Quicken 2001 Is Truly Deluxe Finance
Written: Oct 06 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The best personal finance software. Period.
Cons: A lot of in-program advertising and links
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| Joubert's Full Review: Intuit Quicken 2001 Deluxe Full Version for Mac (2... |
I’ve been using computers for just over 20 years now and am now that unfortunate soul that gets called by friends, families and friends of friends for all computer questions.
Without fail the one piece of software I have consistently recommended to everyone is Quicken. No other product has consistently dominated its niche like Quicken has done with the personal finance segment.
The company first came to market in the mid-1980s. They claim 1984, but I don’t remember it back then. I do know that I became an avid user in 1987 and have faithfully upgraded almost annually. Two years ago, Intuit, the makers of Quicken, hooked me with TurboTax, but that’s a whole other Epinion.
As of today, I have 28 accounts or loans detailed in Quicken. My biggest account is a personal checking account that holds 10,982 transactions as of this writing. The product has come a long way from the days when the representatives used to beg and plead with me to archive my data. Today’s robust computers and better file handling make that request a memory.
I truly adore this product and I’m going to address each feature in the most organized way I could think of which is by menu bar selection. You can customize toolbars and tabs to take you to your most commonly visited places, just like you would set up links and favorites in a browser, but the menu bar will cover every feature. Strap in because there’s a lot more here than just balancing your checkbook.
File Menu
Most people don’t realize that they can run multiple Quicken databases. My wife and I are both active in civic groups and every so often, we get charged with the dreaded treasurer duty. Using the file menu, you can switch back and forth between your personal finances and whatever else you’re tracking.
The Print Checks feature is here too, but I’ve been using CheckFree for years and try not to bother with paper checks for anyone anymore. Your check supplier can sell you Quicken compatible checks or you can order them directly from Intuit, but beware – they are VERY expensive.
One of the file menus best options is the Pin Vault. This option debuted a version or two ago and allows you to store all the passwords for web access at various financial institutions. Quicken can also be configured to prompt you when you first access the system to download your transactions and update investment prices with a single click. While doing so, the software queries Intuit for product patches and lists of new partners.
Also here are passwords at both file and transaction level. I still haven’t found the need for a transaction password, but I always put a password on my file. I find myself somewhat reassured that the babysitter or some distant cousin spending the night isn’t flipping through my checkbook and wondering why I bought pizza four times last month. (Okay, it was six, but one was for work….)
There’s also an import and export feature that I never have occasion to use, but is definitely a godsend for someone who is first starting off in Quicken and wants to maintain their past database. I will confess that I tried a NationsBank proprietary product that was essentially a version of Managing Your Money about three years ago. Luckily, most of my data was still in Quicken mode, but I did have to use the import engine then and it worked like a champ. As for the MYM debacle, forget it. I documented no less than four bugs, one of them quite severe, to the company at the time and received a terse email saying that they were confident their product was the best on the market.
Edit Menu
Besides the basic cut, paste and delete functions we’re all used to these days, Quicken stashes its User Options menu here. This feature will let you change the look and feel of the program, altering colors, tab placement, toolbars, report options and the like. There’s also a mini Internet Connection wizard that in my opinion has always been more trouble than it’s worth. Establish a connection as always and simply use the Quicken online functions on your terms. Under older operating systems such as Windows 95, you’ll end up with another Dial-Up Networking choice if you use the feature. That’s hardly the worst thing in the world, but you really don’t need to bother.
There is also a global find and replace option in this section. I’ve found that useful in the past when I’ve decided to create a new category or account. For example, about five years ago, I decided to start tracking my utility bills in their own accounts (you didn’t think I had 28 credit cards, did you?). This gave me another degree of granularity that I wanted, but I had no intention of re-keying the data. Instead, I was able to create a new account for my electric company and then globally replace all those entries in the checkbook that were categorized as “Electric” to be categorized with the account name. Voila, instant analysis on the seasonality of my electric bill – which swings 2-3 times higher in summer and was worth tracking separately for budgeting purposes.
Finance Menu
Finally we start getting to the meat of the program. You also begin to see in this area that Intuit intends for Quicken to be your home PIM much the same way as Microsoft wants Outlook to control all of your office functions.
