Quicken 2008 Premier [OLD VERSION]
by Intuit
![Quicken 2008 Premier [OLD VERSION]](/images/Quicken-2008-Premier-OLD-VERSION-B000U0CBVG-L.jpg)
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Software Reviews of Quicken 2008 Premier [OLD VERSION]
Customer Review: Don't waste your money
Summary: 1 Stars
I too have been a Quicken user for more than 20 years and this is by far the worst ever. The issues are too many to mention them all, but if you read the other reviews, you see where this is going. Intuit's support has also gone out the window. I am in the process of exploring my options to get rid of this junk. DO NOT BUY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.Customer Review: Downgrade from 5-star to 1-star!
Summary: 5 Stars
(This is a drastically revised review. My initial installation experience was good, and I rated the program 5 stars. Now I rate it at 1-star, but I can't change the rating of the review.) Here's the recap.
I dreaded the upgrade from Quicken 2005 to 2008. I waited as long as possible, then validated my data, etc., and set aside a day when I thought I could stand the frustration. Whaddaya know, the installation went pretty easily, and soon I was up and running, intact, or so I thought. I use Quicken BillPay and have for years, and I have Windows XP Pro. My online billing proceeded normally, and I was greatly relieved. I even submitted a 5-star review. The program does little more than Quicken 2005 did, but the new eye-candy was pleasant, and the upgrade was mandatory. By waiting as long as possible to install, the program was already on Version 7 (God help early adopters!)
Then I noticed that my checking account appeared as "Wachovia Securities" when the correct account was and always has been "Wells Fargo". I tried all the obvious ways to fix it, and nothing worked, so I thought I'd give the new "chat" support a try. When it became clear that the things the support person suggested wouldn't work, she simply disconnected!! That solved HER problem. And I decided not to sweat it, since the erroneous name didn't seem to cause any other problems.
But then -- I pulled up an old saved report from Q2005, and one column of data was garbage. This time I tried email support. Through an exchange of emails, they advised me to validate the file, and if that didn't work, to supervalidate it. I did all of that (very carefully, I had a backup, but by the way the normal backup you get is worthless, more on that), and it still didn't work. The email guy said I should phone in and talk to a support person.
AND THEN I noticed that the validation process had ELIMINATED ALL RECORD OF ONLINE TRANSACTIONS AND ALL OF MY ONLINE PAYEE LIST, which was substantial!! Oh woe. This is when I tried restoring a backup file I'd made the day before. But get this: WHEN QUICKEN 2008 MESSES UP, IT DOES SO IN A WAY THAT PREVENTS YOU FROM GOING BACK TO A PREVIOUSLY FUNCTIONAL VERSION. Every old file I "restored" now showed the same total absence of online transactions and onlinei payees. Now I did decide to phone in for support.
I was pleasantly surprised: Without a long wait time, I was connected to a young woman in Bangladesh or some other remote location, but she was really really sharp and actually solved the problem. This was not trivial. I had to cancel my online billing setup, validate and revalidate and revalidate the file until no "corrected errors" showed up, and then reinstate online billing. We basically took Quicken apart and put it back together again. She also corrected the account so that Wells Fargo showed up instead of Wachovia, although this was separate from the issue that had wiped out my online transactions. As far as the column of garbage in the saved Q2005 report, she said that Q2008 does that sometimes; I should just delete the report and recreate it. All these problems were solved, my online payee list was restored, and at that point, I was charged $24.95 for the call. I tried to argue that Q2008 had created the problem and corrupted my file, but decided to blow it off and just pay and be done with it. I thought my problems were over. Ha.
BECAUSE THEN, when I next "updated" my online accounts, Quicken Bill Pay downloaded the LAST TWO YEARS OF TRANSACTIONS, roughly 650, along with a few new ones interspersed. The balance in my checking accounted was now -$87,000. That's MINUS $87,000.
In the next call to phone support I found out that "That's just how it is". I would have to go through the last 2 years of transactions and manually delete the duplicates. (He did tell me to sort the account by "most recently entered" instead of by "date", so I was able to select groups and delete with only 1-2 clicks per transaction instead of the 4-5 clicks it normally takes to delete a transaction.) At the end of all this, my accounts have been somehow "unreconciled" -- all records of the last month's reconciliation have been eliminated. So I'm having to redo that too. I don't actually expect my bank account to balance at the end of all this (How do you carefully and thoughtfully delete duplicate records when you're feeling like !@#%$?) I plan to just enter a fudge factor and forget about it.
Here's some learnings: If you're converting from an old version, and you decide to validate the file before you start the conversion, keep rerunning the validation routine until it turns up no more error messages. They don't tell you this, but the sharp woman said that was important. Then you may or may not want to "super-validate" which you do by holding down the shift key while you go thru the validation procedure.
