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Quicken Online ReviewA Quicken Online review by a former user.
Review Last Updated: 04/17/2009
Cost: Free
Our Rating:
(As always, a quick disclaimer: before you work with any online budgeting tool, you should run through our Personal Budgeting Course first, so you have a good home budget already drawn up and ready to go. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say!)
OverviewWe used Quicken Deluxe software to track our spending for years before switching to Mvelopes (find out why we switched by reading our Mvelopes review), so it was a no-brainer to give Quicken Online a shot when it was time to manage my home business accounts.Why not spring for the full Quicken software? Well...Quicken Online is free. Wouldn't YOU try the free version first? :-) Quicken Online was initially a fee-based service that charged $2.99 a month. In late 2008 it became free, unable to compete with other free services like Mint.com. During my first log-in, it quickly became obvious that Quicken Online is really geared for the younger crowd, those who don't have complicated mortgages, investments, debts and other such "fun" things we tend to accumulate as we age. If all you want to do is check your bank accounts regularly and generally track simple expenses, then Quicken Online will work great for you.
ProsSince I always like to accentuate the positive, let me begin with all the things I liked about Quicken Online... It's a free version of Quicken. Enough said! Simple layout. I found it pretty easy to find my way around. The colors were pleasant and the site was relatively intuitive. Easy start-up. I didn't need tutorials or a user's manual to get the ball rolling. I followed online instructions, entered my banking information, and Quicken imported all my transactions. I did have a hard time finding the "budgeting" feature (I use this term loosely), because it was actually located under a tab called "Goals". Click on "Goals" and you'll get a subsection called "Your Budget". I also had a little bit of trouble figuring out how to set up a paycheck, which leads me to my next "plus"... Terrific help--always in context. As you're working through each screen, there's a highlighted area called "Popular Questions" to the left that are highly relevant to the task you're on. You can click on the questions to get pop-up answers, with links to Quicken Online Community Forums that are also quite helpful. Not once did I have to contact Quicken support. Everything I needed was in the FAQ or "community" forums. Great feature, because you don't have to go to a separate customer service page or center to get your questions answered. Just about any questions you could ask is on the community forums and may already be answered. Just do a quick inline search and you're all set. Quick views of your accounts. The "Transactions" tab lets you see your transactions all lumped together, or separated by account. A list of your accounts is always handy on the left-hand side, ready for you to click. Simple, colorful analysis. The "Trends" tab shows your spending habits with a nice, colorful pie chart. Click on the different categories below to analyze that slice of the "pie" with a neat bar graph, and the ability to pop-up all the transactions for that category. Good for an overall view of spending habits. "My Wallet" cash tracking. Time spent with any personal budgeting book or website will reveal that cash spending is a typical budget- buster. So it's great that Quicken Online has a feature that lets you track your cash spending. Called "My Wallet", you simply make "deposits" to your cash account and then manually enter how it's spent. (I recommend budgeting cash or ATM withdrawals for each paycheck, and limit yourself to spending only that amount of cash until your next paycheck. You'll keep from spending more than you want and you won't feel guilty about that latte, because it's already budgeted.) Quicken Online's RealBalance™. If you take the time to enter a paycheck and regular bills, you'll see a RealBalance™ when you log on that supposedly gives you a true picture of how much you really have left to spend. This is an important feature, and one of the greatest advantages to envelope budgeting, so if you can get it to work properly for you (I couldn't), it's a definite plus. New budgeting tool. Like most other features with Quicken Online, it works pretty well, but isn't super-customizable. If you don't like how the budget categories are ordered, you have to delete them all and start over, entering categories in the order you'd like to see them. One forum participant complained that the budget amounts didn't "roll over" into the next pay period. That's called envelope budgeting, and in my opinion, if you want true envelope budgeting in an online or computerized fashion, the very best option is Mvelopes, which we use for our own personal finances. Mobile and e-mail alerts. The possibilities are almost mind-boggling! Get e-mail and/or text alerts for the following:
Export to Turbo Tax. If you use Turbo Tax to prepare your (simple) tax returns, this is a major feature. All you have to do is import your Quicken Online data to Turbo Tax, tweak a bit, and you're done. Put away the Excedrin.
ConsBelow are some of the reasons I didn't like Quicken Online (but please keep in mind the following may not be "cons" for you, if you have a relatively simple home budget situation).Trouble importing transactions. Maybe it's just my credit union, but it seems every time I fire up Quicken Online it can't "refresh" my transactions. So, I need to log in to my credit union and get to where I can see my transactions, then log off and refresh Quicken Online again. Usually it's because security questions are popping up, or the credit union has a special offer, etc. It seems this isn't unique to Quicken Online, so--thanks to very strong security at banks and credit unions--you'll likely deal with this regardless of which type of online or desktop budgeting software you choose. Can't enter upcoming transactions if they're new. I went to enter upcoming transactions for payees that hadn't been run through Quicken Online, because because it hadn't downloaded a bill payment yet. I wasn't able to do so. Once I'd cleared a transaction with that payee, then I could set up a recurring transaction. Upcoming recurring transactions are tricky to deal with. I really wanted to use the "Real Balance" feature, so was looking forward to entering recurring transactions and having some idea of how much was left to spend in my checking on any given week, after my main income deposit was made. I found out that recurring transactions didn't match up to incoming ones, so they didn't drop off the "upcoming" list, and my balance was all screwed up. When I searched for an answer in the forums, I found out that a lot of folks with biweekly paychecks and monthly recurring expenses were finding their RealBalance™ to be way off as well. Again--this isn't critical if you have a really good home budget, because you should already know how much you have to spend after each paycheck, but geez, if it's a bell and whistle, then I'd kinda like it to work. Transactions assigned to incorrect categories. When transactions such as cleared checks come in, Quicken Online seems to randomly assign payee and category, so I have to go back and manually change them. You'd have to do this regardless, but I find the volume of it annoying. Can't add an account that's not listed. If your financial institution isn't on Quicken's list, you can't track it in Quicken Online. You can submit it to their support; but this is something you CAN do with Quicken software, so keep that in mind. Can't reconcile. Even if you track things online, everyone should reconcile their bank accounts to their checkbooks on a regular basis. I haven't seen how to do this in Quicken Online yet. It's built in to the regular Quicken product. For now, I've been doing it manually. That's bringing back memories! No reports. I was shocked to discover there was no reporting feature in Quicken Online. At a minimum, I was used to printing out my income/expense comparison at the end of the year for tax purposes. After users complained, Quicken Online did provide a download feature, where you can download transactions to Excel. As comfortable as I am with Excel, that was the last straw for me, and I decided that Quicken Online just didn't meet my needs. I'm moving to the desktop product.
My ExperienceI used Quicken Online for about two months (for business accounts and expenses only) before giving up and purchasing Quicken 2009 for $29.99. While I found it easy to use, I didn't like the fact that I had to export my data to Excel and manipulate it manually in order to create income and net worth statements.ConclusionsPlease don't think of this as a negative review. I am a Quicken fan, and I've used Quickbooks, too--also a fan of that.After trying Quicken Online my conclusion is that it works well for younger folks that have uncomplicated expenses, a need for basic budgeting and spending tracking, and no need to print out reports on how they're doing. I'll also be reviewing other free budget software programs, so maybe there's an alternative to Quicken Online that works better. Go here to see my other reviews.
Piggybank Rating 3 piggybanks out of a possible 5 |
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