken on a 2nd computer and validating/cleaning the files there before bringing them back over to my main computer where they now can be used again.

I have signed up with Quicken Inner Circle (http://www.quicken.com/innercircle) to continue the rant that was the original purpose of my post here :)

Here's a great summary of exactly how I feel about Intuit and Quicken:

http://personalfinancesoftwarereviews...

Every point is right on.

I'm about at the end of my rope with it. After an update got pushed out about a week ago, my Quicken will not load any of my data files correctly, nor any of my backups.

The major thing Quicken had going for it IMHO was that in 10 years of use, it never corrupted my data to the point that I could not recover. Now it has, and that's unacceptable. It's infinitely more unacceptable that Intuit no longer answers it's support phone. It's now a recording that points to a website where you can supposedly get a callback in 10 minutes. When you go to the website, there's no indication that you'll be getting any callback, and in fact, you don't. You just end up getting pre-canned email responses that will likely have little to do with the problem you submitted.

Anyone else fed up with Intuit and Quicken can check out some of the alternatives (which I'm currently looking into):

http://www.macworld.com/article/59617...
http://www.mdmproofing.com/iym/articl...

About the only thing that makes me feel good is the fact that once I've found a decent alternative to Quicken, I can blog/twitter my 10 years experience with Intuit (turbotax, quickbooks, quicken) so others may not have to suffer.

That is difficult to believe. The bank charges me $10 a month for bill payment services. If they are charging Intuit as well, that seems pretty seedy.

However, that would be a legit reason to discontinue the service :)

So can I presume that if I were to switch over to quicken billpay (which costs the same yet supports more than one institution) that I **would** be able to continue using an older version of quicken to do online payments?

Yes, that's the standard 'end of life' response I'd expect. But I am NOT talking about supporting older products. It is fully acceptable that the teeny tiny amount of support that Intuit provides with its products (30 days I believe) expires. That is not an issue. It is also acceptable that Intuit not provide bug fixes or improvements for out dated versions of products.

This is not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about disabling working functionality in paid for products. There is absolutely no reason I should not be able to continue communicating with my bank through an older version of Quicken unless there are substantial changes to the protocol (in which case I do not expect my older software to be enhanced to support new protocols).

Now unless the banking industry schedules major protocol changes that just so happen to perfectly coincide with the 'end of life' schedule of Intuit products, Intuit is disabling functionality for only one possible reason: to force users to upgrade to a newer version to continue syncing data with institutions. And extracting money this way from customers is extortion: "To obtain from another by coercion or intimidation". – hlslaughter, on February 23, 2009 01:16