
Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout - Jerry2
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3041032/desktop-apps/intuit-sells-quicken-to-private-equity-firm-in-management-buyout.html
======
WalterBright
Doing my taxes this year, I find it amazing how incompetent most financial
software is (including Quicken).

For example, take a simple task: download all your financial data for the last
year. Log into your bank's site. There is no button for "last year". You have
to laboriously enter 01/01/2015..12/31/2015\. Then you're given a choice of
formats. Download ALL of them, because sure as shootin', Quicken will only
import one of them, and that's one is different for every different account!
(Stunningly stoopid.)

Then try to get the statements, just try, my pretty. There is no "get me all
the statements from last year." Nope. You download them one at a time, and
some of them download to the same file name! So it's clicking around, then
rename the file to "January 2015", then repeat for the next one, etc.

Oh, you wanted the tax 1099 forms? That's a whole 'nuther section on the web
site.

Buy anything from Paypal? This is the killer. Paypal lists the payee as "Bob".
Your credit card statement lists the payee for the same transaction as
"Carol". The credit card downloaded data file lists the payee as "Ted". And,
Quicken somehow calls it "Alice". Can you believe it in 2016? Naturally, you
cannot download the full information about the transaction anyway. Download
the CSV file, and Paypal randomly leaves out information you have to manually
edit back in, like the item description which appears on the web site but not
in the CSV data.

And why does my bank list the payee for a check as "Check 236"? The bank knows
who the money got sent too. It's all on a computer.

~~~
jrcii
What gets me is when I see software designed this way and then start imagining
how much money was spent developing it, and fellow software architects sitting
back with their arms folded staring at the screen thinking what a good job
they did.

~~~
WalterBright
Every year I call up one or two of their tech support numbers, and suggest
they add a button labeled "download everything I need to give to my accountant
for the last tax year." Every year they are astonished at this suggestion, say
what a great idea it is, and next year nothing has improved.

Am I really such a unique snowflake that nobody else even thinks of this?

Maybe I should patent it. It's obviously not obvious!

~~~
FollowSteph3
The thing is different people have different tax needs. Some people have very
tax filings while others are very complex and some things can't be downloaded
at all. It would be great but it's just not possible. FYI I work in a related
field and I can tell you some tax filings are complicated!

Also not every source generates valid data files :(

~~~
JangoSteve
Just because it's difficult to handle 100% of use cases doesn't mean you can't
easily solved 80% of use cases. The suggestion the parent and grandparent
comments are making is simply to add a button which combines the previous
year's statements (understanding that not everyone's fiscal year matches the
calendar year) with all the documents that are already in a separate section
named "tax documents" into a single download. More generally, they're just
suggesting things like naming the file for January's statement as e.g.
"2016-january-statement.pdf" instead of the same generic name as every other
month's statements.

Saying that those suggestions aren't valuable or worthwhile just because 100%
of use cases can't be accounted for probably isn't the best way of deciding
which features should be implemented (and if it were, then it seems like most
of their current features should have never been built since they rarely seem
to handle even 80% of use cases).

~~~
darryl42
My brokerage account allows me to search for statements and then check off the
ones I want to generate a PDF for, they then get combined into a single PDF.
Of the three banks I deal with it was the only one with this feature made
catching up on my statements so much easier.

------
ryandrake
If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely
needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial
life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice
a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in
a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop
functioning tomorrow, I'd be screwed.

It's funny because I'm sure I don't even use like 95% of Quicken. I don't use
the budget, or the bill paying, or the charts and reports, or the tax crap, or
the retirement planning or all the other various bells and whistles Intuit has
decided to bolt on to its vast menu structure over the years. I use it as a
checkbook register and as a way to plan the month so I don't overdraw my
checking account (which would probably happen monthly if I didn't have
Quicken), and to download credit card transactions weekly to watch for fraud.
That's it. Surely those two functions are the MVP for any alternative.

There is no way in hell I am going to upload 15 years of financial history to
"the cloud". Not a snowball's chance in hell. And yes, I've tried GnuCash.
It's just not as good. Clunky UI, double-entry accounting, Yuck.