Then you can pray a lot. If your bank account name comes up wrong, try ignoring it. If your old reports look funny, delete and recreate them. Do anything you can to avoid using the Q2008 version of validation.
If you need support, go immediately for the phone support. I talked to 2 people, and both knew what they were doing. The first woman was awesome (except for not telling me the horrors that would happen the next time I ran the online update). The second person, a guy, knew I was, well, screwed, and he tried to be as nice as possible about it. I have used Quicken since 1998, and I will say that support is better than it was a few years ago (not close to the way it was Back in the Day), and they don't charge you unless they solve the problem. The chat and email support were useless.
All for now.
Customer Review: Intuit Scamware
Summary: 2 Stars
No useful improvements from the previous version AND it deleted the account information on about half my accounts. Make sure you back up your databases BEFORE you upgrade and then watch them closely for the first few weeks after you upgrade.
Bottom line, this is a prime example of abusive softeware licensing and should be illegal.
Customer Review: Buyer beware
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm a Quicken user of over ten years, and had come to rely on the product to keep track of day-to-day and long-term finances. My most recent version had been Quicken 2004 running on Windows 98. All things come to an end-of-life, and it came time to upgrade both the PC and Quicken. I decided to go with Windows Vista Home Premium and trusted Intuit's claims that Quicken 2008 was ready for Vista.
I did check the reviews on Amazon, and was not exactly impressed by the lack of enthusiasm for the new product. But - I went ahead anyway, thinking that as a long-term computer user I would be able to troubleshoot and solve any problems that might arise.
First came the nightmare of patching the box version (which is what is sold on Amazon and probably most retail stores). The patches available from Intuit bogged my system down, repeatedly failed, ran the processors to their max (and this is a dual-core AMD64 system, about as new as you can get). After multiple attempts taking most of one day, I decided to hang it up, get some rest, and try fresh again. After a near total wipe of Quicken from my system, I tried again after having to shut nearly everything down, crossed my fingers, and finally the install worked. Or seemed to.
I used the new software for several weeks after converting my prior Quicken data files, and things seemed to go reasonably well, although I did experience the screen flicker that other buyers have reported here (this flicker persists).
Then I tried to back up my Quicken data file. All I had to do was to attempt to access any of the filesystem features (backup, browse, validate), and Quicken died without a word. No error messages. It simply could not access the filesystem, and failed completely ungracefully.
What followed was two weeks of futile correspondence with Intuit customer support, which appears to be outsourced. I was told to uninstall, reinstall from CD, repatch, get rid of my data files and try to start a new one from scratch, etc. Due to my extreme difficulties in getting the Quicken product patched (with their patches) in the first place, I requested a pre-patched installation, made via download. I was told that would not be possible, although if I paid additional money, I could get a replacement CD.
Then I was told to download a utility from Microsoft that would wipe clean any prior software installation data left over in a Windows install database, and start the process all over again. And, for good measure, Intuit customer support supplied me with a good-for-24-hours-only URL from which I could download a pre-patched copy of Quicken. I did all these things, uninstalled Quicken (once again), ran the install cleaner utility, and reinstalled Quicken from their prepatched download.
End result? No change from when I started - every access to the filesystem causes Quicken to silently die.
I was then requested to give my home phone number and a time when I could be reached so that an Intuit customer support rep could call me and help fix the problem. We set a time via email, and I was there, eager to get this resolved. No call came. Then a little while later, I received an email from the rep apologizing for not calling on schedule ("due to a technical difficulty"), and he wrote me to use a web link to set up another "Quicken callback". I did this, and was told an Intuit rep would call within ten minutes.
Call they did, another seemingly outsourced rep who was totally unfamiliar with any of the prior emails that had been exchanged between myself and Intuit. She proceeded to attempt to get me to redo all the same things I had done before. I could tell she was shooting blind, and then she stopped me in mid-sentence to inform me that she would be happy to resolve my problem, however that if she was successful, Intuit would charge me another approximately $25 for the phone incident. Of course, if she could not fix the software, there would be no charge to me (generous, eh?).
That was the end of the line for me. I think it's unfortunate that a company who should be concerned with releasing functional products appears no longer to do so, and feels it is appropriate to attempt to inflate charges to fix a faulty product in the first place. It would be as if a car company sold you a vehicle that would only go forward, but not in reverse. Then when you said you had to go in reverse, they informed you they would be happy to fix it... for five thousand more over your original purchase price.
Quicken buyer: beware.
Customer Review: Quicken Premier 2008
Summary: 4 Stars
Smooth installation and conversion from QP2005 in Windows XP Pro. My wife is the bookkeeper and I'm her computer support. As a Quicken user of 10+ years, she has had no complaints and appreciates some of the new features. It probably helped that I added more memory in our older machine.