Quicken Home Business 2. Review Rating. Quicken has been around for almost a quarter of a century. While it has competitors in the personal finance management space, such as Personal Capital and Mint. Moneydance on the desktop, it still dominates the field. Put simply, Quicken helps you manage every element of your personal finances account management, spending, bills, planning, investing, and propertydebt. The most significant improvement in the Quicken 2. Its countless tools are tucked away a bit more neatly, yet are easily accessible, for the most part. Similar Products. There are four versions of Quicken 2. E785A2E63BC9938C8BCA86E72E639CBECA_large.jpg' alt='How To Import Quicken Files To Excel' title='How To Import Quicken Files To Excel' />Quicken Interchange Format QIF is an open specification for reading and writing financial data to media i. Software How to Display Text Backwards in Microsoft Word Windows Vista. Backward text can add a creative touch to your fliers, or you may need it for some other. Explore the many alternative personal financial management programs that are currently available and offer an alternative to Intuits Quicken program. Quicken Starter Edition, which costs 3. Quicken Deluxe, for 7. At 1. 09. 9. 9, Quicken Premier includes advanced investment tracking tools. No other personal financial management service offers the depth and breadth of tools found in Quicken, but its very completeness can be overwhelming. How To Import Quicken Files To Excel' title='How To Import Quicken Files To Excel' />And the 1. Quicken Home Business reviewed here is the best choice for a sole proprietor who needs transaction categorization for income taxes, profitloss projections, and cash flow reports. New Look, Navigation. I would be interested in knowing how hard it is to import from Quicken to Moneydance. How you can verify that you have captured everything completely, across stock. How To Import Quicken Files To Excel' title='How To Import Quicken Files To Excel' />As with other financial software, Quickens home page is a dashboard that displays your most important numbers in both table and chart form. You can customize the default view and create multiple versions of it containing different items from the list of a few dozen options, like All accounts, Calendar, Income vs Expenses, Portfolio Value Graph, and Tax Related Expenses YTD. The left vertical pane contains your current account balances you can turn this off if you prefer. There are two options for navigating between the programs primary sections. Blue Letter Driver S License Louisville Ky on this page. You can click on any of a series of tabs that are displayed horizontally above the main screen to get to areas like Spending, Bills, Investing, and Property Debt. Or you can turn on standard Windows drop down menus that run across the very top of the page. Click Bills, for example, and three navigational links appear above the main data display Online Bills, Bill Reminders, and Projected Balances. As you click each, the screen changes to reflect the data and tools available there. The Bill Reminders table is a list of all reminders youve set up, along with their status Overdue, Upcoming, Auto, and so on and action buttons that let you enter and edit them. Drop down menus above this table contain alternative viewing options Stack, Calendar, and so on, and let you define the account and date range. Links to Reminder utilities Add, Manage, and that sort of thing appear to the right. This is how Quicken works throughout, like a Windows program that uses standard navigation conventions. Its easy enough to learn and use, and it has improved, but it still has an outdated aesthetic. Some tools pop out in new windows instead of being seamlessly integrated, and theres an uncomfortable mix of old and new looking screens. Its has though the features have just been tacked on over the years. And Id guess that US consumers who would use the majority of those features are in the minority. Money Out SpendingQuicken makes it easy to see records of all of your income and expenses. If you supply your login credentials for your bank and credit card accounts, the software will move cleared transactions into the appropriate registers you can also enter transactions manually. This list view can contain transactions from all accounts, or you can look at them individually. The date range for each register is customizable. Quicken provides a list of categories Entertainment, Bills Utilities, and Auto Transport, among others that you can assign to transactions. You can create your own, but its very important that you use the official income tax categories for those transactions that youll want to report on your taxes. The payoff for this detail work comes in the form of a big colorful chart that makes it clear where all of your money comes from and where youre spending it. There are other tools available to help you monitor your accounts. Quicken provides a simple reconciliation tool, for one. And when you click on the Action icon in the upper right, youll see a whole menu of related activities that you can access from here. You can, for example, write checks and export data to Excel, and create reports. There are numerous personal finance applications that automate a subset of the tasks that Quicken does. Learn. Vest is one. You can track income and expenses to learn about your spending habits and create better budgets. It also helps you find ways to meet your financial goals, like an exploration of your options for repaying credit card debt. Other applications perform one primary function, but they do it well. Wallet. Hub, for example, helps you monitor and analyze your credit score. Paying Up BillsOne of the first things youll do as youre setting up Quicken after youve created or entered your Intuit ID is to connect to at least one bank account. You can add more types of connections later, but youll probably want to get going with the account youll use to pay bills. There are three options for this connection. You can manually download files from your financial institution or set up an automatic update option. To pay bills and transfer money from Quicken, youll be required to use Direct Connect your bank may charge a fee for this on top of Quickens 9. Quicken offers two options for paying bills. You can create a bill by providing the key information this then automatically turns into a bill reminder and appears in the list along with its status upcoming, automatically entered, etc. If you have a login for a billers website, you can link to it, and its amount and date due are automatically updated when that information becomes available. All outgoing and incoming transactions from all accounts can be exported and imported when you launch Quickens One Step Update. If you dont need all of Quickens features but you want to automate online bill paying, you might consider Doxo. This Web based application also serves as an online filing cabinet for household records. You can upload these manually or retrieve them via email and connections to service providers. Quicken displays a very useful graphic when you click on the Projected Balances link a line graph projecting your account balances for a specified time period based on the bills and income youve entered. When you click on any dot representing a date, a small window opens that lists money in and out for that day. Looking Ahead PlanningClick the Planning tab in Quicken, and you can work with five different types of planning tools. This is one of the areas that sets Quicken apart from its competitors. The usability and usefulness of these five tools help you prepare for your financial future in more detail than anyone else. They are Budgets. Everyone groans at the thought of this critical element of financial planning. Quicken simplifies budget building by pulling in the actual data youve entered and displaying it by category Auto Transport Gas Fuel, Bills Utilities Mobile Phone, and Food Dining Restaurants, for example in a graph or table, for a customizable time range monthly, quarter to date, etc. You can select the categories you want to appear and create multiple versions as well as adjusting the current budget amount and rolling over balances. If youre looking for a desktop alternative that actually teaches you about budgeting along the way, you might consider YNABhttps www. You Need A Budget.