Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
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 import one of them, and that's one is different for every different account! (Stunningly stoopid.)
Then try to get the statements, just try, my pretty. There is no "get me all the statements from last year." Nope. You download them one at a time, and some of them download to the same file name! So it's clicking around, then rename the file to "January 2015", then repeat for the next one, etc.
Oh, you wanted the tax 1099 forms? That's a whole 'nuther section on the web site.
Buy anything from Paypal? This is the killer. Paypal lists the payee as "Bob". Your credit card statement lists the payee for the same transaction as "Carol". The credit card downloaded data file lists the payee as "Ted". And, Quicken somehow calls it "Alice". Can you believe it in 2016? Naturally, you cannot download the full information about the transaction anyway. Download the CSV file, and Paypal randomly leaves out information you have to manually edit back in, like the item description which appears on the web site but not in the CSV data.
And why does my bank list the payee for a check as "Check 236"? The bank knows who the money got sent too. It's all on a computer.
Isn't that a basic job requirement for a software architect at BigCo?
This is so close to reality it hurts
Am I really such a unique snowflake that nobody else even thinks of this?
Maybe I should patent it. It's obviously not obvious!
They could register a branding for compatible download systems.
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.
Also not every source generates valid data files :(
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).
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
Do you work in programming in anything other than greenfield projects?
I'm sure they weren't nodding in smug pride, but weeping and drinking themselves into a stupor many nights, and sometimes during the workday. They know. At least, the better of them know.
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 easier than the CSV data provided by the bank (Actually having transaction descriptions on your imports helps!). So much so that for the next couple of years instead of getting the CSVs from the bank, I got PDF copies of our paper statements and fed them into the same script.
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.
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.
It's funny because I'm sure I don't even use like 95% of Quicken. I don't use the budget, or the bill paying, or the charts and reports, or the tax crap, or the retirement planning or all the other various bells and whistles Intuit has decided to bolt on to its vast menu structure over the years. I use it as a checkbook register and as a way to plan the month so I don't overdraw my checking account (which would probably happen monthly if I didn't have Quicken), and to download credit card transactions weekly to watch for fraud. That's it. Surely those two functions are the MVP for any alternative.
There is no way in hell I am going to upload 15 years of financial history to "the cloud". Not a snowball's chance in hell. And yes, I've tried GnuCash. It's just not as good. Clunky UI, double-entry accounting, Yuck.
The day I got off Quicken was a very good day for me. I had developed real hatred of the software and the company.
I keep my Quicken files on Dropbox so they sync just fine. I am also protected from data loss due to versioning. I also like the idea that the company storing the data is separate from the company that makes the software, so I can be assured that my accounts cannot be data-mined and everything works exactly the way I want it to.
Using text only and my own toolchain I can setup how I want. Get reporting how I want it. You just need some time for the initial startup.
Why are you running your financial life so close to the edge? Keep two months' spending as buffer in your checking account. That's what I do. The mental load saved of not having to worry about overdrawing my account is completely worth it.
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 format.
These days I'm forcing myself to use Ledger http://ledger-cli.org/ The UI is essentially the UI of your favorite text editor (with all the efficiencies and pain that entails), but no one can argue that your data is held hostage! It's a text file!
Ledger supports an "!include" statement that works exactly how you'd think it would and is super handy.
Also a big fan of Moneydance http://moneydance.com and have written a budget plugin for my family's needs
FWIW, they didn't reveal the terms, but they did say that they expected around $500m from all three divestitures, and Quickbase and Demandforce are bigger.
Anybody happen to know how big the Quicken team is?
Unfortunately, the Quicken name is now so tarnished that the private equity firm likely has one swing at a decent update. Anything less than a homerun and they might as well shut it down.
Caveats:
1. This is anecdotal evidence, and many PE firms actually do buy companies with the intention of firing people.
2. I don't know whether this is the most common activity or just generates the most press/attention. I would be pretty interested in a statistic that looks at PE company acquisitions and compares company headcount at entry and exit.
Every once in a while I look into gnucash or ledger but so far I've always run out of steam before I've been able to ensure that they'd truly give me feature parity for the features I care about.
At any rate though, it is a joy to not be using Quicken anymore.
Imagine detailed consumer spending for Home Depot & Lowe's for the past few years broken down by market, average purchase size, frequency, churn rate, loyalty, demographics of consumer, financial position of consumer, credit scores, et al. That's huge if you're investing in either company or if you are either company and you want to know how your competition is faring, marketing spend, expansion decisions, etc.
In their earnings they only show direct Mint.com revenue (affiliate traffic from signing up for credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, etc) which is extremely small compared to the data intelligence. The rest probably shows up in "data services" or something vague.
I use their accounts package, and a few of their other packages, I am satisfied.
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.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/result.aspx?q=Money+p...
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.
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...
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.
GNUcash is probably the ugliest piece of software that I use regularly, but at least it works. Depending on one's needs YNAB or Quicken might be a better choice though - but neither work well with multiple currencies or even accounts.
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.
I run quickbooks for a small business - if I wanted a Xero equivalent, I have to pay $70/mo?! That's crazy!
Perhaps I am already too old, but the idea of cloud application sucks and I hope the desktop never dies.
In my opinion the cloud should only be used to synchronize my data between my devices but it should never be the sole source of my programs. If I spend money on software then my main requirement is that I can install it locally and run it independent of the mother company.
Cheaper to upgrade / fix / repair / replace.
I build clouds for a living. There is no cloud. It is just someone elses computer.