The first option here is called “My Finances” and it takes you to the snapshot page that Quicken users should now be familiar with. The default charts here are side-by-side histograms of income and expense last year and this year-to-date. A budgeted categories graph completes the top portion of the screen and the bottom has my favorite Quicken graph, the good old Net Worth By Month feature. All of the graphs and reports in Quicken are customizable, and you can also customize the ones that appear when you select “My Finances”.
Next comes one of the areas that I call “partner bombs”. Not only does Quicken want to track every detail your household, but they have partnered with dozens if not hundreds of companies. The next option is Quicken Services and it’s here that you’ll get pitched on everything from tax software to postage to check ordering. There are some useful things here so it’s probably worth a gander, but I’ve found that this section is typically not intended for the budget conscious. The name of the game here is convenience and one usually pays a premium for convenience.
The next four sections under this menu item are the heart of your database. This is where you create accounts, categories, online payees and the other rules of your database. While Quicken will install default categories for you, I believe you should sit down with pen and paper for a few minutes and think about what you want to track and at what level of detail. Anyone who works with data will tell you that it is always best to create your structure before loading data. You can change later, in fact, that’s a Quicken strength, but you won’t regret taking a few minutes for planning.
Quicken’s Online Center is also accessible from this menu. If you have enabled your accounts for online web access – something every major financial institution now offers – this is where you go to actually do your downloading. I’m only using one charge card for the majority of my purchases now, and I have enabled it for online access. I download my transactions at least weekly, and since many are regular transactions or those recognized by the system, the categorization goes very quickly. Reconciling the monthly statement is usually no more difficult than keying several numbers (closing balance, charges and payments), adding the date of the statement and clicking the reconcile button. I have never had to go back and manually reconcile an account using this feature.
The Quicken Calendar also resides here and provides a nifty graphical view of your financial activity in a monthly calendar format. Spotting trends and patterns is a snap when you switch to this view.
You’ll also find the ability to set reminders with the Alert function in this section. You can use this to remind yourself about anything, not just Quicken transactions, but of course, you have to be in the system regularly to get any benefit. Reminders won’t help you if you’re only entering data once or twice a month.
Finally, you’ll find a Quicken Address Book and Calculator here. The calculator is handy, of course, but I still don’t get the address book. There’s the ability to categorize addresses, but this function is for friends and family, not payees. I suspect we’ll see something linked to this in future versions that will provide reminders of so-and-so’s birthday and provide a handy-dandy link for you to send flowers or candy through the Quicken link. I already have too many address books so I just pass this one by.
Banking Center Menu
I love the banking center. The screen splits into multiple sections here. The top has alerts from Quicken that inform you if one of your financial institutions or payees is now offering web access. There’s also an overview of any bank accounts you have with hyperlinks directly to their register and another section of hyperlinks down the side that takes you to more partners. Your scheduled transactions (e.g., mortgage, car payment) appear here as do a series of transactions that Quicken suggest you might want to schedule. What the system does in this function is look for recurring items that fit a pattern and offer them up to you. Two buttons, schedule and reject, appear next to each scheduled transaction. This system does work well, though. Quicken suggested we schedule a transaction for our exterminator on October 11. I hadn’t scheduled it yet when the phone rang. Yup, it was the exterminator calling to schedule an appointment for October 9. Below all of that is an analysis of credit card activity and another appearance by the income and expense chart.
Online Billing is also located on this menu selection. So far, I am only using this for one company, but it does work well. An email prompts you that a new bill is ready for viewing and if online payment is configured, you can simply click a link to pay the bill. I do find that I prefer to enter the bill by hand, but I would rather get the electronic version of the bill than the paper version so I’m happy.
Other features in this section are an Online Payee list, places to enter and edit memorized and scheduled transactions and still more places to order Quicken stuff.
Investing Center Menu
Quicken may want to take over your ancillary functions like contact management, but it wants to own your investments, plain and simple. If you’re not careful here, you’ll end up exporting your portfolio to a secured area of Quicken.com. Note – it is secured for your access only with a password, but I’m not crazy about my portfolio being online with my broker, much less my software vendor.
Despite the aggressive nature of this activity center, the features you receive are tremendous. You can update your investment prices with the click of a button and receive all sorts of charting and tracking. In this version, Intuit added more than 30 different new portfolio views and they really are fun to play with. They would be more fun with more money and better performance in my case, but they’re still fun.
