Quicken connects to the Internet and downloads your transactions for all online accounts at Citizens Bank that you have set up in Quicken. Working with your downloaded transactions. Step 1 Select each transaction that you want to add to your register. You can hold down the Command key and click additional transactions to select multiple transactions.
Original review: Jan. 13, 2019 I've used Quicken for my personal finance management for the last 20 years and have been very happy with it. However, the original company sold the personal finance software in 2018 and kept the QuickBooks Products. The new owners have made some changes and since they have taken over my software has crashed repeatedly and I've lost entries in the process. However, they seem to be focusing on marketing the product rather than maintaining the software. I would no longer recommend it to anyone. Original review: Jan.
11, 2019 I have been a Quicken user for 20+ years. My laptop is having problems, I need to take it apart and replace some hardware and clean it.
Before doing that I need to have another computer up and running in case something happens. I use my computer all day, every day so being without one is not an option.
I installed Quicken onto a backup laptop that I have kicking around. I backed up the Quicken data file on the old and copied it to the new. When I try to open Quicken on the new computer, it demands that I log in. When I try to log in, it doesn't recognize my email address ID even though I receive email (spam) from Quicken at that address almost daily. On the old computer, I went to the Quicken support site to try and get some help. It too wanted me to log in, which I did with no problem, or so I thought.
After I log in, I am taken to what appears to be a home page. I click on the Support link and am brought to a new page.but I am no longer logged in! Of course, it won't let me post a question without being logged in! So, I log in again and the same thing happens. Seems to me QUICKEN REALLY DOESN'T REALLY WANT ANYONE USING THEIR SUPPORT SITE!
So OK, I'll call support even though I will have to pay long distance charges. I am connected with a woman I can barely understand because her accent is so thick. She asks for my email address, when she repeats it back to me it isn't even slightly close to what I had said. But it doesn't matter, she won't/can't help me anyway.
To make the rest of the story short, my only option is to pay them for an upgrade! It will cost $45 that I do not have to upgrade to a new version on which will never, ever use the 'new & improved' bells & whistles! I suppose they think they have a captive customer base. Surprise Quicken! After 20 years, I am in the market for new software. You have lost a long-time, formerly loyal customer. This should be a simple thing: install the software that I bought a couple of years ago, copy the data file over and I'm good to go.
But no, QUICKEN HAS TO MAKE IT AS EXPENSIVE AND DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE. Original review: Jan. 9, 2019 Upgraded to Quicken 2019 after many years of using Quicken. The new version forced a new signup for Quicken Bill pay. It is now over three weeks without getting the bank authorization completed.
Four calls to support. I've now been put on the high priority waiting list but told to call back in another week. Quicken is not taking responsibility. The support staff just says they are having problem with the vendor so not Quicken's problem. There is another serious aggravation that the upgrade deleted all of my online vendor so that everything now has to be entered again.if I ever get the bank authorized. I recommend that no one upgrade to Quicken 2019.
Wait until 2020, maybe they will have it solved by then. Original review: Jan. 3, 2019 I have been using Quicken Bill Pay for more than 15 years and in 2018 I enrolled into new version. This was in September when I created the first user login and then since nobody contacted me I decided to call them.
They told me that my user was cancelled and needed to enroll again. I did enroll and they asked me to submit my social security, void check, and bill and ID which I submitted and nothing happened again. Not sure what else to go to get new version as I am not able to pay my bill through Quicken.
Please help me. Original review: Dec. 26, 2018 I must agree with the majority of reviews on this forum. I have been a Quicken user since early 2000 when I bought my first house.
I use it for Bill Pay and account register tracking only. The former versions made my household budgeting so much easier.
Now setting up bills takes TWICE the amount of time with a ton of bugs. Every time I try to schedule a bill in advance and select a future date - it reverts to the existing date which if not careful will drain your bank account.
The recurring bill feature with the so called pdf bill view is useless and doesn't work the majority of the time. Original review: Nov. 30, 2018 I have been a Quicken user since 1986, (32 years now) and it was originally a pretty good, pretty well-supported product. I have used various versions from that very early one up to and including QW2014.
I will not upgrade further and will not pay them continuously for a failing product. First, I'm a retired 'techie' with 42 years of IT experience from beginning programmer to Database Administrator maintaining hundreds of databases on about 50 virtual server instances.
Over the years I have dealt with numerous financial institutions, and have all my financial records, including years of investment account transactions housed in this product. As I have aged, my investment savings records have become far more important than cash and credit accounts records. Granted over the years I made a few mistakes with Quicken in the area of retaining data in my current file. This is because I have experienced performance problems as the file grew, to the point it would take ten seconds or more for the update of a row of data in the register of all accounts.
With my decades of experience in handling data, I know this has to be a structural problem. So the logical thing was to leave behind accounts I no longer used.
