Sven just IM’ed me through Skype, the P2P telephony system. Sven seems like a nice enough guy, but I don’t know him. He was just looking for someone to talk with. I was busy paying bills through Quicken and probably was brusquer than I intended. But what sort of IM system lets any and all of its 4M users ping you? Or do all IM systems lay you open to spontaneous global chatting? And if they all do, why don’t I have more people pinging me? Is it my breath?

(Yeah yeah, I’m sure there’s a way to turn this off in Skype. Can’t I just complain about it irrationally?)

Then I went back to Quicken. I’ve been using it for 15 years and have gotten worse and worse at it. My Quicken work environment is so screwed up that it’s beyond cleaning: I have uncleared checks from ten years ago, a bank balance that shows me to be $41,000 overdrawn, multiple entries for online payees that I can’t figure out how to delete, and a column in the “Split” dialogue box labeled “Exp” that seems to be entirely undocumented. But that’s not what I want to whine about.

It occurred to me that the way I’ve been entering deposits is probably wrong: I go to the registery and create a “deposit” line. It works, but it’s totally inelegant. Surely the UI gives us a better way of doing it. So, I click on “Help” and type “deposit” into the index. What comes back is

If you receive payments for invoices or cash sales but don’t deposit the payments directly into a bank account, you can set up an asset account such as Undeposited Funds and use it to track the cash and checks until you deposit them into your bank account.

Ok, but how do I make a deposit?

If you click on Contents > Finances > Entering transactions in the account register > How do I … > Enter a basic transaction in the register, step 4 tells you: “In the Payee field, indicate who receives this payment or gives you this deposit.” So the instructions are there, but buried and only slightly incomplete: It neglects to tell you that in the “Num” field you have to click on “Deposit.”

Man, Quicken’s documentation sucks.

Categories: Uncategorized dw