Quicken Experts?

[Andrew B.]

Which are the expert Quicken communities. Maybe here? My accounts are so messed up I'm tempted to rename them in Quicken and start fresh with new ones in place of the old ones. Or, start with a new bank and new Quicken?. Which banks can match Bank of A for ability to download transactions and to bill pay on-line?

BTW, I came up with a good one today. I was on the phone with Discover and asked for some information. I was told it is agains their policy to give out partial numbers. I pointed out that it is a partial of one of my numbers, and they routinely ask for those. I was told that their policy forbids them to do so. So I said my policy forbids me from doing business with companies that have "c" as the third letter of their name, but in a world as large as ours, I manage to get over it.

I guess you would have to be there in my pissy mood to appreciate this one.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Alert Readers will note, however, that "s" is the third letter of their name.

But regardless, anyone who's dealt with a big bank will have been in a pissy enough mood more than often enough to appreciate that one.

I've transferred all the business I can to [hums theme from "Cheers"*] my credit union or local savings and loans.

* For nonUSians
http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/cheerslyrics.html

[ktinkel]

You can easily do as you suggest, though I think I would start out fresh. Print out reports from all your old accounts, including check and transaction registers, and save them. Then begin a brand new Quicken file, beginning January 1 (or December 1 of the prior year to pick up outstanding checks more easily).

But I usually do this in January or February, not July. It could be tedious beginning now. You can export your data, of course, then import it to a new Quicken file. Just dump prior years, and begin with 2008. I would print out old check registers, reconciliations, and other reports, and save them with your bank statements. Then start fresh for this year.

As for banks, I’m with Steve: credit union all the way. I don’t know whether ours allows banking by mail, data downloading, etc., because I don’t do that. You could certainly ask. I think any credit union or bank that provides these services these days will be competent at it (but I could be wrong about that). Our credit union offers most banking services; but I have never stress-tested it!

[George]

I own Quicken and Quick Books because I was told they were the best. But in studying them... well, why does anyone need anything more than Excel?? I just don't get it.

I deal with banks in person. These people have a real attitude where I live... but when I have a problem, I ask to talk to a supervisor, and I use a well thought out approach. It does get results.

A couple months ago, my main bank turned down a request I made, but they were so rude, and as I was driving around it stuck with me. So I drove right back, asked to talk to the supervisor that was involved, and in detail I explained why their behavior had to be considered extremely rude. She was flabbergasted, but she agreed with me and promised to have a special meeting over my comments with all the employees. Then, she said she wanted to honor my original request, without any prompting on my part.

I always get results like this with the entities I'm involved with, and I don't care how often I have to bring up my complaints -- but the key is the approach, knowing key points to bring up. Hmm..a soft low voice helps, and stuff like that...

But many times I will just do a letter, and once I had the manager of the local supermarket respond by driving to my house to personally apologize and discuss the problem in detail. Again, the approach is important.

George

[groucho]

Andrew, I notice your thread has been quietly languishing.

Chase, Citibank, and a host of others have good online banking and bill paying. Downloading into Quicken, you'd have to check one by one (call) but I believe both now offer that.

What do you mean by the accounts being all messed up? If you mean the categories within Quicken...That's either a day of retagging every transaction, or just enduring till years-end and then cutting over, starting new. Quicken can be a PITA. I stopped using it when I switched to online banking and stopping printing my own checks from it. Cost of the check, cost of the postage..and sometimes an envelope...

Before Quicken was invented, I kept all my books in a Lotus spreadsheet. Sometimes I think that was a better way to go--it was just not terribly feasible to PRINT CHECKS from Lotus back then, either.<G>

[Andrew B.]

I used to go to the bank website and trigger a download to Quicken. When I started triggering it from within Quicken, it downloads many of the same items again. Too much work to find and delete.

[groucho]

Sounds like either this is a bug, or maybe you are just not supposed to do it "both" ways, because there is no provision for keeping track of what has been transferred one way versus the other?

If you're familiar with Excel, and you can export the Q data out into Excel as a .csv file (that used to be fairly simple) then it should be fairly simple to eliminate any dupes in Excel, that used to be a fairly common macro function to purge lists. One big push, all clean, then reimport into a new Quicken file, or into the old one after deleting 'all' to purge it too.

Depending on what you'll need to do with the data (generate tax prep lists?) it might pay to clean it up, or just to draw a line, take the latest balance, and move on.

[Andrew B.]

Interesting. I didn't know I could import to excel and then move back into Quicken. What I did was make an entry that corrects the total, and left it at that. But I'm not happy doing it that way.

[groucho]

Yup! http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010346261033.aspx

Basically, you import the data as a list, filter by "unique" only, and the list is purged of all duplicates in one shot, just using the menus.

I hear Excel 2009 will also make a decent cup of coffee, but they can't get the "teapot" functions ported over to the 64-bit version.<VBG>

[Andrew B.]

Quicken 2008 Deluxe only exports to QIF. Is there another way to get it to a .csv

[groucho]

"convert qif to csv" brings up a page full of hits, some offereing free conversion tools, others offering to convert it for you.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010929291033.aspx?pid=CL100570551033 and MS thinks you can import it live from a web site direcltly into Excel.

Either of those help?

