Product Description

See your complete financial picture in minutes! Find out what you have and where it is going pay bills plan for your future help save more money and take control of your finances. * Smarter categorization of your spending. (New!) Hide categories you do not use; rename downloaded payees; eliminate clutter by expanding collapsing or merging categories - and other new customization features. * Forecast your cash flow with the Monthly View. (New!) See upcoming bills and scheduled transactions so you will know exactly what you need to spend and how much you will have in reserve once bills are paid. * Pay bills on time. (Improved!) Avoid late fees - whether you use Quicken Bill Pay write checks or go directly to your billers web site.* More flexibility with scheduled transactions. (Improved!) Quicken now accommodates more scheduling options for payments and deposits so you can manage Social Security checks property taxes school tuition paychecks and more.* Reach financial goals. (Improved!) Dozens of charts and graphs give instant answers to long-term financial questions. Better categorization gives you improved spending report details.* Monitor your retirement plan. (Improved!) Get your complete retirement picture in minutes by downloading from top 401(K) providers. * Easier export into Excel. (Improved!) Now it is easy to move your Quicken data into Excel. * Back up and archive your Quicken files quickly and easily. (Improved!) Online features require Internet access and are subject to change. Services vary among participating financial institutions or other parties and may be subject to application approval additional terms conditions and fees. REQUIRES- IBM or compatible Pentium 200 (Pentium II 300 recommended) Windows 98/2000/Me/XP 32 MB RAM (128 MB RAM recommended) 100 MB free hard drive space plus 45 MB for Microsoft Internet Explorer if IE 6.0 or higher is not already installed (IE 6.0 included on CD-ROM). SVGA (800x600) with 256 colors ...

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3204 in Software
• Brand: Intuit
• Model: 283645
• Released on: 2004-07-30
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows 98
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Over 100 feature improvements on popular tools
• Connect instantly to bank, credit card sites, and 401(k) providers
• Manage finances by setting up automatic transactions
• Quickly and easily track investment holdings
• Plan for financial goals by viewing net worth over time

From the Manufacturer
Quicken 2005 Deluxe helps you take control of your finances in minutes. Quicken 2005 Deluxe contains all the tools in Quicken Basic, plus tools to help you manage your investments, plan for the future, prepare for tax time, and much more!

Features:

• Over 100 feature improvements on the tools you use most, to make Quicken easier to help you plan, increase your savings and simplify taxes!
• Connect instantly to your bank, credit card sites, and 401(k) providers with a push of a button, so you won't have to manually enter your data. Connect to more than 1,800 financial institutions.*
• Manage your finances by setting up automatic transactions for a wider range of frequency options--including property taxes, social security income, and more.
• Track your investment holdings--without taking the time to enter every historical transaction. You can decide to add in transaction details later for tax purposes or performance analysis.
• Plan for your financial goals by viewing your net worth over time. View the breakdown of your net worth by cash, property, or stocks. The Net Worth Monitor lets you do all this and more with charts and graphs.

*Online features require Internet access and are subject to change. Services vary among participating financial institutions or other parties and may be subject to application approval, additional terms, conditions, and fees.

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Customer Reviews

Don't upgrade to 2005 - even if someone gives it to you!
If you have the 2003 Deluxe version stick with it. It is the last Intuit version worth using. I regret upgrading to 2005.

When installing Quicken 2005, it removes Quicken 2004 from your system, converts your data and you will not be able to go back. If you do decide to upgrade, make sure you make a backup - you will want it.

(...)
Intuit's claimed benefits for Premium are misleading - nothing of particular value is offered.

The "over 100 enhancements" they claim to have made to 2005 are nebulous and difficult to find. Subjective as well.

I am a professional financial advisor and have helped people for years with their use of Quicken. Out of concern, I persisted and actually manged to get through to a manager in product development on the telephone. She was surprised I got through- and she was too busy to talk with me as she was getting ready to leave for the weekend.

I have several sugestions for upgrading the product and expanding their market- but since they don't matter to Intuit- no need to bore you with the details. You would never see them anyway.

The qif problem is real. They are pitting their customers against the finance industry. It doesn't look like a work around is in the near offing. I looked at Money several years ago and thought it was way below the quality of Quicken. I haven't been back since but have now re-thought. Quicken should talk to the Work Perfect people about competing with Microsoft- uh I mean Word What or something like that? Let's see - they didn't listen to their customers either - then of course there was Lotus 123 - but I don't remember what that was for......

Terrible Untested Software
I have been a user of Quicken and CheckFree for bill payment for over ten years. I received a "mandatory upgrade" of Quicken Premier 2005. I learned after the fact that Intuit has taken over the CheckFree feature under the same QuickenBillPay name.
There are two tech support areas now--one for the BillPay service and another for the Quicken software.

