Others say...

"Intuit has destroyed Quicken"
The reviewers that give this buggy product one star are absolutely correct. The greedy execs at Intuit have removed .qif support, so they can force banks and credit unions to pay a fee to them (my credit union refuses to do this, so no more importing of data there), sent their call centers/chat rooms to India, providing cheap, worthless support (complain loudly to these people via e-mail that you are fed up with jobs being sent overseas), and splattered ads all over the place to get more of your dollars to buy other Intuit products that will likely not work too well. One Step Update has never worked properly.

The only people benefitting are execs at Intuit, who make millions laying off countless workers here in the USA for crappy offshore support.

I am trialing Money 2006 and will probably switch over to that product.

"A Good product gone bad by corporate greed"
You have read every one else's review and I agree. I loved 2002. It worked, I didn't need anything else, it was a good upgrade from 99 that I was currently using. I loved the graph of income and expenses on the front screen. I could down load data from my Bank, ect, ect. ect.............

Then to insure that intuit can stay in business they start to deactivate features and therefore sabotaging its own software to insure that you have to buy their newest product. Most companies rely on improving their product significantly so people want to upgrade (hence Quicken 99 to 2002 upgrade). I believe that this is an unforgivable business practice. But.....

I am a fan and long time user of quicken so I reluctantly bought 2005 for my home and 5 businesses.

INSTALLING
I had problems installing on 2 of the 4 computers That I have attempted. Which resulted in calling customer support (read all reviews from Quickbooks 2005)

CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Customer support is in India and their personnel also do customer support for HP, Dell Ect. So therefore they Are not experts in Quicken at all they simply look up solutions in a large Database on their computer and read them off to you. You could solve the problem yourself easier. Intuit hint (Give us access to you extensive Support Database and drop the customer support personnel)
On hold time is too long (more than 20 Minutes)
Was hung up on twice (had to start all over each time)
I ended up solving my own problem.
Customer Support costs money. I cannot believe that customer support charged me for their help in getting this new installation running correctly (especially when I didn't want to upgrade to 2005 anyways)

NETWORKING
2002 could be networked 2005 cannot. It will not read the data file if it is on another hard drive. It acts as if it is a new installation each time I open quicken on a different computer.

WEB CONNECT
This is not a problem with only 2005 only but also with 2002. I can download the data from my bank. And lets say that I wanted to download the data to June 30, 2005. It will download the data that came in during that period of time, clear it in the reconciliation screen but when it trys to balance it uses todays Bank balance (July 6, 2005) to balance against instead of June 30th's balance.

In Short, Small Business really needs to have an accounting software company step up and wake up Intuit and Microsoft and knock them into reality.
Would I recommend this software NO WAY!!! Am I stuck using it? Yes. Will I jump ship the first chance I get? Without looking.

"I should rate it ONE"
I've used Quicken for years and Bragged that I write all my checks with the program. Then I got 2005, and my bank got bought out. Now, I've jumped through all the hoops, called both Quicken and my bank, been to my bank twice personally, and can't get sny psssword to work that will satisy both Quicken and the bank. (They use different ones.) It looks like I'm going to have to go back to paper checks.

Still not solved, and to say I'm frustrated is the understatement of the year. Try ro find "customer support."
I wish I could get them on the same page. I could dictate a password. They want you to change passwords frequently!! HOW, for God's sake!

"Not so bad"
Having read all the bad reviews and forced to upgrade from Q2002, I had to take the leap in order to continue with my porfolio dounloads and mgt. I knew I didn't want MS Money from an earlier try about 2 yrs ago. Anyway, I use it for checkbook entries/family expense management and investments/portfolio management. It converted everything from Q2002 without a hitch and I haven't had any problems. Unlike some other problem areas, I do not use the bill pay portion of Quicken. I can't download my bank transactions since they still use QIF, but I knew this ahead of time from all the Amazon reviews. In order to get the same functions as Q2002 deluxe, I had to get the Premier Home and Business. One of the other reviewers hit the nail on the head regarding the underhanded way Intuit tries to get our money. I just wish there was another competitor other than MS Money.....maybe there will be soon.

"Massive feature creep AND buggy online banking"
Like many of the other reviewers, I've been using Quicken for quite some time. I was perfectly happy with Q2002, but Intuit wanted more of my money and started turning off all my online access unless I upgraded.

Q2005 has added any number of useless new "features" and you cannot seem to turn them off. Further, they insist on displaying a number of these "features" on the main register screens, cluttering up the display. I can no longer have my banking browser window open along with Quicken because the Quicken screen has all this extra junk around the register.

Add features fine. But let me ignore them, please. Don't clutter the screen with buttons and panes that I don't want to use. The technical term for this is "feature creep" where a good program is ruined by too many features. This program is becoming as unwieldy and impossible as Microsoft Word.

***One glaring bug***

When I schedule an online payment (using my bank's online banking), the scheduled payment appears in the register's "Num" column WITH A CHECK NUMBER. In my case, this check number happens to be a duplicate of previous check numbers (it's about 200 less than my current check number). Since I write many more online checks than paper ones, it will eventually march through my paper check numbers, creating all sorts of confusion. To fix this, one has to manually change the "Num" field (and can do so only after the payment is sent) to EFT or whatever you usually use to indicate an online (numberless) payment. What a royal pain!!!