Personal Financial Software

Continued from page 1

By Simson Garfinkel

January 8, 2003

What's most annoying to me, though, is that the majority of the delays that I experience with Windows Quicken are clearly the result of poor programming. Needless screen redraws slow performance, and the software also plays poorly with other Windows programs. For example, at times Quicken writes directly to the Windows screen rather than going through the Windows Application Programming Interface (API). As a result, the program sometimes draws in windows belonging to other applications. As Quicken was ported from DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 and so on, Intuit's programmers slapped new features on top of old and rushed to make their annual deadline. But while Quicken 2003 is in desperate need of a complete rewrite, the economics of the personal finance software industry, combined with the management practices at Intuit, all but assures that such a rewrite will never take place.

As with previous upgrades, Quicken 2003 for Windows adds new features without addressing the longstanding technical problems that I've identified above. With Quicken 2003 it is much easier to set up Quicken for online account access. The 2003 version has a nicer "heads-up" display of your finances. There's also a heavy emphasis on taxes, including an investment analyzer that tells you if your mutual funds make sense for your tax bracket and a "capital gains" estimator that tells what your real proceeds will be after a sell of stock. Finally, the 2003 version does a harder sell on Quicken Bill Pay (an electronic check server) and Quicken Brokerage (a cross-marketing deal with online broker Muriel Siebert & Co.). Overall, I prefer the new interface, but I'd happily trade it for a product that runs faster and more smoothly.

At the same time I upgraded Quicken, I also tried out its rival software, Microsoft Money 2003 Deluxe and Business. Overall, Money and Quicken are more alike than different: both have registers where you put individual transactions, both can issue reports on your finances, and both can download transactions from banks and credit cards. Both organizations have partnered with a huge number of financial institutions: the chances are quite good that if your bank supports either Quicken or Money, it probably supports both of them.

Money has a program that's supposed to convert a Quicken file to Money format, but the converter crashed the first few times that I tried it. Eventually, though, I was able to get a good chunk of my Quicken file converted into Money format.

Money 2003 looks and feels like a Web site. The buttons are all flat. There are lots of embedded graphics, photographs of friendly-looking people who appear to be effectively managing their finances. And there's lots of cool blue-and-gray color coordination.

The program is also tightly integrated with Microsoft's online service, MSN. You might be looking at a transaction, click on a button, and-wham-you're suddenly looking at a profile of a stock or a company on the MSN Web site. There is a menu called "Shopping" that takes you to shopping Web sites. And the first few times that I ran the program, Money gave me the hard sell on Microsoft's ".NET Passport"-the program wanted me to use my .NET account (which I don't have) to "conveniently and securely access your Money file as well as to access many of Money's convenient online features." This actually made me feel quite uncomfortable, so I declined.
 
Like Quicken, Money displays a variety of advertisements from Microsoft partners. Thanks to one session's bombardment, I now know that interest on NetBank checking accounts is three times the national average and ING Direct has great rates and no fees. You can turn off some of these "sponsored links," but few people probably will. (I didn't, for example.)