Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3041032/desktop-apps/intuit-sells-quicken-to-private-equity-firm-in-management-buyout.html

by Jerry2 • 10 years ago

125 106 10 years ago

computerworld.com

orionblastar4• 10 years ago

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.

yitchelle• 10 years ago

Amazingly Microsoft Money Sunset is still available as a download and free to use.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/result.aspx?q=Money+p...

the_unknown• 10 years ago

Thank You!! This is the best news I heard all day. I loved MS Money and only moved away because I thought it was inevitable. I didn't know about this option.

Tempest19814• 10 years ago

How does it compare to Quicken, and can it still download transactions?

thepangolino• 10 years ago

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?

joshuaheard• 10 years ago

Quicken switched to its own proprietary format for which it charged banks a license fee.

sizzzzlerz2• 10 years ago

Consumer lock-in. If its proprietary, so much the better.

paulryanrogers• 10 years ago

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.

orionblastar4• 10 years ago

CSV files are good, but sometimes they contain blank data and spaces that mess up importing them. I used to work as a federal contractor importing text files into databases by downloading them via FTP or Web Sites on a federal Intranet.

I would import them into Oracle, SQL Server, MS-Access, Clipper, etc and sometimes had to write a custom program to import the files.

I would work in a Unix environment as well and had to run AWK and SED to remove blank spaces and other problems that would cause invalid use of null errors in a database that the column couldn't be null. Sometimes the CSV file didn't follow the database validation rules, like using text in a number field, etc.

We also had fixed width files. Stuff from an IBM Mainframe that was in EPISODIC that had to be converted to ASCII. Then when it converted some of the characters in the file had to be edited because they were illegal control characters that had something to do with DASD JCL/JECL control codes.

But a CSV file is basically one database table with a bunch of columns in it that you import, separate the data with commas.

jd3• 10 years ago

I believe our bank just stopped accepting stuff from the version of quicken that my father uses to do his financials. To this day he runs quicken on a 2005 (!) iMac G5, which is his daily driver.

sizzzzlerz2• 10 years ago

I'm still running it on a Mac iBook from 2004. Its the only thing I use it for because I can't stand later versions of Quicken on either the Mac or a PC. Granted, I'm only using it as a checkbook register but it does it so well, why look for something else?

hackuser• 10 years ago

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

rgovind• 10 years ago

Slack?

knowaveragejoe• 10 years ago

You don't need the desktop clients as far as I'm aware.

sandmansandine• 10 years ago

Slack's desktop client is really just Electron I believe

trimbo• 10 years ago

Slack is aimed at businesses

supercoder• 10 years ago

Slack is just a web app wrapped up on the desktop

asdfologist• 10 years ago

Microsoft.

basicplus2• 10 years ago

NCH

I use their accounts package, and a few of their other packages, I am satisfied.

http://www.nchsoftware.com/

flog• 10 years ago

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

MajorLOL• 10 years ago

Honestly, is this a good thing?

I run quickbooks for a small business - if I wanted a Xero equivalent, I have to pay $70/mo?! That's crazy!

nightski• 10 years ago

It's true. They are trying so hard to push Quickbooks online too. But no, I am just fine with my 2014 QB Pro thank you very much.

yoodenvranx• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

georgeglue1• 10 years ago

I mean, Intuit has moved its core accounting products to the cloud a while ago as well right? I'm not sure I understand how Xero is connected to Quicken-type services.

isomorphic• 10 years ago

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/ 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• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

There are tools for OFX download and import - there's a larger ecosystem site here: http://plaintextaccounting.org

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

Karunamon• 10 years ago

Re: Getting your data out, Quicken has supported OFX and CSV import/export since at least the 90's, and it's enough of an industry standard that any other place you take your data will support the same.

cgrinds• 10 years ago

Likewise, I've moved to beancount http://furius.ca/beancount/ and the awesome fava https://github.com/aumayr/fava 21 years of Quicken data converted to a lovingly crafted text file. Ahh.

