Quicken – The old dog with new tricks
This is the 3rd post in a series about free personal finance websites. You can find the first post here and the second post here.
There is a good chance that you have heard of Quicken before reading this post. Quicken Software started in 1984 and has been a household name when it comes to personal finance software. However, this name has been built on a line of desktop software, not something that you can use from any computer with an internet connection. Quicken Online has changed this by allowing you to keep track of your finances over the internet. So here it is, my review of Quicken Online. Again, these are my opinions, people, so you need to make a decision for yourself!
The first thing that I really like about Quicken Online is how clean of an interface it has. There are a bunch of colors being used, but it never reaches the point of being distracting. Also, the layout is very simple and easy to use. If someone had never used an online personal finance tool, I think that Quicken Online would make it easy to begin. So the bottom line here is that I like the user interface– I like it alot.
Something else that I really like about Quicken Online is the budgeting tool. I would imagine that all of the personal finance websites out there have the ability to set budgets. However, Quicken Online’s does much of the work for you. It looks at your spending history and then calculates your average spending for major categories. This average is then your default budget. If you want to change the budget (say cut back on eating out for example), you are able to change the budget to whatever number you would like. Also, there is an indicator that shows if you are on track with your budget as the month progresses. This should help to avoid the end of the month scramble to stay under budget. Here is a screenshot to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about. As you can see, I might want to slow down my spending on household items because I’m a little bit over-budget in this early part of the month.
So far this review for Quicken Online has been very good. With a company as well established as Quicken this should not be too surprising. However, this tool is not without faults of it’s own. Much like Geezeo in the last review, Quicken Online does not have much when it comes to reporting. I’m able to see my transactions and see a pie chart of where my money is going, but that’s about it as far as analysis goes. Now I’ve never used any of the Quicken desktop solutions, so maybe that is where the real in-depth analysis takes place. However, this series of posts is about free websites for tracking expenses, not for-pay desktop applications.
So there you have it. Quicken Online is very easy to use and if you are just looking for a basic transaction tracker and budget tool then I would highly recommend this application. However, if you are like me and are looking for more than trivial analysis of where your money is going you might want to keep looking (at least at this point in time). I have heard that there are some big improvements that should be showing up in the next few weeks, so there’s that.
In the mean time, I will continue my search for what I consider to be the best free personal finance website out there. Next time I will be discussing Buxfer, a site that I have had very much experience with, so I expect it could be very interesting.