HOWEVER, I made the mistake of leaving behind some of my retirement savings and investment accounts. Now I would like to have my complete investment history in a single complete file. This involves nearly 100 thousand transactions housed in about 15 different accounts from over the years, including various employer's 401k plans. Intuit has apparently made some very poor design decisions in their 'secret' file formats, resulting in the lack of ability to export/import investment transactions between files.
They blame this on their claim that investment accounts 'do not have a real transaction register'. All of my 32 years of Quicken data files have faithfully been upgraded and will all work with QW2014, so are 'version compatible'. However, they will no longer support the movement of my investment transactions between their own files. I have never used downloads from financial institutions, so that is not an issue. Now think about the situation.
Quicken can visually present my investment transactions in a 'register' format. I can enter my investment transactions in that register. If they can 'build' the register, and I can manually create the data, why can't they export/import the same data to a different file?
They must have done something really, really stupid to create this problem and they should get it fixed. After having spent months of researching this situation, I've found no good method of fixing my data other than printing transactions lists from old files and manually re-keying my historical data into my current file. I know there are supposed to be ways you can 'hack' the investment transaction exports by editing the files that will supposedly allow this, but I shouldn't have to hack the vendor's own data to move it.
With my 42 years of IT experience, I'm sure I could do this, but less technically inclined folks are going to be lost. What with their oldest, most reliable long-term users aging and their retirement savings becoming far more valuable that cash accounts, it would make sense to fix this shortcoming so they retain long time users and create new ones. If I were not at an advanced age, I would be looking for and inviting other software developers and data architects to get involved and we would create a competing program with proper design details that would fix these problems. And we would use an open documented file structure that would provide performance and import/export capability. Original review: Nov.
27, 2018 I’ve been a Quicken user since 1994. Over the years the app has changed here and there but for the most part, you knew where things were and things made sense.
I upgraded from 2007 version to take advantage of the $29.99/year Cyber Monday promo to try it out. I'm forecasting that the 2007 version of Quicken will probably not work once we go to Mojave which will drop 32-bit support. To note, I've read that you can cancel the auto-renew subscription, which I did, and the Quicken 2019 app is 'supposed' to continue working even after the expiration date. Quicken is not an app to radically change the user interface, thinking changes will make it better. It’s been made much worse in this 2019 rendition of Quicken. GONE is the empty field at the bottom of your various registers, waiting for you to fill in the next transaction.
Nope, now you have to hit a '+' icon and fumble through a clunky entry interface. GONE is the blue/white striped lines you’re used to.
GONE is the Title, Payment, Debit on the top line, with Category Memo, and Open Split on the lower line. GONE is the accounts window you are used to. It’s now in sidebar and feels odd. Want to have two account windows open at once, one atop the other, checking and a CC for example, nope, not anymore. You can only be working in one account at a time.
Pretty much everything you're used to has been erased from this application, and replaced with something else. It's tiring, companies reinventing the wheel thinking 'Ah yes, this will be better. People will like doing things this different way.' We don't like it. It worked just fine the way it was.
It made sense and its unchanging nature over the decades was a good thing. It was reliable. You could upgrade and use it straight away. It didn't need to be overhauled to the point where long time users will need to re-learn how to use it.
To the meeting rooms that thought up this overhaul tactic for the age old, tried and true, Quicken that we all knew and liked, you didn't jump the shark here. You completely blew it. 100% failure. You should've just polished up the existing one. Instead you lost all the good familiar elements and replaced it with a bunch of useless tat and an awful, unintuitive, cluttered and clumsy user interface. This is bookkeeping software, not rocket science.
Keep is simple. Less is more.
Look to the past for design inspiration. Original review: Nov. 25, 2018 Amazing. Just upgraded to the 2019 version. Tons of issues. After finally getting all 10 of my accounts set up, I wanted to link some accounts to my bill pay service.
Should be simple right??? The morons at this company did not think that it was needed to allow importing of 2017 or prior BILL PAY accounts into the 2019 version. This company thinks we should go through the process of setting the whole damn thing up again. The same MORONS did not realize that some people have ten bank accounts and hundreds of PAYEES. Well, after using it for 11 months, I regret purchasing 2018. Setting up the online ID was a major pain it the. To make matters worse, it is veeerrryyy slooowww to open.
I am sure this is related to the online ID but I cannot get Quicken support to confirm it. They mostly blame my computer or internet connection. Sometimes when I close an account and go back to the Home Tab, the program does not refresh properly so I have restart it. Ironically, moving to 2018 has given me a reason to move away from Quicken. So as a 20 year customer, I will be researching using other programs like Personal Capital, etc. Original review: Nov.
21, 2018 I started using this platform when it was Andrew Tobia's Managing Your Money, that's probably a 20-year run. There were always updates that you could pay for, but there were very few times that an update was necessary to continue functioning. The latest update is also a transition from Intuit software to yet another owner.
