Tuesday, January 20, 2009

quicken not in the uk?

Was trying to figure out how I'd start to sort out my UK finances as I start to build them up.

We've been using Quicken for the PC for ~15 years or so in the states, started with a dos version and have kept upgrading over the years*. History going back that far. Have some gripes but it does work and keeps track of multiple banks, credit cards, investment accounts, etc - mostly automatically.

So I figured I'd just pick up quicken for my mac and start using it here. Alas... it is not supported for UK accounts. Seems they discontinued the product ~4 years or so ago. Use MS Money perhaps, well that would be frustrating, but possible. Except that too, while still sold here, was last updated in the 2005 version and folks tell me it's getting dated.

Seems odd to me, I've recently started using mint.com in the US for tracking my $ accounts and it works pretty well. Probably well enough that we would not need quicken were it not for the 15 years of history.

Has to be a reason folks have dropped out of the market, but it isn't that small of a market? How hard could it be to keep software up to date? Am I missing something?

* my main gripe with the US quicken is that there is still no apparent way of going from PC --> Mac without the data getting all messed up. The last time I tried my accounts went haywire to the tune of multiple million dollars, which given the inputs was mathematically impossible. Annoying to have parallels installed just for quicken, but so be it, it works.

1 comment:

Jamie Thingelstad said...

This may be the best sign that we are, shall we say, getting old? :-)

I also am a long holdout to Quicken. I also have Parallels installed and use it [almost] exclusively for Quicken (Mac version blows, fingers crossed on the upcoming rewrite). I've played with Mint.com, but it's a toy. Can't touch the power that a tool like Quicken offers.

With that said, it's sad that the Quicken software isn't updated more regularly.

I think the problem, is bigger, for these vendors. The reality is that the "checkbook generation" is gone. Now it's all electronic, and you just go to your bank. I realize that doesn't provide the tools that I need, but I guess people don't see much growth in this market. Odd...