Comment by ryandrake
5 hours ago
I can't seem to ween myself off of reliance on Quicken. I really want to, and I hate that I am tied to Intuit software. I hate that every transaction I've made since 2000 is stored in a proprietary binary blob.
But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's online connection to confirm each of them. I do this daily so I can catch any fraud or mistakes. I have 27 accounts tracked, and I'm simply not going to log in to each of them using their janky web sites, download CSVs, and import them manually into personal finance software. It's just not going to happen. Quicken's support for this is far and away the best out there.
Doing this all in plaintext and copy/pasting from downloaded CSVs every day seems like an absolute nightmare.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be banks turning down their public-facing OFX services, and instead moving to the model where Intuit is the middleman and you need to tether yourself to them, who in turn channel your requests to the banks. So it's been getting even more and more difficult to escape from Quicken.
Problem solved for me because no banks in my country provide an API for anyone or anything to download transactions directly. Not even Quicken. Banks here are stable. The only change they tolerate is increasing their fat quarterly dividends, although there has been talk in the smoky back rooms of government about passing legislation to force them kicking and screaming into the present.
On the other hand, downloading a PDF or a CSV from time to time isn't that much of a hassle. I have Python scripts to parse the PDF and output hledger text, and hledger itself reads the CSV files and autocategorizes the transactions (I had to supply the categorization rules, naturally). You don't have to import anything, it's plain text. You don't have to copy/paste anything.
If there were APIs to download transactions, it would be as simple as
or something. Of course, you don't get the colourful eye candy of Quicken.
I use MoneyDance, which does automatic bank sync, is double-entry (although you can make single-entry transactions if you try hard enough), and is a program rather than a web service. It’s got some rough edges, but it meets my needs well enough. I haven’t looked into how hard it would be to read its data files if I wanted to migrate away.
Right there with you. I've tried to leave quicken multiple times. Especially when they moved to annual subscriptions. I haven't tried to leave since 2019-ish, and all the alternatives were just clunky as hell, as if the devs completely ignored UI/UX. Also, I'm on the latest quicken for mac and it has an export feature, but I have never used it. Maybe when they start charging per transaction I'll finally leave. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford it annually, but it still stinks that there's no open source alt, even to do just the basics conveniently.
Have you tried [0] Tiller Finance?
[0] https://tiller.com/
I've used tiller for several years. Handles all the connections to pull data, but all the data is completely accessible within a spreadsheet on my own storage.
Quicken isn’t Intuit (as far as I know at least). You’re probably thinking of QuickBooks?
Thanks for mentioning this. I didn't realize Intuit sold it off to private equity in 2016.