New user IDs needed to be set up, new security, and now Quicken is a subscription service. Despite promises of improvements, the new software is abysmal. Every second or third time I start the software there's an update or patch, and they have degraded rather than improved the software. Last week I was on the phone for over 4 hours, until 7 PM on a Friday night, with tech support, trying to figure out why the balance in the register did not match the balances in the Account Bar for my primary credit card. After hours of file validation, super validation, restoring back up files, ad nauseum the tech decided that the data file must be corrupted. More time was invested in setting up new accounts and copying old transactions into them to maintain the history, only to discover that all of the budget category assignments are lost on 3 months of newly downloaded transactions that were not copied (since they were available online).
Then, when I went to use the program today the problem resurfaced in my primary checking account. They were very quick to refund my annual subscription. But now I probably have no access to syncing accounts or paying bills. This appears to be a company that is doing everything possible to go out of business. Original review: Oct.
29, 2018 I have used Quicken for many years and frankly not any major changes over the years to make it worthwhile owning. Most major finance software make major interface changes over the years, but Quicken has pretty much remained the same.
It is still as buggy as ever and I can never get the bank updates to work consistently over the years. I primarily use it to balance my checkbooks, but now with the yearly subscription it is definitely not worth it.
My personal opinion, 'See you Quicken', don't need it anymore. I just downloaded Personal Capital and it is a great tool. It won't balance your checkbook, but what information!
Original review: Oct. 25, 2018 I have used Quicken for many years and loved it. I never have used the link bills or auto payments, but I like to have good records of my bills, loans, bank accounts checking and savings. I have become very upset lately because when I look at my bills I see missing bills, also there are many duplicated bills.
The balances are not correct. This is not helpful in tracking my finances but a lot of extra work constantly correcting quicken. When I bring Quicken up it takes forever to come up with the program, since I do not use any online features that does not make sense to me. Sad to say I once loved this program but will have to say goodbye to Quicken and just do everything by hand. Original review: Oct. 18, 2018 I have used Quicken software and Quicken Bill Pay for 15+ years and upgraded to the annual premium Quicken with free Bill Pay.
Beware, they don't transfer the old Quicken Bill pay account and you are forced to set up a new user ID and password and have to go through the verification process to get the account approved. Setting up bank accounts is not as easy as it was before when you entered the bank account information, routing number, waited two or three business days for micro deposits to the account, and the account was approved. That is not the case with the new version. You have to set up the account, then wait a couple weeks for them to send you a secure email which requires you to have to set up another password to view. They require you to send in copies of voided check, driver's license, current utility bill, and your Social Security card or something to verify your Social Security number.
The whole process is very confusing and time consuming. You would think they could use the old bill pay information and just transfer over my bank accounts. After almost a month, I think I am almost there with the conversion, but beware it will be time consuming so don't close the old bill pay account until the new one is up and running. You also have to go into the Quicken software and add Bill Payment with new user ID password to connect the software, so you don't get charged the monthly $9.95 fee. My conversion process to Quicken 2018, now 2019 software itself was simple and everything seems to be working. Original review: Sept.
16, 2018 Several days ago one of my Quicken accounts would not update via 'one step update.' Got error code 505 over several days. Eventually I called the Quicken telephone support line (per Quicken instructions). Call was answered quickly and when I explained the problem he immediately wanted online access to my system. It being Quicken I allowed it. He ran several utilities on my system and one after another he found a problem that he had a solution for - the first being my anti-virus software which he said was ineffective and suggested another which was not free. Secondly he found that this particular account's file was 'corrupted' on my computer and as a solution I could buy an 8 (I think) or a 10 year subscription to Quicken for $199 or $299 that he would be happy to install.
I declined and he ended the call. I will not darken their telephone support line again and hope that I can find software that will not subject me to this kind of blatant hustle. If I could be done with Quicken I would be! The answer I found today. After right clicking on the file's name and bringing up the edit/delete window, going to the online tab and clicking on reset and then waiting a couple of minutes while Quicken contacts the system from where the data is downloaded, the problem was solved. All done in less than 2 minutes -not the 30 minutes I spent with this fellow while he was doing nothing but putting on a show while trying to sell me something. Note this is NOT Intuit.
Intuit sold the software to these people and while Intuit was not perfect they did their customers no favor by selling Quicken to this new company. Original review: Sept. 13, 2018 I updated my Quicken 2018 and the program kept crashing after. The first time I got customer service, I was put through paces of trying things for over an hour. When I suggested that I'd like to talk with the supervisor, the woman told me there was no point in that-the supervisors had no more tools than she did.
When I said I'd still like to speak to one, the line went dead. After 15 minutes and no call back, I called again. Nothing was made of my complaint, but another woman tried to help me. Same stuff, same procedures for another hour. I got the same response when I asked for a supervisor. She refused and said there was nothing she could do.
