Graceful Parenting in Austin

What I wanted from Quicken was pretty simple, to upload transactions from my bank, make sure I recognize them all, give them a category and compare my spending to a budget. It shouldn’t be that hard. But using Quicken made me cry. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. because I exaggerate when I write, I mean it for real, Qiucken made me cry real tears…

Technorati Tags: finance, mint, wasabe, Quicken Online

I don’t want to go back to that time and relive the awful experiences. I will just give a few examples, so you can feel what I’m talking about. Then I will tell you about new options that offer hope to those of us hurt by painful finance software.

For one thing, when I am in Quicken, I want to see my new transactions, make sure I recognize them and assign a category. In Quicken, there are three things going on, I can acccept, record and clear a transaction, but I don’t know the difference. I’m a relatively able computer user, though, so I head out to the Internet to find out.

My first find is the Official Quicken Personal Finance Software Blog. This should have some answers. I’ll search for accept, record and clear. But there is no search feature on the blog. So, I start browsing the posts. Mostly the official Quicken folks post about new releases, then customers post comments about all the bugs and system crashes like “I had a hang up or something and when I went in to update last night and figure out what I had in my account I found all of my check numbers gone POOF nowhere to be found.” Oh, no. Then I got to the end of the list of posts. Only seven posts all together for all time. Then I looked at the date. Nothing updated since 2005. Wow. So, I’m upset because Quicken is taking so much time to do simple things, so now I spent time on an official, live blog that is also a waste of time. (When writing this post, I saw that there are three new posts on the Quicken blog from 2008, with no new information, mostly pointing to resources on other sites, which qualifies this as a spam blog, pretty much.)

But I’m persistent, so I find the Quicken Community with forums. Experts hang out here and answer questions from novices like me, so I submit a question asking about the difference between record, accept and clear. A senior contributor writes me back and explains that I can click accept to record the transaction, then all accepted items are marked with a ‘C’ for cleared. Well, that clears things up. Then I realize why this is more complicated than it needs to be. Quicken is trying to reconcile my checkbook.

Remember that? Remember paper checkbook registers? Remember getting a statement in the mail and verifying that your balance and the bank balance are the same? Uh, well, I haven’t done this since the eighties. (Now I exaggerate.) But in today’s world of on-line banking and debit cards, reconciling a check book with a bank statement doesn’t make sense. I might as well make popcorn on the stove.

I’m checking out this forum and find a lot of interesting information, like all the things that can happen (loosing data, uncaught exceptions, incorrect balance, etc.) that require rebuilding the data file. Then there are the internal rates of return reports that don’t include DEPOSITs and WITHDs and cause a bug when selecting Performance (IRR) and customizing the layout for Subtotal by: either “None” or “Account.”

No, this can’t be right. I feel like I’m using software the operates the Space Shuttle to ride my skateboard and I just want to stay right here on earth and cruise down the block.

So, I head to the trusty Internet again and find this quote from Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint:

“One day in November 2005, while using Quicken to catch up on his personal bookkeeping, Aaron realized that he was in for an afternoon of tedious accounting-type work: poring over his statements; filling in gaps in entries; and categorizing dozens of purchases. While all he wanted to get to was a simple pie chart breaking down his monthly spending into its major categories.

And when, even after spending a couple of hours trying, Aaron couldn’t get that chart (and he holds masters in computer science and engineering) – he started to wonder why there wasn’t a better way do all of this automatically. So instead of finishing his Quicken update that day, he began thinking about building the capabilities that would become Mint.”

Well, Mint didn’t work out for me. Mint stores the usernames and passwords for your bank accounts so it can automate the data transfer and that made me a little nervous, since Mint, the software, is a beta program and Mint, the company, is a start-up. Also, the program doesn’t allow you to edit the categories, so I ended up with odd rules like the “Hair” category includes haircuts, makeup, cologne, messages and dry cleaning and don’t use the “coffee shops,” “fast food,” or “restaurants” category, because that should come from our “allowance” category which is really named “Cash & ATM.”

I didn’t give up, though. Ends up Patzer wasn’t the only one to get fed up with Quicken when trying to do a simple pie chart. There are other, similar options like Geezeo, Wasabe and (oh, no) Quicken On-line. I chose Wesabe and I love it. It is quick and easy and we get insight into our spending and we can make changes and meet goals.

So, if these were the eighties, here is where I would do a lengthy comparison and analysis of this generation of on-line personal finance software. But the information is out there already, so if this is interesting, here are some links to get you started.

General info about these kinds of programs
Yodlee’s white paper on next generation on-line banking and bill-pay
The Simple Dollar cautions about the next generation of on-line banking and bill-pay

Mint
Lifehacker talks about Mint
Get Rich Slowly talks about Mint

Geezeo
Don’t Trust This Guy talks about Geezeo
(not much available about Geezeo)

Wesabe
Lifehacker talks about Wasabe
BeingFrugal talks about Wasabe
Wasabe introductory screen cast on YouTube

Quicken On-line
Lifehacker talks about Quicken Online
Get Rich Slowly talks about Quicken Online
About.com talks about Quicken Online

I’m happy with my new finance software and I don’t cry anymore about it. Just in time, too, because now I need to get started on our taxes.