I am writing to provide you with an update on Quicken and Simplifi.
Quicken for Windows marked its 30th year by debuting an all-new “modern dashboard” in 2021, bringing some of the best design ideas from Simplifi and the Quicken Web App into the desktop product, including a summary of recent transactions and a slick new tool for displaying and categorizing uncategorized transactions. We also modernized the UI of Quicken across the board, with design updates to the register filters, UI controls, and more. Other improvements include enhanced management of Saved Reports; searchable account, payee, and tag lists; File Copy improvements; updates and extensions to the Security Detail View; an all-new FBAR Tax Report for overseas accounts; editing multiple investment transactions; and a number of changes and improvements in Quicken Bill Manager. The team has been busy!
So has the Quicken for Mac team: over the last year, we added a new investing dashboard and Simple Investing support, budgeting of transfers (e.g., mortgage payments), and a set of enhancements to account reconciliation: reconciliation history, automatic reconcile, and re-reconcile. We also completely revamped the process for adding online bills, enabled Touch ID/Apple Watch support for opening password-protected files, and released one of our most-requested new features: Dark Mode.
We also made numerous improvements to the Quicken mobile app including support for hidden and separate accounts; category, tag, and payee management; multiple budgets; and transaction sorting and filtering. The investments section was revamped, we improved performance for both budgets and investments, we added support for PDF attachments, and we refreshed the UI overall.
Simplifi, launched in 2020 and recently named “Best Budgeting App” by The New York Times Wirecutter for the second year in a row, continues to mature. Over the last year, we have enhanced Simplifi’s unique Spending Plan with projected/planned expense and income items, providing the fine-tuning capability of traditional budgeting without sacrificing simplicity. We have added badges and achievements to celebrate our users’ financial progress, and we also improved investments with balances over time, additional security detail including related news, and much more to come. Also coming soon is a major update to our iOS and Android mobile apps which will markedly improve performance for customers with large transaction sets.
In addition to the product work, we have been working on improving connectivity across all of our offerings. In my letter last April, I noted that we were embarking on several major initiatives to add additional connectivity paths to financial institutions, with the goal of improving the security and reliability of data downloads. Two generally invisible technology changes have already occurred – one applying only to Quicken for Windows users and the other to all Quicken and Simplifi users. With these changes, we are now seeing measurable year-over-year improvement in data download success. Other changes, such as the recent Schwab connectivity update, require some user involvement; we are applying our learning from Schwab to make these as straightforward as we can.
I’d also like to provide an update on our company. In March of this year, after 2 years of nearly 100% work-from-home, we began welcoming employees back to our offices in Menlo Park, Tucson, and Bangalore. We have learned a lot about how to work well remotely, and we are not going back to the way things were in 2019. But we know that we do some types of work more effectively face-to-face, and we also simply enjoy seeing each other in person. I hope the picture below gives some sense of the cheerfulness we all felt at being together again.
And finally, we were very pleased to be named Best Personal Finance Company in the Fintech Breakthrough awards.
Thank you for being a Quicken or Simplifi user!
CEO, Quicken Inc.