So, my only option seems to be to cancel Quicken and look for something else. This was a terrible experience and I'll never use their product again. Original review: Aug.
29, 2018 I have been using Quicken for years, I go to update to 2018. They need all this paperwork sent to them for verification. I understand that but I am still trying to get my account verified after sending them all the documentation and been waiting for over 2 weeks. Their support sucks!!! You ask to speak with a supervisor and they tell you hold on then come back and says no one is available.
I have had it. Going out to another vendor. Their service and support is TERRIBLE. Don't get the application and try and use Quicken Bill Pay!!! Original review: Aug. 4, 2018 Awful, awful company.
The software gets worse every year. More and more bugs. I'm a longtime customer since 1999 and I've been able to avoid database corruption in Quicken by avoiding any of the new features they've added in the last 5 years. Quicken knows it has most of its long time customers in a bind. We've spent years and years entering transactions/securities, etc and we don't want to lose all that history.
And there is no real competitor that has all the features Quicken has. Also, the support forum at Get Satisfaction can be an exercise in frustration. The Quicken moderators regularly remove any posts that say anything negative about the product. Very, very insulting. They treat their customers like bratty children. I like most Quicken users can't wait to find some alternative.
When that day arrives the customers will leave in droves. Original review: July 30, 2018 This product (Quicken 2018) couldn't be more confusing or frustrating. I tried for 3 months to sync my transactions, manually tag and enter them, and separate my personal from my business expenses, and ultimately had to scrap all my work and redo it manually. I tried their support, web chat, online forums, etc. But the product and app are so confusing I couldn't figure out how to make it work. My advice is that if you struggle AT ALL with technology to STAY CLEAR of this product at all costs! Original review: July 17, 2018 Quicken 2018 is definitely a downgrade from what Quicken used to be under Intuit.
Unfortunately there isn't much choice in this software arena anymore. I'm guessing there will be soon given the number of 1 star reviews on this site. Arithmetic is easy, and should be a given for a finance software tool. And yet I find incorrect totals frequently that do not correct themselves until I log out and log back in.
It means I can't trust the numbers I see, which is the most basic function of a home finance software platform. But far worse than the bugs is the third-party Quicken Bill Pay partner (Metavante Payment Services). Not only is the service and user interface horrible, but they are blatant thieves. I decided to give them a try, but after a month I couldn't use the service anymore. It was just awful, and I almost missed a bill because I didn't get the notification.
I never had those types of problems using my online banking, so I went back to their bill pay service. I canceled my Quicken Bill Pay, and thought that was the end. Two months later they took money out of my account. I never authorized it, and I had done nothing that would have warranted additional charges according to the terms & conditions I agreed to. I called and pointed out the mistake.
They tried to show me where I was wrong, but the terms they showed me actually proved I was right. They opened a ticket for a refund.
Keep in mind this is only $5. The claim was denied with no explanation. The thought of them doing this to their thousands of customers and profiting from it irked me to no end, so I decided to follow up again. Once again I was directed to terms and conditions that backed up my position. I was told a supervisor would call me back. That never happened. I called again and they told me they would open another request for a refund.
I told them that wasn't good enough, I needed to talk to supervisor. I've still not gotten a call back, and never got a refund. The fact that a company would go to these lengths to keep $5 that they clearly do not have a right to tells you all you need to know about them. And based on the justification they gave me for not refunding the money, my hunch is that they are overcharging all of their Quicken customers.
They get away with it because the dollar amounts are low enough that people don't notice or don't bother to go after them. It seems like this would be a great opportunity for a class action lawsuit. I'm volunteering to be a plaintiff if anyone wants to take the case just because they annoy me so much. And I hate to think of all the people they are stealing from because they aren't savvy enough to know they can usually pay their bills online for free through their bank. 2 weeks later, I received a charge for $5 for exceeding the 15 transaction limit per month. I don't have that many transactions, so I had to have the customer service rep walk me through the transactions. Turns out they count receiving a bill and paying the SAME BILL as TWO separate transactions.
I have automated rules set up for everything, so they only handle each bill once. Well, they got me for $15 and they refuse to give it up. I would stick with them, but I can't stand the nickel and dime attitude and the deceptive practices. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't delete everything from my bank bill payment system (FREE), because I'm going back to that.
Tl;dr I do NOT recommend Quicken Billpay. Maybe they'll get their act together one day, but this is not that day.
I will likely also report this to the consumer protection bureau because I think it was very deceptive. Original review: June 17, 2018 Like thousands of other customers using Quicken 2016 or 2017, Quicken stopped syncing with my bank after the software update in May. I spent five hours working with customer service without getting a solution. The whole time they acted like this was a problem they'd never seen before, but it turned out they'd already had lots of users complaining about it for weeks! Quicken offered lots of suggestions; some of them fixed the problem for some people, but some of us were still stuck. They finally released an update for 2016 with a promise that the 2017 correction would soon follow. But then they started getting complaints that the 2016 update created new problems, so they shut down the discussion, deleted most of the complaints, and posted an official statement saying the problem was corrected.
