Review by J. Donaldson

Update Nov 2016nI continue to wonder why Intuit made the budget changes they did. I’m now forced to use some data from Quicken coupled with a lot of manual calculations and external data. It’s just a mess. Why oh why doesn’t some other company come out with a competing product.

Update Feb 2016nI HATE Quicken budgeting. Even after using the 2014 version for over 2 years I still find it a royal pain to deal with. All I need is one simple change to make it much better for me. That would be to show the total budget column on the right side of the Budget Details display. Without that I have to switch between two screens and use a calculator for each row of my budget. This was SO much easier in the 2011 version.

Original Review:nI have Quicken 2014 Premier. I’ve used Quicken since about 1991. The previous version I was using was the 2011 version which was fine and worked much like the previous several versions. But in 2012 Quicken radically changed the budget feature (I mean really why do you use an individual tool like Quicken - budgeting right!) and broke it totally. User complaints were loud and clear demanding Intuit change back to the 2011 format. All Intuit did was continue to tweak the newer, less appreciated, format.

I managed to hold onto Quicken 2011 until recently. Quicken forces updates every three years by cutting off your bank downloads when your Quicken version is older than 3 years old.

It took me several hours to tame the new budget format into something I can use, but it is still very frustrating for me. Generally what Intuit did was remove manual user control over budgets, which killed budgets for most people that use Quicken. They then began to add back in features they had removed, but still in the new less useful format.

Today I can get budgets to work for me but every single day I have more effort involved than I did in Quicken 2011. I’m forced to switch between two or three different screen displays to do what I could do with one display before. I also have to have a pen and paper on the desk to write down some numbers between screen swaps. In some cases I have to have a calculator available too. For me it’s a mess.

I’ve turned in feature / bug reports but hundreds of others have as well with no results. Intuit is just going down it’s own path and ignoring customer inputs.