Product Description

Get the tools you need for smarter, simpler investment planning and portfolio management. By bringing all of your important financial information together in one place, Quicken Premier helps you more efficiently optimize your investment portfolio, simplify taxes and grow your net worth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1793 in Software
• Brand: Intuit
• Released on: 2007-09-09
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Includes all the features of Quicken Deluxe, plus powerful investing tools to help you plan for your financial future and grow your investments
• Make online banking even better--bring all your online accounts together in one place
• Connect to your bank, credit card, 401(k)s, or brokerage accounts with a single password
• Smart investment tools help you research, balance your portfolio and monitor your net worth
• Organize your tax information and help maximize deductions

Amazon.com
Get the tools you need for smarter, simpler investment planning and portfolio management. By bringing all of your important financial information together in one place, Quicken Premier helps you more efficiently optimize your investment portfolio, simplify taxes and grow your net worth.

Powerful investment tools help you define goals, set targets and optimize your investment portfolio.

Keep track of your complete financial portfolio with Quicken Premier's Net Worth Report.

The latest asset allocation and investing guidelines to help you compare your portfolio to market averages, evaluate potential stock purchases and make smarter investment decisions.

View all your finances in one place.

Plan your future. Manage your investments. Watch your net worth grow.
Quicken Premier has all of the features of Quicken Deluxe--plus investment planning tools to help better manage your portfolio and help maximize your investments.

Get the most out of your investments
Powerful investment tools help you define goals, set targets and optimize your investment portfolio. Get alerts on your favorite stocks and funds to help you make informed investment decisions.

Instantly view your net worth
Keep track of your complete financial portfolio with Quicken Premier's Net Worth Report. Gain insight into your investments with performance charts and reports.

Access the latest asset allocation assistance
Our exclusive investing tools have been updated with the latest asset allocation and investing guidelines to help you compare your portfolio to market averages, evaluate potential stock purchases and make smarter investment decisions.

Optimize your portfolio with tax efficient investments
Quicken's Tax Reports make it easy to evaluate and ensure your investments are as tax efficient as possible, helping you get the maximum tax benefits on April 15th.

View all your finances in one place
Like Quicken Deluxe, you can bring your online accounts--including banking, credit card, loan, 401(k), and investing accounts--together all in one place. Avoid the hassle of going to multiple web sites and remembering multiple passwords. With Quicken, you see it all in one place and you need just ONE password.(1) As with Quicken Deluxe, you can even include 529 contributions as part of your overall net worth.

See where you're spending your money
As with Quicken Deluxe, the new "My Savings Plan" instantly shows a summary of your actual spending and compares it to what you planned to spend for the month. Quickly understand what's left over each month for you to invest.

Pay your bills on time
Like Quicken Deluxe, a monthly calendar of your paychecks, bills and expenses helps you schedule bills, set reminders and--most importantly--help avoid late fees. Easily pay bills right from within Quicken using Quicken Bill Pay or a third party bill pay service.(2)

Store important documents and statements in one place
As with Deluxe, not only can you bring your online data into Quicken Premier, you can scan in bank statements, checks and receipts to save time with tax prep. No more time wasted looking for receipts and statements--everything is stored in one central place.

Get free support when you buy, install or upgrade Quicken
(3) If you need help purchasing, installing or upgrading your new software, free phone support is available for Quicken Premier 2008 through December 31, 2008.

What's New in 2008

Maximize your investments

• New! Get the latest asset allocation assistance
  Our exclusive investing tools have been updated with the latest asset allocation and investing guidelines to help you compare your portfolio to market averages, evaluate potential stock purchases and make smarter investment decisions.

Make saving as easy as spending

• New! See where you can find more to invest
  As with Quicken Deluxe, A new "My Savings Plan" instantly shows a summary of your actual spending and compares it to what you planned to spend for the month. You can quickly see where you have room to spend or save more. Set flexible spending targets for regular expenses like entertainment and home expenses and then check your progress as you go through the month.
• Improved! More easily categorize your expenses
  As in Quicken Deluxe, a reorganized and redesigned menu makes it easier than ever to categorize your expenses. You can also add extra details to any expense to help jog your memory--i.e., the specific restaurant for a dining expense or the trip destination for an airline ticket.
• Improved! Smarter navigation makes it easier access the tools you need
  Like Quicken Deluxe, easier navigation makes it faster to get around and discover the features and tools that work best for you. Tabs let you quickly switch between Quicken's main pages. And a new interactive account bar makes it clear which of your accounts you are working with at any given moment.

Track everything in one place

• Improved! More connections to more financial institutions
  Quicken Premier 2008 connects you to over 5300 banks, brokerages and other financial institutions--including PayPal. It's easier than ever to truly bring your accounts together in one place.(1)
• New! Import your PayPal account transactions into Quicken
  Whether it's payments or income--or both--Quicken can now import your transaction data directly from PayPal.
• New! Track your 529 contributions
  Include 529 contributions as part of your overall net worth. See how you're progressing on your college savings goals.
• New! Get reminders of scheduled bills and transactions--without opening Quicken
  If you're using Windows Vista, our new Quicken Billminder Gadget can remind you of scheduled bills and transactions directly from your desktop.