Stay away from these incompetent crooks. By the way, Quicken is not a part of Intuit anymore. Original review: June 12, 2018 Have used Quicken for many years, buying upgrades every 2-3 years. Slowly over the last 1-2 years it has become increasingly buggy, mainly with online connections.
I used to assume this was due to additional security measures that financial institutions are implementing, but now I'm pretty sure the problem is Quicken. In the last 2 months I have spent dozens of hours resetting account connections, fixing the Quicken ID, re-downloading the program and reinstalling. At times it would connect, then it wouldn't. Finally seemed that I had everything working last week. Now I go to connect again and it acts like I am connected, but no transactions show.
Then I start re-setting accounts and it gives me more errors. I am done with this horrendous product. Quicken you just lost a decades long user. Original review: June 8, 2018 It is the most unfriendly program ever.
I had the nice basic program on Windows but switched to a Mac and was forced into buying 2017 Quicken. My nightmare began. First, I just want to enter my transactions as I did before - no bank tie in.
I can not get a balance to come up. I can not get the same company name to work for either spending and income. It can not differentiate between the two. So if I started at income for a company, it refuses to be spending. It changes balances. It adds all of my different accounts into one main balance and I can't make it go to just one account as I did.
Original review: May 23, 2018 Has anyone else had a nightmare upgrading from Quicken 2015? In addition to disabling my online banking download and bill pay, I have had all kinds of issues since they ended support for Q 2015 this month. Here are some of the issues I face: 1. The program not opening up my file forcing me to spend time figuring out where the active file was kept. Multiple messages to upgrade to Q 2018 even though I opted out of getting any more messages.
Not able to download transactions from bank anymore (I tend to think they disabled this proactively instead of just ending support). Continuing to charge for Quicken Bill pay. At ConsumerAffairs we love to hear from both consumers and brands; please never hesitate to. We take privacy seriously, please refer to our to learn more about how we keep you protected. You’re responsible for yourself and please remember that your use of this site constitutes acceptance of our.
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If you're looking to replace, you're in the right place. For years, Quicken was the name in personal finance software. But let's accept reality – Quicken is often broken.
It doesn't sync your accounts problem, you have password problems, screens that should appear are blank, and it's just not a great experience. Sometimes it feels like they're just getting you to buy the newer version, right? Quicken was once the most popular and powerful personal finance management software out there. But Quicken isn't what it used to be.
It's hard to innovate a platform built in 1983. Back then, cell phones were bricks (if you could afford one) and apps were what you ordered at a restaurant. Quicken has faced a lot of technical issues and its support is meh at best. (if you own Quicken for Mac, you know this headache first hand) In 2010, Intuit acquired Mint for $170 million. In 2016, Intuit sold Quicken to private equity firm H.I.G. Look: If you're tired of Quicken, its support and sync issues, and want a suitable free alternative or replacement – we have some options.
Here are some of the best Quicken alternatives available: Our Best Picks. If you're quitting Quicken and want to move to a spreadsheet you can customize to exactly what you need, Tiller will automate all the data collection for you. You build a spreadsheet (or use a template) and Tiller will pull the data for you. Thus, saving you a ton of time and hassle. 11 Best Quicken Alternatives:. – free financial dashboard and wealth planner. – spreadsheet automation to bring it in house.
– best in class budgeting tool & mindset. – ad-supported budgeting tool.
– compare your situation with your peers. – can import data from Quicken. – not cloud-based. – follows Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps. – follows envelope budgeting method. – open-source and free. – date & calendar based budgeting 1.
If you're a long time user of Quicken, you're beyond the “help me build my budget” phase. If you're more interested how your investment account is performing and less interested in just knowing how much you're spending on groceries, Personal Capital is a great Quicken alternative (but it'll also pull your credit card transactions so you will know how much you spent on groceries if you want!). Personal Capital is a full-featured, free, personal finance management tool that focuses on helping you with investing. It has a powerful mobile app (also means it's a cloud-based service) that replicates the web experience.
They're free because some users pay them for their wealth management services (optional). They are not stuffed with advertisements like some other free tools. You can read my. Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: It's better than Quicken because it's updated, has a rich set of tools for investment and retirement, and it has a budget and expense tracking component. It's a website and not a software application, there's no software to download and patch or update (ugh) – that's all done automatically. I am a fan of their retirement planner, a tool that helps you project your future financial needs and whether you'll get there.
It's worth checking out. One other vote of confidence for this Quicken replacement is their CEO – Bill Harris. He was formerly the CEO of Intuit and PayPal. You know he has the leadership skills to dominate in this space and the ability to lead teams to build financial systems that are top notch (the rest of the leadership team is very impressive in their own right!).
