A Must Buy - Small Business Invoice Software Review

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By Isabella Stewart


It isn't perfect, and I haven't quite figured out how use some of its functionality - in particular tracking our investments, but overall I'm quite happy. My bank said they cannot download my transaction to this accounting software because they do not use the newest file transfer systems.

Overall, this migration from MS-Money to Quicken was fairly painless. I would say that I spent about 5 hours to ensure that everything was set up to my liking. Minor gratuitous changes to the UI, and while it's nice that user data is now stored in a single file rather than multiples, it's almost TWICE as large. Internet Explorer 8: Quicken defaults to Internet Explorer for web page viewing and basically anything else it needs done in terms of going online. Even though I am an avid Firefox/Chrome user, I recommend using IE 8 for Quicken.

I have been with Quicken since the late 1990's and have been pretty disheartened on the issues with the downloading of transactions, don't even try to use San Diego County Credit Union and Quicken since that just won't work unless you have an IT degree. I finally gave up! I have been using one click download for other accounts and when it works it's great, but I keep getting error messages and need to call Quicken over and over to get anything resolved. At the current time the issues have not been resolved, so the whole point of having one click download and being able to see all your accounts updated at one time is not working for me. And of course they changed the data format. Quicken being practically the only game in town, and I being a long time user of quicken and TurboTax was what dictated my purchase. I wish a competitor to quicken would surface soon, because I know I'll have to convert someday, but now is still not the time. MS Money might not be supported, but it still works and meets my needs.

I had used an earlier version of Quicken, probably 9 years ago and was very satisfied with the usage for a small business. That's why I bought this updated version. I switched to use this after using Microsoft Money for many years. Not only is this product unintuitive and clumsy, the final straw is after generating reports finding that the data is wrong. No ownership or any issues, even when the application's error message clearly states NOT to contact your financial institution as it's not their problem. Of course, guess what their support does, Blames your bank. Because of that, my Schedule C was missing all my income for 2010. To fix this I manually added the missing categories to each of the customer payments, making sure to separate income from expenses. I gave a "tolerant" 4 star rating with respect to user functionality, giving credit to the designers with the original intent of creating a standalone product.

I guess I feel that I have a couple of choices by April 27th, 1 - live with my current version and say goodbye to my downloading capabilities, and, if possible, any other features they can start removing till I have to upgrade. I just have to calm down a little before I pay the ransom on my downloading abilities! So this proves that Q2011 makes some permanent notations in the Registry (or somewhere) and then certain financial institutions (which, I assume, didn't pay Quicken to upgrade to the latest 2011 server software) are tagged to no longer download "acceptable" transactions. I've been using Quicken since the early 1990s, and until now all updates always worked smoothly.




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