The Future for Personal Plus

Debra de Reeper

A 20+ years user, I usually upgrade my PP every 2 years. My Home Inventory has stopped opening so thought I'd look at upgrading my 2018 to 2020 but cannot find information about new features/upgrades like we had in the Quicken years. After reading these comments about the lack of support from Reckon I'm not sure if I should upgrade. I would love to hear from a Reckon Rep about the future of PP, are they committed to supporting it? The website completely hides PP like it doesn't exist.  Or do I too give up :-(  

Peter Jenke

Rightly or wrongly, I renew my licence annually and, touch wood, apart from a couple of minor niggles it works. It has to. 25+ years on Quicken/Reckon, all my personal finance transactions and my SMSF depend on it totally. I simply can’t afford to be without it. Although I’m not as conscientious with Home Inventory as I am with Personal Plus, it does work for me.

Peter Jenke

Not a problem Debra.  As I said above, I throw money at it every year, not because I want to, but because I'm so dependent on it and just can't take a chance on it falling over.  I can't deny that I've had it crash in the past, but through contacts from this forum (take a bow Gary Pope), I've been able to recover (albeit only after entering near heart attack territory).  It's fundamentally a good product which does exactly what I need it to do.  Worse, I can't identify another product which goes even close to my needs - without considering the 28 years (I checked) of historical data I have with the product.  That's the really scary part.  I don't believe I have an alternative.

John Campbell

Hi Debra and others,

Unfortunately I have not updated my RPP transactions since May 2019, so I am looking like going back to spreadsheets and a shoe box. Still have the Quicken 7 packaging in the bookcase ('97), but bought my first copy in '95 ? (Should have learnt then, as was easier then to buy another copy than update.)

I start up RPP every month or so and import share price updates from my own ASX database, but that is becoming less frequent. Each time, I wonder if RPP will start normally or find a new way to crash; all those Microsoft updates !!

I actually find it easier to update my list of banking transactions by importing .csv dumps from all bank accounts into a .xlsx spreadsheet, back to 2009. I managed to massage this into pivot tables and filtered dumps for the accountant for last year so have a viable alternative.
There are many sites which now provide share price history plots; even the app on my phone works better. Now just the share buy/sell transactions to transfer and a historical report of combined share values to go.

Now with the total lack of Reckon support for RPP (when did Reckon last provide any ? ) it looks like a waste to persist with the data entry. Such a disgrace that we have been treated this way.

I wonder when the other Reckon products will go the same way. They certainly have a track record for how to upset a user base.

Best of luck to everyone, after 25 years.

John

John Campbell

Just read Reckon’s “Corporate governance policies”, which includes “Statement of Values”
It lists "Key values" which start with “Integrity” and continues.

The Statement of values then concludes with “So bearing those values in mind:”
…
 Exceed customer expectations

As a long term user who has expressed expectations, I'm not sure these are being achieved, or what the published policies are achieving.

Peter Phillis

Hi Debra et al
It seems we could easily start a long time users club.
Debra, can you tell me as an "expert" personal inventory manager if the inventory program is integrated with Peronal Plus. I was hoping that when you purchased something and entered the transactions in your bank account or credit card account you could flag it as a new inventory item.
If it doesn't work that way can you tell me how you use it?
Cheers, Peter