Upgrade Whines & Contradictions

Intuit's recent announcement that it's completely dropping support for the old QIF banking file format for downloaded transactions affects only users of the 2001 and 2002 versions of Quicken. You should hear the howling from a select group of people, a number of whom are SOHO and small business owners, using the older versions. They are seriously ticked off and generating enough heat over this to boil a small ocean. The amount of heat is surprising too, considering the comparatively small percentage of Quicken users still running the older versions. So what's the big deal?

First off, the newer WebConnect format offer no backward steps from previous versions of transaction formats. In fact, current WebConnect implementations are much closer to a "one-touch" download from your bank's web site. That's a benefit. As well, WebConnect is inherently more secure although (and in defense of its detractors) my bank's IT department either wouldn't tell me about the improvements or simply didn't know. In any case, I've been using WebConnect via Quicken XG for about a year and I've yet to encounter a problem. So either the banks and Intuit are getting better at this or I'm becoming less of a screwup or maybe it's a combination of the two. More . . .