This month, we’d like to look at two topics brought to our attention by Smart Computing readers. We think the information here will help many other readers, too.

Update Alternatives

Quicken’s One Step Update feature is a great tool that helps users quickly import transaction and balance information from a financial institution into Quicken without doing the work manually. This saves users from the tedious and error-prone task of gathering receipts and entering transaction data one expenditure at a time.

Quicken users can back up their data on their computer or back it up to Quicken’s servers. The online option offers a safety net if something should happen to your PC.

Some users rely on One Step Update every day to keep their eye on daily transactions. Others may only update their transactions once a month. Because the feature is customizable, users can even set up One Step Update to regularly download certain data at a certain frequency. The handy tool allows for quite a bit of flexibility depending on user preferences. For example, a user can exclude certain accounts and financial institutions from each update.

The bottom line is that the ease of use and convenience the One Step Update feature offers makes it arguably one of Quicken’s most popular tools. But what if your bank doesn’t support it? A reader recently discovered that even though her bank was on Quicken’s long list of banks that work with One Step Update, the feature wouldn’t work as it should.

She’d selected the bank from the list, entered the necessary bank user ID and password to activate the bank for One Step Update in Quicken, and clicked the One Step Update button. Even though a dialog box showed communication between the two parties, an error message eventually reported that there was a connection error and the information couldn’t be downloaded.

Frustrated, the reader turned to us for advice. We suggested calling her bank directly to make sure there were no additional fees or set-up steps she needed to address. Fortunately, her local bank made it easy to get someone on the phone who could help. She learned that particular bank preferred not to transfer account information using Quicken’s method. Instead, the reader had to follow a few simple steps provided on the bank’s Web site to export the transaction data to Quicken. Now the reader just follows this process each time she needs to download her transactions.

Once these steps were completed, the reader could see all her latest transaction data in the appropriate Quicken account register and was able to continue with the account reconciliation as usual. And we are able to share a valuable lesson with everyone else: If something doesn’t work quite right, don’t just assume you won’t be able to use it. There are many great resources available out there, and you can almost always find a workaround.

Server Storage

Another reader posed a series of questions recently, and we thought the answers might provide useful information to a number of other readers, as well. She was considering upgrading from Quicken 2000 to Quicken 2009 but didn’t know if she could go straight from one version to the other without moving her data to the intermediate versions in sequence. We assured her that Quicken would handle the transfer from one version to the other without hitting each upgrade along the way and referred her to Intuit’s support site: tinyurl.com/lgxenl.

Once there, this reader began poking around a bit and started wondering about her financial data and where it’s actually stored. She worried that it might be stored on Quicken’s servers without her knowledge. Because so many of us use Quicken to track every last one of our financial details, this is a common fear. Her question was: Where exactly does Quicken store my data?

Like many answers, this one depends on several factors. If you’re simply using Quicken on your personal computer, that financial data doesn’t go anywhere. It just sits in your Quicken file on your hard drive. Of course your bank’s servers also have much of this financial information, and if you choose, you can allow the bank’s servers and your computer to communicate so that you can sync the data between the two locations. This requires you to set up an online banking account with your financial institution and to activate One Step Update within Quicken.

There is a way in which Quicken might store some of your financial data on its servers. Intuit offers a product called Quicken Online Backup, which you can use to back up your data files. Every Quicken user knows that Quicken periodically asks you to back up your data within the software itself, but this backup file may still reside on your computer’s hard drive. If something should happen to your computer, you would lose all that data. You can also back up to an external source such as a CD. Additionally, Quicken Online Backup offers to store your data offsite on its own secure servers for your peace of mind.

Of course, you have to sign up and pay for this service: $9.99/year to protect your Quicken data files (up to 100MB); $49.99/year to protect your Quicken data, tax, photo, and media files (up to 1GB); and $149.99/year to back up your entire computer (up to 10GB). The bottom line is that Quicken won’t save your financial data on its servers unless you explicitly set it up that way.

by Jennie Schlueter