Quicken’s Online services intrigue me as a potential non-OS specific platform that could allow me bank balance access from any net connected system. It’s also a free service, which is always worth checking.
I have a history with Quicken’s stand alone so that’s obviously where much of my comparison will be.
The registration process was simple and straight forward. The ability for the service to acquire my banks multiple accounts was very impressive compared to downloading to my own desk top.
As I tried to check my balance in the evening of the first day, the service was unavailable for more than an hour. Time was limited, so I gave up.
The service by default automatically updates accounts once a day. From the time stamps I see about 6:15 a.m..
Unfortunately, the current date was the 6th of Feb and the most current transaction was from the 4th of February. I logged into my bank and verified that transactions were present for the 5th that didn’t make it into the updates. Current date transactions I could understand since the last update was before the work day, but none of the transactions from the 5th?
Later on the 6th around 11 a.m. I logged into the service again and found the transactions from the 5th were present. A bit slow to show a complete picture, but it finally arrived.
Now to the user friendliness. It’s not bad, albeit a bit awkward. To designate categories for transactions I sometimes had to click multiple times to get the category assigned to an entry.
Initial Impression: If your looking for something on a limited budget that has the basics with a little more and you don’t cut things so close that instant access is always a requirement, this could be a viable alternative for you.
I will be continuing with the service for a while to see how it goes. Check back in the future.
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8 April 2009 Update. Well, the service was frequently slow or unavailable and the updates to the account were many times days behind. Hitting refresh didn’t always help. Making entries was nice, but there was no automatic or manual reconcile function so you had to watch closely to delete an entry when the item finally cleared the bank. Not the best functionally. I’ve given up.
21 Buzzards 