~~~
ec109685
What is super sensitive that you couldn't export to something like Mint? They
don't store your account numbers on their cloud after you've completed the
link.

~~~
Tempest1981
Not a compelling argument, imo. Seems like almost every major website is
getting hacked, and finance sites are probably a big target.

------
isomorphic
I'm just not going to put all of my financial records in once place under one
vendor in the cloud. On the other hand, I'm not going to trust Quicken after
years of neglect and no sane way of getting my data out.

I used GnuCash for a few years, and was generally satisfied with many parts of
it, yet it was horribly broken in some ways. And it isn't easy to get data
out, even though it can use a native XML storage format.

These days I'm forcing myself to use Ledger [http://ledger-
cli.org/](http://ledger-cli.org/) The UI is essentially the UI of your
favorite text editor (with all the efficiencies and pain that entails), but no
one can argue that your data is held hostage! It's a text file!

~~~
soccerdave
I'm curious how you are organizing your data. Do you have one file per account
(checking, credit card) or is it all in one big file? I've looked at ledger a
few times and get a little overwhelmed, part of it though is because Quicken
is so easy since it downloads everything.

~~~
zdw
There are tools for OFX download and import - there's a larger ecosystem site
here: [http://plaintextaccounting.org](http://plaintextaccounting.org)

Ledger supports an "!include" statement that works exactly how you'd think it
would and is super handy.

------
JustSomeNobody
Private equity firm, huh? First round of layoffs w/in 6 weeks.

~~~
curun1r
From what I've heard, the Quicken team is already pretty trim. It's just not
growing and not in the cloud, so it doesn't align with Intuit's overall goals.
The private equity basically just bought a discount annuity.

FWIW, they didn't reveal the terms, but they did say that they expected around
$500m from all three divestitures, and Quickbase and Demandforce are bigger.

~~~
Tempest1981
Yep. I read that they doubled the size of their Mac team. My first thought
was, "what, from 1 to 2?"

Anybody happen to know how big the Quicken team is?

~~~
curun1r
Intuit holds an annual internal developer conference (CTOF) and it appeared
that the contingent from Quicken all sat at one lunch table. Probably between
10-20 devs, though I guess it's possible some didn't attend.

------
thorntonbf
Intuit has squandered the Quicken brand for years with lousy updates and even
worse customer support. In some respects it's good to see them sell it to
someone who might do something with it.

Unfortunately, the Quicken name is now so tarnished that the private equity
firm likely has one swing at a decent update. Anything less than a homerun and
they might as well shut it down.

~~~
shostack
Since it is a private equity firm, what makes you think they are interested in
doing anything other than gutting the business?

~~~
L_Rahman
I work at a PE-owned company (over 20 years in PE ownership now) and the
strategy is to seek growth, not to cut costs by shedding headcount.

Caveats:

1\. This is anecdotal evidence, and many PE firms actually do buy companies
with the intention of firing people.

2\. I don't know whether this is the most common activity or just generates
the most press/attention. I would be pretty interested in a statistic that
looks at PE company acquisitions and compares company headcount at entry and
exit.

------
mathattack
Interesting. I wonder if this is the start of a pattern of desktop companies
who have converted to SaaS ditching their origins. It makes sense that there
is residual value, and the current owners don't want to be distracted.

~~~
aceperry
If the SaaS companies are dumping their desktop offerings, who is buying them?
Like you, I'm wondering if this really is a pattern, but it sounds
interesting.

~~~
mathattack
Generally the companies that gut and harvest (like CA) differ from the
builders.

------
tunesmith
On a Mac, the only software I've been able to migrate to is Banktivity
(formerly iBank). The migration wasn't perfect but I eventually successfully
ported over more than a decade of transactions including investments.

Every once in a while I look into gnucash or ledger but so far I've always run
out of steam before I've been able to ensure that they'd truly give me feature
parity for the features I care about.

At any rate though, it is a joy to not be using Quicken anymore.

------
kilroy123
Very interesting. Mint must of been making, a um, mint for inuit. I was always
skeptical it was a big money maker for them. This move tells me it is far more
profitable.

~~~
AznHisoka
I'd wager acquiring mint was one of their worst decisions ever. A product
that's losing popularity year after year and a pain to maintain technically
too. Wouldn't be surprised if they shutdown the product in a year.

