| Product: |
Intuit Quicken Deluxe 2000 |
| Date: |
01/11/01 (59 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Reasonable price, Good overview of your wealth (or otherwise), Easy to reconcile with statements
Disadvantages: Fiddly to set up, Needs all your existing paperwork up to date before you start, PLEASE remember to back-up!
Quicken is one of those packages that I’ve been using for years, upgrading as I go, but, I suspect, never really making full use of the previous version before being talked into the next. Of course, Intuit are in good company here, MS Office being another case in point.
My home accounts used to be a homespun MS Excel affair, which was merely a list of known my monthly commitments with room to add my income at the top of the list itself, with plenty of spare spaces left for visits to an ATM and credit card payments.
Of course, being a spreadsheet, I could make the balance take care of itself, but it always struck me that there must be a better, purpose-built way. The monthly sheets were never much help at remembering quarterly bills like BT's phone charges, or annual ones like my AA subs (that's for my car, not my drink problem).
That’s when a magazine disk of an early, and soon to be replaced version of Quicken, caught my eye, and since then, I have scrapped all my paper records, apart from bank statements, as these could be construed as tax documents, and therefore need keeping for two years.
Setting Quicken up is a bit of a chore, especially if you have multiple accounts and your financial life revolves around regular payments, direct debits, standing orders and the like. You need to have a comprehensive list of these to hand, with the amount payable, and periodicity detailed. (Quicken will handle monthly – both lunar and calendar, quarterly, 4-monthly, 6-monthly and annually) If you know the actual date they are due, so much the better. If you’re not sure, get your bank to supply you with a list of known payments.
The other thing you need is a specific point when you can safely say that your “paper” version is as up to date as it’s ever going to be, before cutting over to Quicken as your main source of accounting. You will need to give Quicken an opening balance am
ount, and the future accuracy of what you are embarking on depends on this.
Once set up, Quicken is a doddle to run. Your regular payments give you a prompt as they are due to be paid, and each account has its own tab, making switching between accounts easy. Those little extras like visits to the cash till can all be entered with ease, and once a new type of payment has been input and categorised, it will suggest this every time you input another from the same source. For example, if your first ATM visit was for £30, then this will be the suggested amount shown next time you start to type “ATM” in the entry field. You can of course change it to what it really was.
Transfers between accounts can be recorded from either the “donor” or “recipient” end, and reconciling the current state of play with your latest bank statement couldn’t be easier.
Just type in the current end balance as calculated by your bank into the first dialogue box of the Reconcile process, “OK” it, and a list of all payments not checked off since last time will appear.
All you now have to do is to click on each one that matches your statement. “Typos” and omissions can be corrected by editing the account main screen, and returning to Reconcile.
After so many transactions, the software prompts you to back up the details. You ignore this at your peril, since having forsaken “paper”, there is no real way back, without a lot of hassle! I back mine up to a separate d:/drive with the occasional further precaution of a back up to floppy – yes the files are small enough.
One small tip I would recommend to anyone setting up a list of standing orders on Quicken: - If you are monthly paid, it’s useful to know how the month will turn out after all standing orders/direct debits are deducted*. Therefore, when asked for a payment date for each item, by all means put
in the real date per month, say the 28th for the sake of argument, but ask for 27 days notice. This will give you a realistic feel for your cash flow throughout the month as all your payments will prompt to be taken off on the day after pay-day. Depressing I know, but this sort of software isn’t for financial ostriches!
*As they say, there’s always too much month left at the end of my money!
My only real criticism of Quicken would be that it isn’t a very “Windowsy” product, in so much that it doesn’t integrate with anything, like Excel for example. But then, since it does what I ask of it, who’s complaining?
If this was Ronseal, it would do exactly what it says on the can!
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