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furious Now, I'd already heard about this, so that is, in itself, not too upsetting. A conversation with a friend of mine, a few months back, revealed that features I value in QO were already being imported into Mint. I'm sure that Mint is a perfectly good service.
However, when I followed the link in your email, suggesting I might want to sign up for Mint, I was not taken to any kind of special "Transitioning from QO? Here's how!" page. I was taken to the frontpage of Mint. I looked around to see if there was any info about importing my QO data; there was not. I did the initial part of the signup, and when it took me to the part where you add accounts, I looked around some more. No dice. I checked with your help forums, and found this:
If you are inquiring about importing data from your Quicken Online accounts (and I see several of you are), the timeline and details for migrating existing QOL accounts over to Mint is still being worked through, but rest assured that when it happens, your historical data (financial institutions, accounts, balances, transactions) will be preserved. That said it is likely that some information in your QOL accounts may be lost. Functionality that is tied to custom categories will be very difficult to migrate and we expect that users may need to do some work to recover entirely. We understand that this is not ideal and we are looking for ways to minimize any pain.
Let's not mince words: This is idiotic. Does Mint.com not let users create custom income and spending categories? I suspect it does; if it does, it should not be so terribly difficult to automate creating the same custom categories, and tagging transactions appropriately. The basic structure of accounting transactions has been well-known for centuries. If you can't figure out how to merge or transfer transaction data, your data managers are incompetent. I've dealt with far more difficult data sets -- try interweaving Chinese and English language data some time.
Similarly, I should not need to enter my account data. How much data could there be to transfer? The institution, the account number and/or username, and the password. If there are security concerns, I'm willing to re-enter my passwords at Mint.com, rather than having those transferred; though I'd frankly prefer to simply enter my QO password once, and have everything sucked over to Mint automatically.
Monthly budgets, as well, aren't exactly rocket science; there are spending categories, one budget number for each past month, and a number set for the current month (which, unless changed, carries over to the next month when the calendar turns a page).
What were you thinking, announcing the closure of QO without having already provided for this transition? I've been a loyal customer for something like 15 years -- I've used TurboTax to deal with my taxes every year since I started earning income. I currently am offering consulting services to small businesses that need to deal with QuickBooks. I have quite liked Quicken Online (and my fiancée was using the offline version of Quicken for years before we consolidated our finances).
It took a great deal of time and effort to get QO running: categorizing transactions often enough to get the system to do things right on its own, at least most of the time; adding the categories we needed to make the trend reports meaningful for us; figuring out how to properly record transfers, refunds, "off-balance sheet" transactions like tax withholdings, and so on. I cannot believe that you are just going to toss my investment of time and energy out the window. I'd sooner find another company to do my taxes and personal accounting with, than just meekly accept that.
I would never have expected you to treat your customers so shabbily; this is wildly different from my past experiences, and extremely disappointing. I expect an apology and a remedy.
No love,
Auros
PS: In regard to your statement that, "After careful consideration we made the decision to not transfer or allow customers to transfer their data from Quicken Online to Mint.com," I suggest that you consider some more. :-P
July 16 2010, 23:18:17 UTC 1 year ago
July 17 2010, 00:07:15 UTC 1 year ago
I'm not immune to typos in my own text; slightly better at catching them than the average bear, but still prone to them, especially when writing fast, and in a state of high dudgeon. But still -- there's a fundamental problem with trying to edit your own text, which is that you tend to see what you meant to write, not what you actually wrote. If I'm writing a paper, I try very hard to get the first draft done at least a day or two before the deadline, because I need some distance, in order to be able to see the text clearly enough for effective editing.
July 18 2010, 17:49:31 UTC 1 year ago
July 18 2010, 18:58:15 UTC 1 year ago
July 18 2010, 20:05:43 UTC 1 year ago
July 19 2010, 17:48:22 UTC 1 year ago
And how much manual reconciliation do you think will be required WITHOUT a migration tool?? ALL OF IT YOU NUMBSKULLS!!
July 25 2010, 18:55:57 UTC 1 year ago
All the features you ask for are in Mint (although custom categories are a fairly recent thing). I don't know why they can't do migration. However, it is pretty easy to find a block of similar transactions in Mint, so reconciling is actually quite easy. That might end up making it less of a hassle than you expect. Mint is also quite good about learning the way you categorize things and providing you with tools to better manage similar transactions. But, that all said, it's just not effort you should need to put in.
Also, fwiw, I think you use your QO to get much more detailed reports than most people. For instance, I don't track payroll tax and dump that into a "tax paid" account that I can track vs. "tax payable" to estimate withholding or refunds, as I take it that you do, and I bet not too many other people do. I think you're suffering for being a couple standard deviations out in what you like to see from your financial package. That's not to say that your expectations aren't reasonable; they strike me as actually kind of minimal. But Mint's directed at slobs like me.
Maybe somebody needs to start a company for the other 5% here.
July 26 2010, 01:22:07 UTC 1 year ago
Re: taxes and the like, all I'm doing is adding transactions to the cash-tracking account to create the proper effect of "off balance sheet" transactions.
For example, suppose I earn $1,000 in a pay-period, but $200 is withheld. $50 of this is a pre-tax deduction, for retirement plan and health insurance; the other $150 is payroll taxes. My bank account will only show an $800 deposit, which will automatically get categorized into the Paycheck income account. I'll add two income/deposit transactions to cash: $150 of Paycheck, and $50 of Tax-Free Income. And I'll add a few expense transactions to represent what the money went to. Now when I look at my income and expense reports, the numbers properly reflect my full income and expenses -- this is particularly important if you want to have a real sense of what percentage of your full, pre-tax income you're managing to save, since for most of us, pre-tax retirement plan deductions are a substantial part of our overall savings.
In any case, all of this can be fairly easily kludged, even in the simple model of Quicken Online, and I would guess in Mint as well. Quicken offline will let you actually alter the numbers in downloaded transactions, so you don't have to be quite so kludgy...
What ticks me off is that I can't transfer my transaction data, categories, and budget targets, all of which should be drop-dead simple; we're talking about maybe a twenty line program, half in some scripting language and half in calls from the script to a SQL interpreter. You might need to instruct the user to go back through their translated data to look for issues, especially relating to split transactions (e.g. you deposit three checks, the deposit shows up as one transaction, and you hand-enter the amounts for different categories). But it would be a lot more work for me to hand-enter every one of the 2,241 transactions I've exported from QO as cash transactions on Mint.
July 29 2010, 04:54:39 UTC 1 year ago
At the same time, Mint has always been built around a philosophy that most financial management apps did too much and intimidated users, resulting in them not actually managing their finances. That's why Mint has been feature-light. This is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it was easy for me to get it up and tracking what's going on. On the other hand, once I wanted to do something mildly non-obvious... well, you read my blog entry.
You're right to want to track your data at the level you track it. I'm confident it'll pay off in the long term. But most people wouldn't want to do it, and would rather avoid looking at their finances than figure out how to do it. Thus, I suspect the Mint product managers would not be planning to build it in. However, if you'd like to shoot me some sample data and some info of what you'd like the results to look like, I'll try it out in my account and report back. (I've never worked at a large enough place to have a real retirement plan other than my self-funded IRA, etc., so I wouldn't be sure that I can make up useful info for use in this.)
July 29 2010, 15:53:13 UTC 1 year ago
July 29 2010, 17:24:57 UTC 1 year ago