Consumerism Commentary - Latest Comments in Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Jason — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:20:55 -0000

This looks to be about the only way to maintain an envelope-style budget in quicken. http://financialsoft.about....

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Ivy — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:07:02 -0000

I have always used TurboTax and have been curious about Quicken. Currently I use YNAB Pro for my budgeting/cashflow and Mint for my overall account view. I appreciate the review since I am currently looking to install a PC version money management software that I can also sync to my PDA. I am also looking to start a business and have not done any budgeting for business purposes yet. Quicken seems to be able to do the trick for both personal and business.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Carla G — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:14:56 -0000

For years I have put off investing in a software program to keep track of our home and business expenses, but after once again spending 2 days organizing receipts, bank statements, etc prior to doing our taxes, the time has come. At first I was leaning toward Quickbooks, but after much research and talking to other users, I've decided that Quicken Home and Business is exactly what we need. I'm looking forward to putting this program to use so as to simplify my files!

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Valerie — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:33:07 -0000

A deposit is income in the Quicken sense that it is money that came into your account, not an expense payment OUT of the account.

Assuming you got a check and deposited it, or the IRS electronically sent it to your bank and it shows on the statement as a deposit, use the Category to indicate that it was a tax refund for the year 08.

e.g., I have a category for FED TAX 08. In it I have entries for each payment made. (This could be monthly from your paycheck or estimates if you are self-employed. In the former case, my sub-category would be "With Held", in the latter case, "EST"

Once I get a refund, I make a new subcategory for FED TAX 08, and it's an "income" item in the New Category widnow, called 08 REFUND. Then in the account where the refund is deposited, I use the category "08 REFUND".

That way, you can run a report showing how much you paid and how much you got back.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Valerie — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:12:24 -0000

I find it easier to enter CD's as a bank account (SAvings) and just enter the interest monthly or quarterly, as paid. If the bank issuing the CD is one that allows downloads to Quicken, it's much simpler to enter the interest than as a Bond and Investment Account.

I name the account "CD-BankName apy% maturity date"
Then all my CD's will appear together alphabetically in the account list at side of screen. Then I can eyeball the maturity dates easily to watch for them.

When one matures, I change the name to YXX (the year of maturity)-Rest of Name above. I move it down to bottom of list of active accounts. At the end of the year I quickly know that if the CD matured in the tax year, I should include it in accounts for an interest report.

I too am surprised the Quicken hasn't shown CD's as one of the types of accounts from which you can choose when you open a new one.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Valerie — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:17:02 -0000

The most important thing, whether you are tracking personal or business expenses is to make sure you use a CATEGORY for each transactions - income or expense. Then you can prepare end of year or monthly reports by category.

When you install Quicken Home and Business, it will ask you if you have a business, if so, it will set up categories most commonly used by moist small businesses, and the appropriate tax line items will be attached to them. You can see all this in the Category List screen.

Take last year's Tax return and see what was deducted for business expenses then and make sure you've got a category for it. Also, check with your accountant or on the IRS web site to get a list of all possible deductions.

Then as he enters ALL expense transactions, he can select the appropriate category for each one. If there is something not already on the Category List, you can add it, being sure to indicate that it is tax related and selecting the correct tax return line item for it.

Home and Business also has a mileage feature that allows you to enter business mileage as you go, and get totals for the month or year.

The old computer adage of "garbage in, garbage out" applies to Quicken...if you don't make the entries, you won't have the data!

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Carolyn G — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:11:32 -0000

My tip is to keep all receipts and immediately enter them into QUicken or whatever program you use. I find that this saves me time and if I ever lose a receipt, I can go on the computer and see what's missing.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Victoria Lentini — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:13:49 -0000

My husband has his own business and I had the pleasure of sorting through his receipts and invoices for his tax accountant. It was an all day job. How can he know if he is claiming all the deductions he is entitled to? His lack of organization is surprising since he is so organized in other areas. I think he doesn't realize that there is a much easier way to keep track of his bills and cash accounts. He really needs this program!

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Jewel — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:24:37 -0000

I've just started a home business and would love to have Quicken for it!

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

PuzzlePiece — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:00:15 -0000

I have been using excel for the past few years to track finances. It would be great to finally have a program that can pull data from the web and update my accounts. Plus those personal financial statements would be really handy for tracking improvement.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

ib — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:55:27 -0000

sorry, i don't have any tips. don't feel qualified to give any since sadly my spending has been bad lately which makes me seriously consider obtaining this software or similar.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Jon — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:41:55 -0000

I can't believe so many people still use the spreadsheet method. Quicken is a powerful program. I have years of credit card transactions that I could never imagine keeping in a spreadsheet. How much did I pay for dinner at place X in 2002? Using Quicken I can find the answer. One of the most powerful tools I've found is the monthly reports, particular Income/Expense comparison. I customize it to "Exclude Transfers" as transferring money to my investing account is not really an expense. It's great to compare your month to month variations in spending by category.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Lolita — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:57:46 -0000

I haven't used Quicken but am looking for a simple accounting software as my boyfriend and I are considering starting up a business in the next year. I've been considering Quick Books Pro but this gives me another option to explore. The user interface looks relatively simple but I'd like to do more research on the business options.

