Review by GoAMZN

This review is on upgrading from Quicken 2013 to 2014. I’m long time Quicken user and update annually. My large (>120MB) data file (>250,000 items and transactions going back to 1995) converted without any problems and my financial institution connections worked as they did before. There is currently a R2 update patch available.

Didn’t notice many visible UI or large feature changes from 2013. Some of the dialog boxes (such as the One Step Update) are different. However I did notice very good UI performance improvements in scrolling in the Portfolio View with investments (eg mutual funds) that contain many (100+) transactions. Scrolling was painfully slow previously. I understand Quicken 2014 uses an updated .NET software framework improves refresh performance. I would recommend updating from 2013 to 2014.

Quicken gets a lots negative reviews. Some of this is likely deserving - releasing 12 patches for Quicken 2013 in a year does not instill quality software development and testing practices. Some of this is related to the very large user base with varying degrees of computer knowledge, condition of the user computers, and connectivity to a myriad of financial institutions, which Quicken gets the blame for the problems.

My experience in using Quicken is not representative as portrayed by the severity of the negative product reviews and their support personnel. I use Quicken extensively for my personal finances, tracking expenses, electronic bill pay via Quicken BillPay, and investments, making use of its online capabilities to send/update transactions, that I couldn’t do without it. (My most used application after Office, browser, and email client.) The Quicken community forum is pretty active and helpful in resolving problems. I have had Quicken hang-up, crash, but I have not lost data, nor have erroneous balances or mishaps in any electronic payments.

With the shift to cloud-computing and mobile devices, there are a number of alternatives to Quicken like mint.com (also owned by Quicken’s parent company, Intuit), or financial institution online services. Some of these alternatives may be suitable to you depending on your needs. I have not found any alternatives which provide the personal finance management capabilities as Quicken.

I hope Intuit management is paying serious attention to the negative publicity and addressing these issues as I would like see Intuit continue to have the revenue stream to be able to invest in developing and enhancing the product.

11/21/2013 Update: Have used Quicken 2014 now for two months. (System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on a laptop with a 3rd generation i7 processor, 8GB RAM. I keep my O/S and drivers updated to the latest releases.) A R3 patch for Quicken 2014 is available. In reading many of the amazon reviews, it’s hard for me to imagine that I am using the same software. My overall experience with Quicken 2014 has been positive. It has worked like Quicken 2013 with some performance improvements and generally stable/faster downloads (several financial institutions and many securities quotes). I only experienced one crash and it was during a R3 patch installation. No data loss due to crash. I don’t use the mobile feature (due to the reviews and no support for investments) or Windows 8 - which appears to be the root of some of the reported problems. Quicken 2014 billing/reminder feature is useful. It addresses the transaction copy/paste I used to perform to create a future income/expense view in an account register. One issue I noticed is that you cannot switch applications when running the One Step update. In other words you can’t let the One Step update run in the background and work in another application. Quicken returns the focus to itself. Reading the Quicken forum, this is a known issue and hopefully will be addressed in near future. Also enabled mouse pointer trails which improved transaction entry speed.nn12/4/2013 Update: R4 patch appears to have fixed the ability to switch applications during One Step update.nn2/14/2014 Update: R6 patch was released in February.nn3/12/2014 Update: R7 patch released.