First, I had a problem "transitioning" to the new service.
It seems the "old server", "new server" and Quicken itself were out of synch with regard to the bank account information.
The software gave error messages warning not to use Quicken for bill payment until the problem was resolved.
The first person in BillPay tech support was unable to help me and referred the problem to Quicken tech support. A week passed and they never called.
I was told to pay bills directly through the web in the meantime. I was able to login and schedule two time-critical payments.
After receiving no response, I called and went through the whole process again. This time I was required to change the bank account information in Quicken to agree with the account information in BillPay. There were two discrepancies: one account with a number that I didn't recognize and an obsolete routing number that was ten years old. The invalid account number was deleted and I was required to change the routing number in Quicken. This time the "transition" worked. However, I was told that payments might be routed incorrectly because of the obsolete routing number and that I should go to the web and correct the routing number. To do this I was told to add the account as new with the corrected routing number and and delete the old account.
It turns out this canceled all of my pending and repeating payments, including the time-critical ones.
Not only that, the software created a new file of transactions and now some account information is in one file and some in another and they can't be merged.

I find this is very typical of Intuit's software. It's never properly tested and the alleged new features are worthless to me. The user interface changes each time and features that should be routine require relearning and sometimes no longer work.

UPDATED: It's as bad as everyone says, maybe worse--0 stars
I have used many versions of Quicken over the years, upgrading regularly, but stopped at Quicken 2002 after seeing 2003, 2004, and 2005 get panned on this site and elsewhere.

However, Intuit has backed me into a corner by discontinuing support for 2002 as of April, so had to decide between this and Money, which is also universally panned. Better the devil you know that the devil you don't, so Quicken 2005 it was.

Before getting into the software, let me mention that Quicken's "sunset policy" is garbage. It is one thing to quit supporting a product--you cannot find good people that want to help consumers with old software. However, to actually turn off functionality? That is inexcusable. If class action lawsuits were not a complete waste of time for everyone but the lawyers, I'd be out there drumming up a list of victims of this exceptionally poor business practice.

That aside, on to the software itself... I originally thought it wasn't that bad.

I have over fifty different accounts, including banking, loans, investment, 401(k), etc., etc., and they all upgraded perfectly. I was also given the option to merge my linked investment and cash accounts, which simplifies tracking (a nice new feature for those of us who are not hardcore accountants).

The user interface is slightly different than previously, but not radically so, and allows more flexible customization. With very little effort, I was able to get rid of most of the annoying "buy our products" links Intuit insists on including.

However, a month of use has brought forth some problems that are making me strongly consider going back to a spreadsheet. Some examples:

--There are a number of hard-coded rules to prevent you from doing something Quicken does not think is a good idea. For example, it is not possible to transfer securities from one account to another at all unless the accounts are of the same type-if not, as in the case of transfer from an ESPP account to a normal brokerage account, you need to "sell" the shares, then transfer the proceeds, then "buy" the shares in the destination account. I would say that rules out the possibility of using Quicken for tax purposes.

--Upgraded 401(k) accounts for those accounts that do not provide the number of shares simply cease to function. The first time that you attempt to use the Update Wizard to indicate your new account value, Quicken creates COPIES of all the existing securities, appends "-401k" to the end, and shows double the value of the account. You cannot delete the old transactions, as you would lose all transaction history. An hour of technical support resulted in the following brilliant suggestion: "Uninstall 2005 and reinstall your 2002 version, then re-enter all the transactions in the account (six years' worth), and upgrade again. That might solve it."

--In general, 401(k) accounts no longer provide accurate information. When updating the account from a statement, Quicken no longer creates automatic buys based on your new balance. Instead it creates bizarre "placeholder entries" that show that on Day X, you owned Y shares of something, but not how the shares got there. Apparently, it is intended that the user now goes back and manually creates the buy transactions that were created automatically in the past.

--When attempting a download from my bank, every transaction that I had before the upgrade to 2005 comes back over and over again. For example, I attempted to download my bank transactions from the past month and received every transaction since the account was opened. Hoping for a one-time glitch (surely once I cleared them out it would not happen again!), I spent a half hour right-clicking and deleting the duplicate transactions. On my next download request, all 487 of them came back.

--If you hold shares in an ESPP account, the name of the security has "ESPP" appended to the end of it, so it is treated as a different security than any shares of the same actual stock you may already hold (even if the shares are in the same account, and were placed there before an upgrade). So instead of showing 1000 shares of XYZ, you get 500 shares of XYZ and 500 shares of XYZ ESPP.

In summary, Intuit has extorted their customers into upgrading. Having done so, they did not fix any of the obvious software problems (why does the cash flow forecast choke when one has too many schedule transactions, but is perfectly happy to estimate how much money you will be spending???). At the same time, they introduced a number of rather obvious bugs. They provide pay-only support (other than for a very limited number of issue types that they will address on Web Chat if you live in the Pacific Time Zone or are willing to work on your problem at night). The consistent approach to support is "uninstall the software and reinstall it and re-enter all your work."

This is a very, very poor piece of software, and a very poor company. It is a shame Microsoft or someone else cannot get their act together and make something better. A spreadsheet or pen/paper would be better than this.