Quicken Online has officially made its way into the history books, welcoming Mint to replace it, as of the weekend.
But unlike other migrations from one software product to another, many of which do a lot of the heavy lifting for the user, this switch from Quicken Online to Mint is no day at the beach. Because the platforms for the two products are so vastly different — including the way transactions are handled — the migration has been less than ideal, the company acknowledged.
Specifically, Quicken Online users weren’t converted to Mint.com customers automatically. Users were required to establish new accounts. And, transactions from the tracked accounts in Quicken Online didn’t automatically convert into Mint, though the company did provide a way to offload the transactions into a standalone file for saving. 
Shortly after the company closed the acquisition of Mint, it first announced its intentions of shuttering Quicken Online. Aaron Forth, director of product design for the company’s personal finance group, said his team spent months working on ways to seamlessly migrate Quicken Online into Mint but that the two had so many different nuances that mashing them together created new problems, such as duplicate data.
And because the company was already focusing its resources at Mint, and not Quicken Online, the best decision was to shut it down and help customers migrate over to Mint.com. Of the 50,000 Quicken Online customers, about 40 percent were already Mint.com customers - half as regular users and the other half as Quicken Desktop users who appeared to be experimenting with the online version.
For the past several weeks, Quicken Online users have been bombarded with reminders that the end was near.
But that doesn’t mean that some weren’t - or won’t be - caught off-guard. Nor does it mean that they will all love using Mint. As I said in a post this morning about e-mail, there are those who “get it” when it comes to new technology and those who still compare everything to the old way. For those, the company has established an FAQ.
Bottom line: Mint is not Quicken Online. Some people will learn that the hard way today.