What could be better? The budget and expense tracking are good but it's not as old as Quicken, so it's not as developed as Quicken. I don't find it to be a negative because it works for me, but people with really complicated budgets may find it limiting. Here's a brief over view video of Personal Capital's cash flow and budgeting tools. (since you access it with a browser, it is compatible with Mac OS!) 2. One of the most popular personal finance tools out there is a little software application known as Microsoft Excel. People love spreadsheets.
You can customize it, tweak it, and get it tailored to exactly what you need. The only downside to spreadsheets is how you need to pull the data yourself and who really wants to do that? Quicken was great back in the day when there weren't nearly as many sync issues because it pulled the data for you. There's a solution: Welcome – a $4.92 a month service (after a free 30 day trial) – that pulls your data for you and puts it into a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel document. You can start with one of their free templates or build your own, but after the initial work you'll have a fully automated spreadsheet tailored to what you need. You can use this to track your net worth, set a budget, or anything else you can imagine. Why it is better than Quicken: Quicken is now cloud-based so if you want to avoid putting your data into the cloud, going with a spreadsheet is your best option.
Tiller makes it possible for you to get automation AND keep your data locally. Is one of the best budgeting software tools available. Think of it like Mint with a personality and a philosophy. YNAB's philosophy revolves around four rules:. Give Every Dollar a Job.
Embrace Your True Expenses. Roll With The Punches. Age Your Money Those four pillars form the foundation for a budgeting app that has helped many people transform their financial lives. If you're looking to transition to a financial tool that will help you (as in help you make the change, not just record expenses), you should take a look at. YNAB made a video showcasing the newest version plus a discussion on their philosophy. Why it is better than Quicken: Quicken only tracks your budget, YNAB does that AND helps you build a budget that meets the demands of your life and your savings needs. If you want to change the way you budget, while still tracking it, YNAB is your solution.
YNAB is not an entire personal finance management suite – it focuses on budgeting and only budgeting. You won't get investment tools, retirement planning, or wealth management.
It's strictly about building, maintaining, and transitioning into the budget you want. You might have heard of these guys since they're now owned by the same company that once made Quicken. Intuit acquired them in 2010 and that's the reason why they shuttered Quicken Online shortly thereafter. Later, Intuit sold Quicken to H.I.G.
Capital and that's when you knew the end was near! Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: Mint is free and very powerful on the budgeting and expense tracking side. They do not have much to help you with investment and retirement savings, which I think you'll find is a huge limitation as you get older. The goal of Mint was always to be a budgeting app and with that in mind, they do a very good job. If you are sick of Quicken and focus entirely on expense tracking, Mint is a good Quicken alternative.
It, like, is cloud-based so there's no software to download, patch, or update. If you have investments and want to manage those, Mint will not be able to adequately fulfill your needs. Status Money is a free cloud-based budgeting tool that lets you compare your finances with people around the United States.
It offers all of the tracking functionality of these other tools, will always be free, but adds the comparison component so you can see how you are performing against your peers and against the National Average. Your peer groups are set by your age range, income range, location (location type), credit score range, and housing status (own, rent). This ensures you are getting a true apples to apples comparison and you aren't compared with someone in another age group, different cost of living, or life phase. You can also build custom groups too if you feel you're in a special situation not captured by basic demographic information.
CountAbout The founders built CountAbout to be a Quicken alternative. Founded in mid-2012, it is one of the only personal finance apps that will import data from Quicken (and Mint!).
If you're looking to transition away from Quicken but worry about losing all your data, you can feed it your Quicken file and it'll populate itself. That'll make the transition far less painful! Like Quicken, CountAbout isn't free but it costs $9.99 for the Basic subscription and $39.99 for Premium subscription. The Premium subscription includes automatic transaction download. A subscription model means you have complete data privacy and you won't get annoying ads like with Mint.
Why is it a good alternative to Quicken? CountAbout has a lot of similar features to Quicken’s: split transactions, recurring transactions, attachments, budgeting and more. CountAbout is web-based, with multi-factor account security, so you don't have to download a program onto your computer, and there's no need to deal with unwieldy syncing issues – all you need is a web browser. And with CountAbout’s iOS and Android apps, your financial information is always at your fingertips.
Check out the key features (reminds me a lot of Quicken). Individual Account QIF importing.
Budgeting. Running register balances. Account reconciliation. Graphs for Income & Spending. Recurring transactions. Investment balances by Institution.
Memorized transactions. Split transactions. Description renaming. Invoicing 7. MoneyDance is not as well known as some of the other alternatives I've listed but I wanted to mention them because they're one of the few money apps that doesn't rely on the cloud.
