Starting this week Quicken Online, Intuit‘s free personal finance Web site was discontinued. This is no surprise. After Intuit acquired Mint.com, a popular and free online budgeting and money management software, the company announced last November that it would shutter Quicken and migrate their customer’s data over to Mint.com.
Unfortunately that plan didn’t work well. After months of trying to integrate users from one SaaS (software-as-a-service) over to the other, the company realized that the platforms for the two products and the way transactions were handled were just too different, according to an article on ZDNet.com. Since then Quicken customers have received email reminders instructing them to create a Mint.com account because Quicken would soon become extinct.
If you were a Quicken Online customer who needs to migrate to Mint, or a Mint customer who just wants to know what is new, here is what you need to know:
-Â Â Â Quicken accounts were not switched over automatically. If you didn’t backup your data before Intuit shut down the site, your data is pretty much lost. You can no longer export your data to a CSV file or import your transaction data to another Quicken Desktop product or Mint.com.
-Â Â Â If you did export your data to a CSV file before the site was shut down you can still upload it to a Quicken Desktop Product, which can cost from $59.99 to $149.99 depending on the version. Remember that Mint.com does not integrate with Quicken Desktop products, according to Quicken FAQ dated August 31, 2010.
-Â Â Â Your Quicken Online account and all the data stored in it will be securely removed from all Intuit databases — no action is required on your part.
-Â Â Â The change does not affect your Quicken Desktop products, such as Quicken Bill Pay, Online Backup, Investments, or downloading transactions from your bank. You can continue using it in the same way you always have.
-Â Â Â Mint.com is secure and easy to use, but according to complaints by Quicken Online users on Mint’s message boards you will lose some of the features that Quicken Online provided such as adding future/recurring transactions.
Moving Ahead
-Â Â Â You can manage your finances on the go with Mint mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones, but there is still no BlackBerry app for Mint.
-Â Â Â Mint.com now connects with some 16,000 U.S. financial institutions, including Canadian financial institutions. That is double the number it did before.
-Â Â Â Mint now has a new feature to track cash transactions that will help you monitor cash spending as well as credit card and debit card purchases.