Quicken Premier 2006 Personal Finance Software Description:

Quicken Premier 2006 Personal Finance Software review:
3 stars (DO NOT BUY if you plan on converting from MS Money) - If you're buying to begin tracking finances electronically, this is a great product; probably a 5-star product. The capabilities of the program and the charts/graphs are amazing. However, the layout, at least on my widescreen monitor, is a bit odd and not as aesthetically pleasing as MS Money.



If you are buying Quicken and plan to convert your MS Money files, think again. You WILL have major problems. Quicken is up front about some of them, e.g., loan information does not convert and must be done manually. The solution they provide makes it seem easy, but it really isn't---data gets dumped into odd places, categories get changed without notice, and don't even get me started on what happens with transfers from one account to another. It's a total mess.



Granted, I have a few years worth of data. But I've now spent over 30 hours correcting all of the data scrambling that occured after importing from MS Money. I'm still not even close to being done because now I've noticed that many of the expenses I categorized have been recategorized by Quicken, without my knowledge or consent, into entirely new categories or worse, into wrong categories. At least when the program puts things into new categories, you can put things back relatively easily. But because it also put things into wrong categories, I'm having to manually search thousands of entries. I'd estimate that 5% of my entries are now improperly categorized by Quicken and finding them is a time-consuming chore.



If you are an MS Money user, stay put. The added benefits of Quicken are minimal and definitely not worth the hassle of converting.
3 stars (For users of 2007 Quicken Premier, the upgrade is questionable.) - I use Quicken for investment and personal financial management, so I part with the $60 each year to stay current. This year's upgrade has some nice features making it easier to take advantage of online or email statements from financial institutions (including attaching cleared check images to financial transactions). However, the process seems to require too much manual copying, pasting ,etc to be of much interest. If I was a casual user of Quicken 2007, I'm not sure I'd find value in moving to this year's edition.
2 stars (disappointed) - I upgraded from Quicken 2003. The new bells and whistles are not that impressive. I recommend it to new users but not as an upgrade.