~~~
rblatz
No buying mint and then basically freezing the product was their worst
decision.

------
hackuser
Is anyone, besides open source projects, investing significantly in desktop
consumer software?

~~~
rgovind
Slack?

~~~
sandmansandine
Slack's desktop client is really just Electron I believe

~~~
timberburn
That's the direction consumer desktop apps should move. Cheaper to develop,
maintain, update, etc.

~~~
cobalt
that's arguable

------
orionblastar
Quicken is good when it works with your bank, I have a bank that doesn't work
with Quicken and only exports to an older Quicken file format that is no
longer supported.

I remember when Microsoft Money was Sun downed, I thought Quicken had beaten
them. But it seems Inuit still has financial problems and sold Quicken.

~~~
thepangolino
You touched on something I've always wondered about: what's up with all those
different transaction data formats? What's wrong with simple CSv files?

~~~
paulryanrogers
CSV is strictly a single table, so it cannot normalize the data. You can end
up with a lot of them or a lot of columns and empty cells.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm drawing a blank on the normalization that would be relevant for
transactions. Do you mean something like "the sub-sub-account determines the
sub-account which determines the account"?

~~~
orionblastar
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization)

You find that database armatures usually store everything in one table. The
professionals break things up into different tables using normalization.

For example you usually have a table with names in it and an ID, and then you
have a transaction table that has the ID in it plus the transaction with a
foreign key going back to the table with names in it. Could be names of each
account or checking or savings account with an ID assigned to them.

Thing is you could be downloading more than one account and you don't want
them mixed up into one CSV file. You want them separate in normalized tables.
Now you could just have a CSV file with Account ID in it and then have a
separate CSV file with the name of the account with the ID in it. But that
just gets confusing.

What if you are a business and have several accounts you want to download and
process? You don't want them all mixed up together. Yeah there could be sub-
accounts as well that have an ID as a foreign key and then another Foreign key
to the main account or sub-sub account etc. When you get into accounting and
you have sub accounts and sub-sub accounts to track spending you have to have
a way to figure out how they work.

Here is an example of tables with sub accounts:
[http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t1855...](http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t1855469.html)

------
an4rchy
Interesting that it's a management buyout. It sounds like the head of Quicken
has a significant stake in this buyout. So, obviously he has some amount of
confidence in the company to put his own money into it.

------
erikb
There is a lot of complaint about this kind of software, and I have to agree,
it's often not well done. But that shows us that the money flows in different
directions, right? Maybe there is a value to having a good tax guy.

------
greggman
My impression is Intuit worked to make sure the online pay system keep
changing their protocol just to force you to upgrade to a new Quicken every 2
years. Can anyone confirm?

------
chvid
I think the story here is that it is much better to do business in the web
space where the user pays monthly, her data is stored (locked?) in the cloud
and she can be costantly upsold features. Compared to the desktop space, where
the user pays a one-off price, stores her data locally and in general does not
update her software.

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scentoni
Does anyone here use [http://www.gnucash.org](http://www.gnucash.org) ?

~~~
jldugger
I do. A few years ago I put together a presentation on how to use it
effectively for personal finance:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CUSct3YGvpVdKI_D_jCI...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CUSct3YGvpVdKI_D_jCI8M9nFz462xQMhQxK4GSwWpE/edit?usp=sharing)

The long and short of it is that GNUCash rests upon an ancient bed of Scheme
and C, and so isn't quite ready for the cloudz.

------
flog
All looking pretty good for cloud accounting products like Xero.com - the
desktop is dead!

~~~
yoodenvranx
>the desktop is dead

Perhaps I am already too old, but the idea of cloud application sucks and I
hope the desktop never dies.

In my opinion the cloud should only be used to synchronize my data between my
devices but it should never be the sole source of my programs. If I spend
money on software then my main requirement is that I can install it locally
and run it independent of the mother company.

~~~
geggam
Recently I replaced the kids laptops with Desktops. They use the desktop and
the smartphone when not at the Desk.

Cheaper to upgrade / fix / repair / replace.

I build clouds for a living. There is no cloud. It is just someone elses
computer.