Also a big fan of Moneydance http://moneydance.com and have written a budget plugin for my family's needs

JustSomeNobody• 10 years ago

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

raincom• 10 years ago

yeah, thats what happened at TIBCO. They got trim it right away.

johan_larson• 10 years ago

Informatica, too.

curun1r2• 10 years ago

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.

Tempest19814• 10 years ago

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?

kilroy123• 10 years ago

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.

nathankane• 10 years ago

No, Mint isn't even reported in Intuit public earnings reports because its contribution is so small it's not material to overall earnings

milesskorpen• 10 years ago

What makes you think that? Everything I've heard suggests that Mint is very far from profitable.

AznHisoka• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

1024core• 10 years ago

Anecdata of size 1: I used Mint initially, and then gave up on it. I was too scared of keeping all my eggs in one basket!

newjersey• 10 years ago

This is why I refuse to do credit score tracking on Mint. They do not need that information.

meritt• 10 years ago

You're very correct but not in the way you might think. They are reselling the consumer spending data (timestamps, store/merchant, dollar amounts, demographics about the consumer, etc) to hedge funds, investment banks, and as competitive intelligence to other companies.

Imagine detailed consumer spending for Home Depot & Lowe's for the past few years broken down by market, average purchase size, frequency, churn rate, loyalty, demographics of consumer, financial position of consumer, credit scores, et al. That's huge if you're investing in either company or if you are either company and you want to know how your competition is faring, marketing spend, expansion decisions, etc.

In their earnings they only show direct Mint.com revenue (affiliate traffic from signing up for credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, etc) which is extremely small compared to the data intelligence. The rest probably shows up in "data services" or something vague.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

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

thorntonbf• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

L_Rahman• 10 years ago

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.

Tempest19814• 10 years ago

Agreed -- it's a weird strategy. "Hey users, look how bad we let Quicken get... Now try our cloud products!"

tunesmith• 10 years ago

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.

an4rchy• 10 years ago

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.

ryandrake• 10 years ago

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.

maaku• 10 years ago

You might be interested in You Need A Budget (YNAB classic, the non cloud version)

avemg• 10 years ago

I've used both. YNAB is not even close to a replacement for Quicken.

sciurus• 10 years ago

Nothing listed athttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_sof... does what you want?

cossatot• 10 years ago

I use Moneydance for my business, and I like it quite a bit. It's geared towards personal finance more than small business, and the double-entry accounting stays out of the way if you want it to, though it was a selling point for me. It has some functionality to auto-download bank/CC statements, but none of my banks are supported (except for US Bank which charges), so I download and import monthly, which isn't that big of a hassle.

e40• 10 years ago

Me, too! Moneydance is stable (no UI churn) and effective. I was able to import all my Quicken transactions and I can do online banking (downloading transactions).

The day I got off Quicken was a very good day for me. I had developed real hatred of the software and the company.

ec109685• 10 years ago

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.

Tempest19814• 10 years ago

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

Lendal• 10 years ago

It doesn't work like Quicken. It's too limited. Won't prevent you from bouncing a check, for one.

I keep my Quicken files on Dropbox so they sync just fine. I am also protected from data loss due to versioning. I also like the idea that the company storing the data is separate from the company that makes the software, so I can be assured that my accounts cannot be data-mined and everything works exactly the way I want it to.

toadi• 10 years ago

Same reasoning here. Like my financial data local. I also use own toolset using ledger cli for reporting and entry. People developed tools to convert CSV from banks to ledger format.

Using text only and my own toolchain I can setup how I want. Get reporting how I want it. You just need some time for the initial startup.

CydeWeys• 10 years ago

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)

Why are you running your financial life so close to the edge? Keep two months' spending as buffer in your checking account. That's what I do. The mental load saved of not having to worry about overdrawing my account is completely worth it.

