Evil, Evil Intuit & Quicken

I love Quicken. Well, I did. I’m a long time user. Way back I was even one of
Quicken’s top beta testers for versions 3 and 4. I especially loved Quicken
because it wasn’t Microsoft. It was the one Microsoft product that seemed to
survive and thrive.

Well phooey on you, Quicken — Microsoft, here I come. The issue is Quicken
insisting that the QIF standard for importing data wasn’t good enough and the
open OFX standard wouldn’t fly. Oh no, Quicken has to have its own special
flavor of OFX, to try and lock you in.

Well, Intuit — here’s what you did. I regularly upgraded until Quicken 2004
gave me that warning that QIF was going to die. See, I use multiple currencies
– dollars, pounds and euros. Since Quicken pulled out of the UK years ago, I
went back to the US version that only believes there are US banks and that
Americans live only within the 50 states.

Ahem. Several million of us live outside. And see, we have to deal with banks
that don’t do no QFX / Web Connect files. So I stuck with Quicken 2004.

Sadly, this meant each month, I had to open the QIF file for my credit card
here, then manually do a search and replace (several) to shift the date format
from dd/mm/yy to mm/dd/yy for a proper import. I lived with this because I was
just too busy to finally mess around seeing if a newer version of Quicken would
help.

Tonight, I’m bringing up a new laptop. Hmm. Do I get my old Quicken 2004 CD
out? Nah — let’s try Quicken 2007. Sure, I have to buy it, but I get a 60 day
refund. Time to test it out.

It installed just fine. Now to see if I could import data. Neither of my two
UK credit card companies pump out QFX. But they do OFX. I exported those, change
the extension to QFX and tried to trick Quicken. I failed.

A quick search, and

Importing OFX Data into Quicken 2005/2006 told me I needed to insert some
info to make Quicken think the files were from an authorized institution. So, I
downloaded a QFX file from my US credit card company, looked for the right
section and inserted that into the other files.

Success! No. They started to import, then I got a "downloaded currency does
not match" error.

Bummer. Another search, and

Hacking Quicken to Import QFX Files on OS X told me that Mac users are
irritated too. I’m guessing it’s because you can’t get Microsoft Money for the
Mac, so they discover this weird locked in world of Quicken for the first time.

As it turns out, there are some further tweaks I might be able to try. But by
this point, my download of Microsoft Money had completed. I fired it up. I
imported Quicken into it. There’s my accounts. I important my files. They came
in — no hacking needed, the dates all correct and WOW — it’s even guessed
fairly correctly many of my categories.

That’s it Quicken, I’m done. I can see things I’ll miss in Money in terms of
how I can view my account list while working within a particular account. But
Microsoft rocks — and you totally suck. I’m with you only until I get my annual
taxes finished in the next month or so, sticking with Quicken 2004, and then I’m
outta Intuit country.