If you are concerned about your data being stored online, this solution is an alternative that keeps your data local to your computer. You can still link your accounts online, so they pull your transactions in automatically, but they only store them on your computer. You can enter transactions manually if you didn't want to link your accounts. MoneyDance looks and feels like a checkbook, with the check register for transactions, but has charts and tables for reporting.
It does budgeting but can also as well, albeit not as feature rich as others. MoneyDance is free to download and try but it costs $49.99. The free version has all the features as the paid version. The free version's limitation is that you can only enter 100 manual transactions.
Have you heard of Dave Ramsey? Many folks swear by his approach and is built with that in mind. His approach takes into account human psychology, rather than relying solely on math, and explains why it is so effective. It also explains why ideas like the debt snowball work so well, we need to work with our biases and tendences if we hope to succeed.
EveryDollar is a budgeting tool affiliated with Dave Ramsey's group, the Lampo Group. Much like YNAB, it's a budgeting tool that uses the principles of zero-based budgeting. In zero-based budgeting, you assign every dollar to a category (or job, in YNAB parlance). It's a level of rigor that can be refreshing or restricting, depending on your personality.
The app itself is beautiful, available on your smartphone, and there is both a free and paid version. The paid version costs $99 a year. (paid version offers phone support and automated transaction importing which is a big time saver; otherwise, you must manually enter the data) Here's a tutorial video on how to build a budget. GoodBudget is a free budgeting app based on the envelope budgeting method. Envelope budgeting is when you set aside a prescribed amount for each category of spending, then spend it down each month. It's one of the most popular money management techniques in personal finance. The envelope refers to the manual method of managing these types of budgets where you put the money into an envelope.
When you run out of money, you either borrow cash from another envelope or you make do. GoodBudget adds technology to the mix and will synch up bank accounts to help track your income and your spending. You set the amount for each category and then watch as your spending nears the limit each month. It's available for both iOS and Android phones. GnuCash is a free open-source accounting software that, if you're willing to put into the work, can replicate a lot of the Quicken experience for those who are willing to scale the learning curve.
It features double-entry accounting (every transaction must debit one account and credit another), which is effective but will require an adjustment if you're not used to it. It offers a lot of the functionality of Quicken like splitting transactions, categorizing transactions, managing multiple accounts, schedule transactions, and reporting that includes all kinds of charts and reports (balance sheet, P&L, portfolio valuation, etc).
The big benefit is that it does budgeting as well as investments. It's not strictly a budgeting tool. Lastly, it offers QIF importing, so you can import your Quicken files, plus OFX (Open Financial Exchange) protocol. So you can pull in your data if your bank offers you the ability to export transactions.
Dollarbird is another personal finance app with an eye towards collaboration and a monthly calendar. You synchronize your accounts (banking, brokerage, and credit cards) with Dollarbird and they build a schedule of future income and expenditures to help with planning. Dollarbird also offers a 5-year financial plan that lets you establish longer-term financial goals and track your performance against them. The innovation they bring to the table is the idea of calendar-based money management.
You can collaborate with other people (partner, family, or a team) to manage a team budget, though the collaborative piece requires the Pro version ($39.99 / year). One of these will make a fine replacement for Quicken. Is there a Quicken Online? Intuit created Quicken Online to try to compete with Mint. Near the end of 2009, they gave up and acquired Mint.
Afterward, they opted to shut down Quicken Online and sold the entire Quicken unit to H.I.G. Capital in 2016. Quicken Online no longer exists. Quicken does have an online experience, something they've only recently created, but it's not free and it's playing catch up. Why is budgeting so important? A lot of folks start using Quicken to help them maintain a budget.
As the tool started having problems, you may be tempted to quit altogether. We wanted to briefly discuss why budgeting, whether with Quicken or one of these other alternatives, is a good idea. For that, we turned to: 1. Why do you believe it is important for individuals to budget? Professor Ariel Belasen, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at Southern Illinois University EdwardsvilleWith credit card spending superseding cash spending as the predominant form of payment, it’s especially important for people to budget because it’s tougher to experience the “slim wallet feel” of spending. Instead, the impact of spending hits all at once on each credit card statement. That means overspending is far more likely – and far more costly given that credit card interest rates are on the rise again.
Many folks think of budgeting as tracking what you've spent, how do forecasting and planning fit into budgeting? Most people spend more on fixed expenses each month than on variable expenses. Fixed expenses are your mortgage or rent, utility bills, phone and internet bills, daycare expenses, etc. The largest variable expenses are typically food and transportation. Planning a month or two ahead will not only help you keep track of what you have already spent, but it will give you an idea of what you can spend moving ahead. It’s also important for people who enjoy taking a vacation or who want to make a large purchase in the future. Planning ahead can help an individual figure out how much disposable income should be saved each month.
