Thursday, March 22, 2012

Yo Quicken



In nine years of using Quicken 2003 for MAC, thousands of checks, I never had the strange anomaly illustrated above.
The written amount and numerical amount always agreed.
I download and install Quicken Essentials for MAC, and I get an unfathomable mystery.
.....Which I see no way to fix.
I tried the “edit,” and I got only the numerical amount, which was correct.
This was the way it was for my ancient Quicken 2003 for MAC, except the numerical and written amounts always agreed.
The written amount was never a penny less.
This anomaly means I have to test-print every check on a blank sheet of paper to see if the two figures agree.
So if they don’t, I can hand-write the check.
My wife did Google-research to see if anyone else was getting the problem, and found that Quicken Essentials didn’t even have a check-writing function at first.
The assumption was that everyone would be doing things electronically.
Well I do, but occasionally I have to use checks.
I can’t pay my water-bill electronically, or even my newspaper subscription.
And my newspaper uses the same bank I do.
I authorized an electronic bill-pay to that newspaper, but the bank had to issue a check.
If I’d known, I would have paid by check myself.
There are other bills I can’t pay electronically, and bills I pay in a roundabout fashion.
My auto insurance has screwed up with electronic bill-pay, so I pay my local insurance-provider, in which case a human (their receptionist) intervenes to assure proper credit.
Sometimes a human is required to get the system to not screw up.
And sometimes I wish a human were around to catch my own errors.
Like the time I mistyped a credit-card payment by a penny, and the credit-card bank went bonkers, saying I hadn’t fully paid a bill, and started charging me interest on that penny, plus a $10 service-charge.
A human woulda caught that mistake, and probably called me.
“Are you sure you wanna short your payment by a penny?”
So I often need to pay by check.
Some of the charities we give to don’t do online donation yet.
Or they require credit-card information I don’t want to divulge.
That is, they don’t do PayPal.
I have to issue a check.
You can’t just assume all money disbursements can be electronic.
And good old Quicken 2003 printed an attractive check.
Quicken Essentials for MAC does okay too, now that it prints checks.
Users were all up-in-arms with a checkless Quicken Essentials.
But what do I do if the written amount is not the same as the numerical amount?
I had to hand-correct and initial my correction.
And now I have to test-print every check to see if it’s wonky.
You’re losing me, Quicken!
I know I’m not using all your glitzy bells-and-whistles.
All I’m doing is keeping track of two accounts.
And printing checks for one.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home