WalterBright6• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

edoloughlin• 10 years ago

sitting back with their arms folded staring at the screen thinking what a good job they did

Isn't that a basic job requirement for a software architect at BigCo?

raverbashing• 10 years ago

Yes they used several UML diagrams, several design patterns. They couldn't code a line of it but the drawings look nice

This is so close to reality it hurts

WalterBright6• 10 years ago

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!

jerf• 10 years ago

"staring at the screen thinking what a good job they did."

Do you work in programming in anything other than greenfield projects?

I'm sure they weren't nodding in smug pride, but weeping and drinking themselves into a stupor many nights, and sometimes during the workday. They know. At least, the better of them know.

fucking_tragedy• 10 years ago

I feel like those are the codebases that still cause you to wake up in a cold, guilty sweat 5 years after last modifying it.

troymc• 10 years ago

If only there was a web plugin or some other web client software that could login to your bank account for you and fetch everything you want, in convenient formats, with nice labels. It would support the weird interfaces of thousands of different banks (and PayPal)...

goldenkey• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if you are being coy but didnt Zenbooks get sued or attacked by some banks for doing exactly that?

colinbartlett• 10 years ago

Plaid basically does just this, though as an API. And it doesn't support thousands of banks but just a few major ones.

fokz• 10 years ago

I've been using Mint for this purpose and so far it almost meets my expectation. The automatic categorizing works well.

jldugger3• 10 years ago

GNUCash supports QFX and OFX, but banks seem unprepared to actually support an API endpoint like that. End result: Mint and whatever systems my retirement funds started using to 'plan your retirement' ask for username and passwords to other accounts. A rare few banks allow for OAuth style read-only tokens, but it's not like my 403b is selected based on security principles.

mwill• 10 years ago

I remember our bank changing our account type (Number stayed the same, they just changed the fee structure) so they expunged all our transaction history from the site, we could only request paper copies be sent out.

I ended up scanning them all, writing a script that split the images up and OCR'd them, then formatted them correctly into and importable format in a single file. It turned out to be much faster and easier than the CSV data provided by the bank (Actually having transaction descriptions on your imports helps!). So much so that for the next couple of years instead of getting the CSVs from the bank, I got PDF copies of our paper statements and fed them into the same script.

vram222• 10 years ago

Wow, that's a quotable story, and says a lot the status of our field as a whole.

my5thaccount• 10 years ago

Just wait until the payee has a comma or a quote in the name and you download a CSV and the programmers can't even properly format a CSV and it's broken in Excel.

JangoSteve2• 10 years ago

Makes you wonder what part of their system might be susceptible to a payee name like lil Bobby Tables.

pbreit• 10 years ago

And banks like BofA only provide 13 months of statements so if you do your taxes in March, you're out of luck.

The $99 drive sitting on my desk could store the complete records of BofA going back to the beginning twice over (without compression).

I just don't get it.

WalterBright6• 10 years ago

That's especially aggravating because the IRS can audit your return going back 3 years. And you're right, it's a trivial amount of data to store.

I had a lot of trouble with Paypal because it kept insisting that the transaction data I requested was "too large" for it to handle. It was about 40k of data, less than the web page it served telling me that.

jldugger3• 10 years ago

Oh, they store it, you just have to pay extra for a complete record. In a more perfect world, this is because it takes effort to retrieve your history from offline storage.

greggman• 10 years ago

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?

erikb• 10 years ago

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.

chvid• 10 years ago

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.

scentoni• 10 years ago

Does anyone here use http://www.gnucash.org ?

nikolak• 10 years ago

I use it primarily because quicken on mac is completely useless when you have multiple accounts with different currencies. They even list your totals wrong like "100 USD + 100 GBP = 200 EUR" last time I tried it. And there aren't that many alternatives for personal use since i don't need anything extremely complex.

GNUcash is probably the ugliest piece of software that I use regularly, but at least it works. Depending on one's needs YNAB or Quicken might be a better choice though - but neither work well with multiple currencies or even accounts.

jldugger3• 10 years ago

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...

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.

Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

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