{"id":125,"date":"2006-03-04T00:59:11","date_gmt":"2006-03-04T05:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/2006\/03\/04\/review-quicken-2006\/"},"modified":"2006-03-04T00:59:11","modified_gmt":"2006-03-04T05:59:11","slug":"review-quicken-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"Review: Quicken 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I decided to get somewhat ambitious, <a href=\"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/2006\/03\/03\/savings-accounts\/\">as you may have noticed<\/a>, and went through all my finances. I decided it was time to see what the wonderful world of Quicken was like. I must say, it&#8217;s a very pretty world.<\/p>\n<p>Using 2006 Deluxe has been a pleasure so far. It&#8217;s much more, me-oriented than Microsoft Money. When I started using this software my first reaction was &#8220;Microsoft has made some pretty lazy software&#8221;. Quicken greeted me with the ability to set goals. I told it I would like to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Setting Goals\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/devdev\/107484947\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"70\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" alt=\"Setting Goals\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/36\/107484947_a5fd72b913_t.jpg\" \/><\/a>Manage my checkbook and bills<\/li>\n<li>Know where my money is going<\/li>\n<li>Save more money<\/li>\n<li>Track all of my investments in one place, and<\/li>\n<li>Know my net worth<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In hindsight I don&#8217;t know if I really wanted to know the last one. It&#8217;s slightly disappointing. In any case, once the goals are set it walks you through setting up your accounts. The &#8216;Direct Connect&#8217; feature seems a million times more functional than Money&#8217;s. It tells me more than &#8216;Error&#8217; when and if there&#8217;s an issue. Money just sits with a turning wheel while something, unbeknownst to me, goes on in the background.<\/p>\n<p>Once I had my accounts neatly setup and downloaded, I unfortunately had to go through and setup the categorization\/memorized payees. Quicken doesn&#8217;t download QIF data anymore because it&#8217;s, apparently, an outdated standard used for troubleshooting; not downloading transactions. I didn&#8217;t mind, though. It allowed me to make sure there was consistency throughout hundreds of transactions.<\/p>\n<p>Some things I really like include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Account Bar\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/devdev\/107486415\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"76\" height=\"100\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" alt=\"Account Bar\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/53\/107486415_6baed891f8_t.jpg\" \/><\/a><strong>Account Bar:<\/strong> it&#8217;s always on the screen, tells me my account values and lets me quickly switch between them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Portfolio\/Investments:<\/strong> Quicken pulls up a very nice, stat-filled screen for each security I own. The market value\/price graph doesn&#8217;t crash the program either (as Money did as it tried to download the data) because it uses previously downloaded values.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Pin Vault:<\/strong> This feature allows me to save my PINs and then lock them with a single password. Money could save all the PINs automatically but this additional security feature is nice.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Quicken Budget\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/devdev\/107484948\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"161\" height=\"240\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" alt=\"Budget Setup\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/35\/107484948_ccbde64d86_m.jpg\" \/><\/a><strong>GUI:<\/strong> Microsoft&#8217;s blue is nice, but the subtle shadows make this a very attractive program. The graphs are pretty, the tabs are intuitive. It looks good and that&#8217;s important.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Reports:<\/strong> I haven&#8217;t even had a chance to go through all of these but they&#8217;re all very useful and I can&#8217;t wait to create some useful analysis.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Budget:<\/strong> Quicken&#8217;s seems like there&#8217;s much more to it. Money would simply ask how often I would spend X dollars in Y category. It would then just apply it as a monthly average value. Quicken allows me to do either that, or by month or quarter. In other words, instead of budgeting $7.45 each month for &#8216;Christmas Gifts&#8217; I can tell it I only expect to spend $100 in December.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Reconcile:<\/strong> I don&#8217;t think Money even had this feature. It helped me figure out which transaction I accidently deleted. All I had to do was pull up my online statement for January and I could quickly find the loss.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously I&#8217;m enjoying playing around with my new program. I know I wrote about <a href=\"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/2006\/01\/14\/track-your-money-with-money\/\">using Money to track your money<\/a>. After two days I&#8217;d recommend Quicken to anyone out there looking for a very nice personal finance program.<\/p>\n<p>[tags]money, finance, personal, software, review[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I decided to get somewhat ambitious, as you may have noticed, and went through all my finances. I decided it was time to see what the wonderful world of Quicken was like. I must say, it&#8217;s a very pretty world. Using 2006 Deluxe has been a pleasure so far. It&#8217;s much more, me-oriented than Microsoft [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[575,586,92],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","tag-money","tag-reviews","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}