Personally, I have been using Mint simply to track my spending and really only look at it once per week when it sends me my weekly update on how I've done. Everything(almost) I do financially, is electronic so I do not spend much time tracking every little thing. I do a quick check once every two months to be sure that everything is still falling into place where it should and make adjustments where I need to.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Brian — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:39:29 -0000

2009 looks like a good app. I may have to upgrade from v2004.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

JBP — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:19:05 -0000

I don't actually use any of the finance programs, though I'm thinking more and more I should give them a try. I've been using an ever-evolving excel spreadsheet that I started back when I only had 4 expense categories and a bank account. Now that I've taken on online savings accounts and started investing, things get a little more time-intensive to track. All the same, it's worth it to know where I stand at any given time!

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Aliotsy Andrianarivo — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:33:11 -0000

Right now I have a budget set up in Google Documents, and also track spending via Wesabe. I would love to try out Quicken's fuller feature set.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Vailbeartrap[ — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:54:15 -0000

Quicken is fantastic! I've been able to reconcile my accounts instantly. It catches mistakes before they become problems.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Elizabeth — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:17:41 -0000

In the "Net Worth" section of Quicken 2007 I hit "Customize" and this allows me to track the balance account by account. You can also sort by type of transaction, which comes in useful for some situations -- for example, I recently used it to subtract the interest from my RRSP contributions from this year so I could see how much I deposited. Really handy for tax purposes.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

B.B. — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:14:56 -0000

I'm curious, how does Quicken H&B compare to MSN Money Small Business? I've been using a copy of MSN Money smb 2008, but can't say that I'm all that impressed with it. I use Quickbooks for my business stuff, so I have some experience with Intuit software. Just wondering if it would make any sense to give Quicken a try.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Nandan — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:49:17 -0000

I haven't used Quicken or Microsoft money yet - I use my own custom Excel worksheets to track my person expenses, bank balances, etc. and online systems such as BillMonk and Buxfer for expenses shared with roommate/friends.
One area in which this got a bit complicated was when I started tracking my stock investments - for employer granted stocks (vesting periodically), I wanted to track the lot from which stocks were sold (calculating cost basis for tax purposes).

I'd love to try out Quicken / hear other suggestions on tools that are good at that. (My brokerage account doesn't do a good job with that)

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Brian — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:31:07 -0000

I like to use Mint and Quicken Deluxe (2007) both on a daily basis. I use Mint mainly to keep of track of balances when I'm away from home and for budgeting. One thing Quicken Deluxe does, that Mint doesn't, is keeping track of future transactions. Quicken online does this, but I can't get it to work properly. I'd love a new version of Quicken, I can't load data from TurboTax into my older version of Quicken.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Clever Dude — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:22:29 -0000

I was actually looking to upgrade to this version so I'll hold off till the winner is announced :)

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Sally Sundeen — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:48:40 -0000

Thanks for this great giveaway, I would love to win this, it would help me get organized with my business that I run through my home. Thanks so much for this! I've heard such good things about Quicken and am in desperate need of getting organized!

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Sara — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:54:16 -0000

This is probably a good opportunity to share some of my recent frustrations with mint.com and why I'm moving to Quicken online (although Home & Business would be even better). Prior to using mint the only financial software I'd used was MSMoney, years ago. The first few months on Mint were great and I decided I didn't need to buy software if I had access to Mint.

Mint is free so I suppose you get what you pay for. Although I like the user interface and a lot of their new features, its the poor and unresponsive support at Mint that's convinced me to leave.

I appreciate the fact that I will encounter frequent problems accessing some of my accounts - for a number of reasons - security setting changes at the institutions' websites, technical glitches. I'm willing to have to manually deal with these issues every couple of months. But I can't resolve all of them myself - a lot of the problems can only be resolved with some assistance from Mint - assistance which I have yet to receive.

The only response to my support requests that i have ever received (other than confirmation emails) are form emails with instructions that can easily be found in the support forums. I visit support forums first and attempt the suggested instructions before I send support requests. I even explain that I have done so in the emails. Everytime I've responded to one of the form emails, to say that I have already followed their instructions and have not yet resolved my issue, I've never heard back from anyone. When I private message Mint personell in the forums, they simply direct me to the same information on the support forum and instruct me to submit a support request. I currently cannot access 3 of my 7 accounts through Mint.

Sorry to be long winded, but I'm frustrated. Mint would be a GREAT tool if they were able to devote more resources to technical support. Here's hoping Quicken online is better.

Re: Quicken Home and Business 2009 Review and Giveaway

Michele — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:55:36 -0000

I have used Quicken for years and love it. I wish the budgeting tool would work a little different/better, seems I can't get it to do what I dream it should. I love the new look and can't wait to upgrade!