Personally, how do you budget and how has that changed over the years? I use Microsoft Excel and I plan a quarterly budget which, at this point, revolves around my childcare expenses. But prior to having children I used to budget out one month in advance so that I could be sure to allocate a certain amount to savings. I find it easiest to put together a simple balance sheet listing when paychecks come in and when various bills or direct debits will come due. If you were advising a student or recent graduate on budgeting, how would you suggest they get started? First of all, I’d recommend calling their credit card company to place a hard cap on their spending limit (preferably well below the overall card limit) so they do not exceed a fixed amount of spending or incur penalties for exceeding their card limit.
Once that preventative step is taken, the rest involves keeping track of due dates for bills and deposit dates for paychecks. I would recommend just looking at the current month at first and then eventually expanding out to the month ahead as well. Saving is far less important for students since their income will rise quite a bit after graduation, but falling into default on their personal debt can haunt them for years. Jim Wang is a thirty-something father of three who has been featured in the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Entrepreneur, and Marketplace Money. Jim has a B.S. In Computer Science and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. In Information Technology - Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a Masters in Business Administration from Johns Hopkins University.
One of his favorite tools is, which enables him to manage his finances in just 15-minutes each month. If you sign up and link up an investment account with $1,000+ within 40 days, you get a $20 Amazon gift card.
They also offer financial planning, such as a Retirement Planning Tool that can tell you if you're on track to retire when you want. He is also diversifying his investment portfolio by adding a little bit of real estate.
But not rental homes, because he doesn't want a second job, it's diversified small investments in a mix of properties through. Worth a look and he's already made investments that have performed according to plan.
An important point about CountAbout is that the $9.99 or $39.99 is per year! That’s pricey, even surpassing Quicken for all but the simplest of accounts. I prefer a one-time fee rather than the constant reach into my wallet. I chose Ace Money which is a very good substitute for Quicken on a PC (the Mac version runs via an emulator. Hopeless and looks like a DOS program). As I recall it was something like $60 one time and syncs most accounts pretty well. MoneyDance I found very simple and a poor substitute.
I’m happy with the switch to Ace money and have moved on from Quicken. I have used Quicken for many years, ever since Microsoft Money was discontinued. It used to be great but today it is fraught with errors that cause me to spend more time trying to figure out what is wrong with the application and sync than I spend managing my spending and investments.
I really do not want a cloud-based application. Call me old school but like have all of my information on my personal computer or in my file cabinets.
Really ready for a STABLE alternative that can download my CC and investment transaction and reconcile correctly. Kind of like Quicken used to be? I have been a Quicken Home & Business user for many years, in the US and more recently in Canada. The Canadian operation has now moved to a subscription mode and the Home & Business version now has an annual subscription fee of $90 per year – to me, that’s a real ripoff. To discourage you from continuing to use your current, non-subscription version, they have now disabled two key features – downloading & categorizing transactions from financial institutions and downloading stock quotes. I have tried all the major alternatives out there, and my favorite by far is one I rarely see mentioned – KDE’s KMyMoney. Just tried MoneyDance and CountAbout – the two closest things to what I’m looking for – and found them worse than even Quicken for the features I really care about.
I just want an easy to use electronic register I can enter transactions into for all my accounts then reconcile against statements as they come in. Not much to ask. And I think just about EVERYONE I know wants one too. We all hate Intuit software but are reluctantly using it because nothing else out there does the two things Intuit does reasonably well: Easy, rapid transaction entry and account reconciliation. Of course, lately it seems that Quicken is just getting worse with each new release.
Bugs creep in and are never fixed. I think maybe it’s time to just write my own solution and get insanely rich off it. There’s a huge market out there for an easy to use electronic register. Can’t understand why nobody is jumping on it to knock Intuit off that hill they occupy all by themselves.
For several years I used MoneyCounts a very simple program but it was bought out and ended up being discarded by Intuit and users advised to use Quicken. I to want a simple program that will keep an electronic register on multiple bank accounts and capable of downloading bank transactions that is not cloud based. Some of the newer programs will do a wonderful job of budgeting but will not give a decent P&L or Income & Expense report that is helpful for the preparation of one’s tax reports. I tried Moneydance but could never link it to download transactions from any of my banks in mid-America. Would someone please come up with a simple accounting program. While not being a budgeting program per say if it had the capability of doing fund accounting an individual could allocate their income to the various funds and be directly subtracted when the expenditure account (whether called a Category of account is set up to come from a given fund) is posted to in the register.
I used Quicken 2007 for home and business (Windows version) for 10 years. Tried the upgrade to 2011 but went back to 2007 version as new features were just complications. Now we have switched to Mac computers and bought 2017 Quicken for Mac.
Hugely disappointed, can’t even print a reconciliation statement along with the illogical interfaces. Much more complicated than the Windows versions I’m used to. I agree with the comment above. We need a simple way to keep our basic financial accounts and good reminders when bills come due.
A good “simple” old fashioned system really would sell to most of us. Just the essentials please!!