12 March 2004 

Having just completed the page on my rant about Quicken Billpay and it's inability to pay reliably, I thought I should get two more bugs documented. These are not killer bugs, these are more of your run of the mill bugs. Unfortunately I think these two bugs together make Quicken unusable for a hard core financial planning customer. If you just track your stocks and get updated prices, then Quicken 2004 Premier is fine. If you want to get into asset allocation, then you should know about these two bugs.

Asset Allocation Drill Down Does Not Work For Cash Positions

I spoke with Quicken software support about this. They acknowledged that this is the way the software works.  In Quicken, when I bring up the asset allocation pie chart I can see a nice slice labeled "cash". Some of this cash is mine, but most of it is held by the mutual funds that I own. As an asset allocation buff, I want to review how much money my mutual funds are holding in cash; if they hold too much too long, then I want to switch to another fund. If I've bought a small cap fund, I want them to be 95% in small caps; I certainly don't want them to be 20% in cash.

If I double-click on a pie slice, then Quicken "drills down" and presents another pie chart that just shows the breakdown of holdings within that pie slice. Nice feature. 

At the high level, the cash slice of the pie chart includes the current cash positions of all the mutual funds I own. However, if I double-click on that cash pie slice, the drill down pie chart does not include the mutual fund cash positions. So, the top level pie chart shows a cash slice of, say, $15,000. Double click on it and the drill down pie chart only shows a total of maybe $5,000. The rest of the cash is held in various mutual funds.

Unfortunately, I do this drill down to specifically find out which mutual funds are holding a lot of cash. This drill down is useless to me. 

"That's the way it works" is what the tech support rep said.

Too bad.

Bonds Are Not Uploaded To Quicken Web Site

I hold a lot of bonds in my accounts. Quicken software on my PC dutifully brings them down from my brokerage accounts and enters them into my Quicken register. Then I ask Quicken to upload my data to my personal Quicken web page. All my assets show up on their web site, except for the bonds! 

Quicken technical support told me that's the way it is. They recommend that I enter each of my bonds by hand on the web site. That certainly makes the process less fun and shows a definite lack of integration between Quicken software and the Quicken web site. Oh well.

Normally this wouldn't bother me that much. I was never a big user of the web site. Why should I, I have it all on my PC. Well, as noted above, the asset allocation drill down on the Quicken PC software does not account for cash held by mutual funds. The web site does do this. I was planning to move to use the web site for my asset allocation analysis. However, I have a lot of money in bonds. Since the web site doesn't automatically upload my bond holdings, my asset allocation analysis on their web site is useless.

Sigh.

March 15, 2004

Do Not Delete Uncleared Transactions 

Or you could corrupt your Quicken data file. Quicken keeps warning that you have transactions to send, when you do not.  Lucky for us all this isn't a "bug", it is just odd behavior. I guess Intuit considers it "normal" for the software to corrupt a data file. Ok. </sarcasm>. Here's the transcript of my recent chat session about this. You decide if you can live with "features" like this. I get more worried with each passing day. (Colored text is mine.)