There are so many features here that I really can’t touch on them all, but you can chart, graph and report to your heart’s content. The system will provide asset allocation, rate of return, capital gains estimating, and just about everything else you can imagine. Be careful where you click though to avoid ending up at a partner site.
The Investing Center also offers an option to set up a 401(k) plan that is much more complex, but also more robust than in previous versions.
Household Center Menu
Learn everything you didn’t want to know about your household! In addition to the ubiquitous partner links (are you paying too much for your long distance service?), you’ll have the opportunity here to enter a room-by-room inventory of your home’s contents. Quicken will then stash cash basis and replacement value data for you in the program and consider those values when calculating net worth.
Quicken’s Loan Center is also on the Household tab and remains unchanged from previous versions. I have no problem with the lack of change because I’ve always found this to be one of the most intuitive and powerful parts of the program. Enter your loan, the interest rate, answer a few questions and your complete repayment schedule is calculated and ready for processing. As in previous versions, you can also pay electronically from this section.
Remember when I told you that Quicken wants to know everything about you? Well, that means your car too. You can now set up an asset account for a vehicle and enable the system to download estimated pricing from Edmunds every month. That gives your net worth reports and graphs more value because you no longer have that car note weighing everything down without the offsetting asset being updated on a regular basis. I find that every pricing guide on the web is inflated to some degree so take this number with a grain of salt, but you’ll at least have a good starting point.
You can manage the same trick for your home too. This is a new Quicken feature that lets you count your mortgage against the value of your house which you can manually update after the system downloads comparable sales in your neighborhood.
Perhaps my soon-to-be favorite feature of the whole package though is the emergency planner. This is the most comprehensive family information database I’ve seen. Entering all the data takes forever – so long in fact that I’ve broken it down into parts – but the effect is wonderful. You can print out survivor reports that put all your financial information at your executor’s fingertips, caretaker reports for someone who is watching your house and an emergency report with medical and insurance information.
Tax Center Menu
This may be my bias towards Intuit’s Turbo Tax program, but I do not care for the tax planners in this version of Quicken. I find them to be very simplistic. That’s probably an unfair criticism because Quicken is not a tax prep program, but I expected more features. The Quicken Suite does integrate Turbo Tax and there are all sorts of hooks throughout Quicken Deluxe to Turbo Tax so I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they become one product as well.
The tax planners here include a withholding check (far too many people over-withhold throughout the year and are happy to get their money refunded without interest!), a “deduction finder” which doesn’t work all that well and links all over prompting you to buy Turbo Tax. You know, it would be simpler just to buy Turbo Tax. You can mess around with some of the calculators, but they won’t do the world class job that Turbo Tax does.
Planning and Reports Menus
I’m combining the last two features because they have a lot in common and because you’ve already slogged through 2,500 words and probably don’t want to read a whole lot more.
You do have fun in the planning section. The best feature here is the Debt Reduction subprogram. If you’re carrying any debt at all, credit cards, mortgages, car loans, you owe it to yourself to go through the easy-to-complete planner and see a suggested repayment plan based on your actual balances, interest rates, etc. Standalone programs like this have been floating around the Internet for years, but this is tightly integrated with your actual finances and buzzes you with all sorts of annoying (grin) reminders that you’re supposed to pay so much extra on your mortgage this month.
There are also tons of other planners here: college, retirement (with lightweight actuarial tables), and savings goals.
The report section includes more reports than you could ever possibly want as well as the ability to export them to Excel in case you get really kooky and want to do in-depth analysis or pivot tables or some other such detail-obsessive nonsense. And for those of you wondering, yes I did, and yes, it works.
Finally, there’s interactive help throughout the program and some multimedia clips that you can play. The multimedia is strictly one-time only stuff, but it’s nice to have when you’re curious about something.
The program retails for $59.99, but upgraders get a $20 rebate, which lowers the actual cost to $40. There are enough new planning tools in this version as well as some more intelligence in the reconciliation processes to make this an upgrade worth buying. And if you haven’t tried Quicken yet, my only word of advice is to start slowly and build up. It took me 13+ years to get to the point I’m at now and I’m still not using all the features.
Recommended:
Yes
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