(1) 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. More than 5,322 participating financial institutions as of 6/05/07.
(2) To pay bills in Quicken requires Quicken Bill Pay (sold separately) or a third party bill pay service (fees may apply).
(3) Email, Forums and Chat technical support provided 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Phone technical support provided Monday - Friday, 5:00 am - 5:00 pm PDT. Additional fees may apply.

Customer Reviews

2007 with a few more bugs...
Save your money. Quicken 2008 is 2007 with a couple of changes. The changes aren't even flashy changes, just a few tabs added that you already had access to.

Bugs found in the first 10 minutes of using the software:
1. Mouse wheel does not scroll down on certain windows...only up. Known in 2007. Fixed on some windows, but not of others.
2. If you have a large data set say in your 401k, refresh times can exceed 30 seconds. Known in 2007. Not fixed.
3. No way to export as you could in every previous version. Huge problem on 2007. Not fixed.

New bugs:
1. Installation took over 1 hour. Not an hour of my computer thinking. An hour of switching on and off antivirus. An hour of rebooting. An hour of running in Admin mode. Honestly, I don't know how I got the software installed in the end. This is not a Vista issue. It is an Intuit issue. BITA to put it mildly.

Intuit is not listening. Customers are asking for simple features like quick response, the ability to manage savings bonds efficiently, and I have been a faithful Quicken customer since 1986 (over 20 years!). I'm tempted to take Microsoft Money up on their latest product. If I'm satisfied, this product gets returned. Microsoft Money will even translate the Quicken 2007 files.

Intuit...are you listening? We do not want to sign up for more credit cards and look at flashy graphics. We want manage our money in an efficient manner. Get your damn marketing (Evident by the marketing cr*p on your site. User opinion 2 weeks before the public release. Do you think we're stupid?) and business people out of the picture and let the engineers do what they use to...code useable software.

The only part of the software I am pleased with is the Sidebar Gadget. But again...I've only used it for 10 minutes. It hasn't crashed...yet. 2008 on the other hand 4 times!

I've made my point. 1-star. The lowest rating I've every given. Don't buy this software.

If you're considering jumping into Quicken
You should ask yourself - "how can a piece of software be capable of generating so much hostility from its user base?" If you can't think up a good answer, go ahead and install Quicken, and you'll have an answer before long.

Some of my favorite quirks from Quicken 2006 & 2007 that I'm glad to see survived the upgrade to Quicken 2008:

Basic arithmetic errors: sometimes, if you edit transactions in the register, every subsequent transaction will get confused about the running total (e.g., change a $10 debit to a $20 debit, and instead of changing the running total by $10, watch in delight and amazement as the running total leaps by thousands, literally thousands, of dollars).

Basic reporting errors: go ahead and open the category list, and click the (very unintuitive) button to generate a report for the category _DivInc. If, like me, you have several years of investment transactions, you're sure to have dividend income, but Quicken will tell you "no transactions for this category." Funny, if you type _DivInc into the global search window, it will bring up all those transactions the report couldn't locate.

File corruption: sometimes, I like to imagine Quicken's routines as a bunch of angry little gnomes running around the traces of my processor and through the registers of my memory. This is because, every so often, the gnomes demand a sacrifice, and offer up burnt offerings of your data integrity to their terrible god of woe. I can't otherwise imagine how downloading QFX data from Hewitt Associates confused Quicken so - in the online center, it shows "number of outstanding transactions: -65,536" Yep, negative 2 to the 16th power of transactions outstanding.

Probably the worst part about Quicken, however, is trying to free your data. If you've got any kind of complicated financial picture (i.e, if you're over 25 years old), you won't be able to free yourself from Quicken's grasp, since the only way to get data out of the program is in QIF format, one measly account at a time. Funny, they don't support _importing_ QIFs, claiming, and I quote, "QIF technology is over 10 years old and was designed for technical support purposes . . . QIF Data Import requires many steps to download, is a poor customer experience and can lead to duplicate transactions and errors." That old technology is good enough for you should you dare to _export_ data from Quicken, however. They're going to make darn sure that you have a "poor customer experience" and suffer from "duplicate transactions and errors" if you try to take your data anywhere else.

Do not buy until they fix many bugs
If you are a satisfied Quicken 2006 or earlier user, do not upgrade. Quicken 2007 and 2008 are very buggy and Intuit seems incapable of rapidly making fixes. For me the bugs in the Calendar, Tax Planner, and Online updates are so aggravating because they should so easy to have found in testing. Personally, I wish Intuit and Microsoft would stop this silly "every year" versioning and release new versions only when they have been properly tested, not when some artificial marketting deadline is reached.