Intuit's decision to disable its older technology for importing most types of bank account information in Quicken 2005 for Windows is causing quite a stir. "I remembered reading your story about Intuit no longer supporting on-line banking with older versions of Quicken, so I thought I should bite the bullet this year and upgrade to Quicken 2005 when it came out," a reader wrote. "So guess what -- with the new Quicken I can no longer download checking account info from my bank, something I could do perfectly well with Quicken 2002."

The reader's bank informed her it had refused to pay Intuit's fees for implementing the OFX (Open Financial Exchange) download technology that is now mandatory for most online banking in Quicken 2005. "If I want to access my accounts, I have to revert to an older version of Quicken that still uses the .QIF file format," the reader wrote. "It's either that or type my data in by hand. Otherwise, my bank would have to charge an astronomical monthly fee to make up for extortion payments they'd be making to Intuit. What incredible greed!"

You can read Intuit's explanation for all this in detail on its QIF FAQ page. Among the things they point out is that the .QIF format is aging technology, that Quicken has supported the OFX standard for a number of years, that Quicken 2004 displayed warnings that Intuit was going to do this in the next version, and that Quicken 2005 customers have 60 days to return the product if they don't like it. In other words, Intuit is saying that sooner or later they were going to have to cut off use of the .QIF format, so why not just have a clean break now?

OK, but readers found some other things on Intuit's FAQ page that were disturbing. "If you upgrade to the new version of Quicken and your financial institution doesn't, they suggest you 'call or write to your Financial Institution to let them know you would like to download into Quicken via OFX...' or that you should '...consider moving to a Financial Institution that supports direct download via OFX,'" wrote another reader. "While I admit that .QIF format is not very user friendly and OFX will bring benefits, Quicken management has clearly taken the Microsoft approach of modifying an essential element of the underlying format on a new version and NOT providing any overlap -- to assure that you must get in lock-step with them. It would cost them essentially nothing in code to keep .QIF available. Instead, they are creating this 'crisis' to force sales both in their new products for people whose financial institutions do change and to force a crisis on the financial institutions by double-barreling the attack to get them to migrate to OFX."

Actually, it would cost Intuit nothing at all code-wise to keep supporting .QIF, because the code is still there. Intuit is only blocking .QIF imports for checking, savings, 401(k), and brokerage accounts in Quicken 2005 for Windows, and export of .QIF data is still allowed. Asset, liability, cash and other types of accounts can still use .QIF imports because OFX apparently doesn't handle them. Credit card account data will not be imported via .QIF in Quicken 2006 for Windows, but it's OK now. And, interestingly enough, Quicken 2005 for the Mac can still use .QIF for all types of accounts, and as of yet Intuit has no announced plans to change that. So while some users must leave this old technology behind right now, Intuit thinks it's perfectly fine for others.

A clear illustration of how Intuit is playing its Quicken customers off against its financial partners is provided on the company's QIF information page for financial institutions. It shows a screenshot of the warning message that is displayed to Quicken 2004 users during .QIF import sessions if their financial institution has not signed up to use OFX. QIF Imports will no longer be available in the next release of Quicken, the message pronounces ominously, because it "appears that this Financial Institution does not support the better method of direct download." A link is then provided for the user to go find a bank that does support Intuit's chosen method.

Of course, the warning screenshot in Quicken 2004 doesn't mention the possibility of the user's bank charging a hefty monthly fee for this spiffy service, and neither does the warning that Quicken 2005 displays about .QIF credit card data imports not working in the next release. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the current consternation over .QIF imports is but a taste of what we'll be hearing from credit card companies and their customers next year. We'll see how much credit Intuit gets then.

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