[Andrew B.]

Thanks. I'll take a look.

[BobRoosth]

I use Quicken 2000 virtually every day and do online banking with BofA, but I have never gotten the two connected. Two reasons:

I like the independent cross check of my register entries against what the bank gives me on my statements.

I do not like the categories that the entries have when downloaded from the bank. One of my clients works in that mode and gets royally confused every now and again. I have had to rescue her a couple of times.

If your account is truly messed up, the easiest answer is probably to start a new one. Do it just as you would were you starting totally from scratch. The only issue might come when you generate reports, ensuring that both accounts are included in reports that should include the entire year.

[Andrew B.]

What would be the steps to create a new account, and have Quicken recognize this new account as the one to use when it downloads from the bank website.

[groucho]

Bob-
Apparently both Quicken and MSMoney charge about $15/month to use their software linked to a bank. Or, the banks charge to link to them--same next price either way.

I find that tragically comedic, since the banks would prefer we all do "paperless" banking (it costs them something like $1 to process each check) and I cna use Quicken for FREE if I continue to mail out PAPER CHECKS WHICH WILL COST MY BANK MORE THAN THE $15 THEY WANT TO CHARGE ME to avoid using paper.

Can we say, management practices like this are one reason the economy is down the crapper?

You'd think one really sharp bank would just give away the equivalant of home checking software--as a perq to capture a customer base. DUH?

I wonder if I can teach Excel to dial the phone and fetch data....

[Steve Rindsberg]

>> You'd think one really sharp bank would just give away the equivalant of home checking software--as a perq to capture a customer base. DUH?

Some here have finally tumbled to something like that ... if you don't CHARGE for online banking, people might actually USE it and save you all that processing overhead.

[groucho]

Oh, we have free online banking. There's just no one-shot way to keep a copy of your register at home as well. You have to export a period, then import it to your computer, in whatever spreadsheet or other software you want to use...and then repear the process every week or month or whatever.

KLUDGE JOB.

I should be able to hit a button that says "Save current transactions to your computer before you log off?" and have it port over transparently.

[Steve Rindsberg]

"I don't trust web apps. "
Let me fix that up for you:
"I don't trust."

At least, most of us shouldn't trust, but rarely. I remember when my bank had some DIY online banking before their new web banking, and indeed it simply overwrote your version if it thought there was a discrepancy. I said, nu-uh, I won't use that.

I suppose those same folks went on to program a batch of the electronic voting machines that were so recently used. But then again, when an old-time mechanical voting booth breaks down and you start passing out paper ballots--you should see the eyebrows go up on the south american, african, etc. immigrants who realize they're in America now and....THEY'RE GOING TO USE PAPERS & BOXES JUST LIKE IN THE OLD COUNTRY? Yeah, not so impressive.

I'd sstick to Quicken, but I'm too cheap to pay the 25c per check (for dotmatrix fed checks instead of playing with sheetfeeds) and the 42c per stamp, and the nickel per envelope -- that's 72c minimum to mail out a physical check!

[annc]

I'd sstick to Quicken, but I'm too cheap to pay the 25c per check (for dotmatrix fed checks instead of playing with sheetfeeds) and the 42c per stamp, and the nickel per envelope -- that's 72c minimum to mail out a physical check!Plus the cost of your time to do it all. Our accountants at work calculate that it costs us $50 to pay anyone by cheque. So even people as far down the food chain as I am get credit cards these days.

[groucho]

I was ignoring the cost of time, figuring that no matter how you pay a bill, someone still has to look at it, confirm it, click something to pay it. Prestamped envelopes used to be sold in the US for the price of the postage alone--but our postal service wised up about that.<G>

I suppose it would make equal sense to PAY eomployees by EFT to their bank card or bank account as well, instead of handing out paper paychecks. I wonder how many firms are still using paper instead of direct deposit?

[annc]

I was ignoring the cost of time, figuring that no matter how you pay a bill, someone still has to look at it, confirm it, click something to pay it. Prestamped envelopes used to be sold in the US for the price of the postage alone--but our postal service wised up about that.<G>We can still buy prestamped envelopes for the cost of the stamp.

I suppose it would make equal sense to PAY eomployees by EFT to their bank card or bank account as well, instead of handing out paper paychecks. I wonder how many firms are still using paper instead of direct deposit?Very few, I imagine. I get mine paid directly into my bank account, and my payslip via e-mail.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hey, how come you're editing my reply instead of replying? Here I thought the system had gone berserk. <g>

I'd go to online banking but I'm too cheap with my time to waste it on slow web apps when I could be printing paper checks. <g>

[BobRoosth]

I have free online bill pay. I would not consider importing their records into Quicken. I WANT an independent record of my transactions. I keep Q open while I pay bills. It takes very little time to key the numbers in both places. Many bills come directly into the online system. For those, I just have to tell it when to pay. The amount is already there.

This process also allows me to continue using Quicken 2000, a much leaner, quicker version than the more recent releases.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Good point about "leaner, quicker". I'm still using QuickBooks 3 for the same reason.

I actually bought a more recent version, 2007 or so, intending to upgrade, but it's such a total porker that I don't know whether I could stand it. Besides, it wouldn't read my old QB3 files. Oh. Well.