This is Chelsea from Quicken Online. Just wanted to clarify, you can’t import your files into Quicken Online. What we do offer is automatic syncing with more than 8500 financial institutions – and when you do add an account- you’ll get about 3 months of backdated data so you can get helpful financial insights right away. You can export transactions into a spreadsheet for use later if you’d like.

For everyone else, we posted a deep dive on the newly designed Trends feature on the Quicken Blog a few weeks back. If you’re interested in more about how the product works, check this out: http://blog.quicken.intuit.com/2009/05/27/fresh-clean-and-redesigned-quicken-online-trends/

Thanks!

- Chelsea, Quicken Online

Craig Kessler
Marketing Director at BudgetPulse
craig@budgetpulse.com

Quicken Online found all of my accounts right away and the budgeting tools have been helping, but even they have issues that interfere with my ability to use their service completely. Whenever I put in a paycheck – and I only get paid once a month – and label the deposit as a paycheck, it still won’t recognize it as income. I basically use Quicken Online on my iPhone as a one-stop shop to track my accounts, but I can’t use it accurately as a budgeting tool so I rarely use it at home. I’m contemplating just getting a full version of Quicken.

Or do they offer this upload feature, but reviews simply focus more on the ability to give it your bank login information?

I like Quicken but think that is because I am used to the Quicken interface.

You can budget on the back of a napkin . . . the real challenge is to do it!

Previously, you’d get the auto-budget amounts (based on a historical average). I’d dutifully adjust their amounts to what I wanted them to be, go off and live my life and come back. Loe and behold, the next time I logged in (every single time) the budget amounts were DIFFERENT.

Mint was auto-changing the budget amounts based on averages. Everytime I categorized an old purchase, or a new one came in (they have great auto-categorizing rules, clunky to learn the first time though), boom my budget was off.

Can anyone confirm this has been fixed? There literally dozens upon dozens of angry posts about this on the Mint forum about this feature not working correctly. The typically response was “We’ll fix that later.”

Without a functioning (and real) budget tool then Mint is nothing more than a repository of information.

The worst part about the auto-budget in my eyes is that if you have a spending part this average is going to be the amount of money you are spending that got you into trouble. Where’s the value in that? If nothing else it should take the average, then subtract 5%, at least that way you’d be spending a little less (and putting that 5% into savings transfers).