I’m a long time Quicken user, and I can’t imagine life without it. I’ve been using it on and off since about 1996. I only took a break when I didn’t own a computer at home for a while.
As much as I love Quicken, I also have some serious issues with it. I cannot tell if it’s my fault or if it’s the software, but let’s assume it’s the software. (I am currently using Quicken 2009 Deluxe. Maybe if I got the Premium version I’d actually have the features I want. But I’m not so sure about that.)
1) I have an HSA and my company makes a contribution to it twice a year. It shows up on my paycheck but to make the contribution to my accounts in Quicken, I also end up having to do some weird accounting on my paycheck to handle it. Basically I end up with three entries on my paycheck splits, one for my regular contribution, one for the company contribution to me, and one to transfer that money to my HSA account. When I do the company’s contribution to me, do I class that as taxable income? Right now, I have the money coming to me from the HSA, but the HSA account does not show a transfer out. So basically I ended up with a missing transfer transaction.
2) The investment account reporting makes it difficult for me to figure out what my investment costs are. They should have a canned report that finds all your investment transaction costs since those are deductible on your tax return. I’d really like to know if my 401k is ripping me off because Fidelity says I’ve paid 99 cents for the year and that’s an obvious lie. I know it is, but I have a hard time proving it with a simple report from Quicken. And it would be nice if I could bring together all my investment costs from taxable and non-taxable accounts onto one sheet or else I’ll forget to deduct some of them. (I nearly forgot one of them this year.)
3) The Investment Performance screen confuses the heck out of me. It doesn’t actually calculate your ROI including commission costs and dividends. I end up having to track all of that separately outside of Quicken. I might as well keep a ledger book by hand.
4) What would be nice, and I realize this is asking for the moon here, but I would like to know the beta for the stocks I hold. Are they considered insanely risky? If so, I’d probably think twice about holding them but I only know of beta as an indicator of risk, so I’m dumb and need that number fed to me. Of course, I’m not sure that information is really accurately available anywhere except maybe a Bloomberg terminal.
5) Why isn’t there a pre-defined category for ‘Property Taxes’? That seems silly that I have to make one on my own since they let you track a mortgage within the product. Who isn’t paying some sort of tax on their property? Even when I was getting a refund on it, I still had to pay it out to escrow.
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