I use Money myself. Probably not to the full extent I could...mostly just as an electronic checkbook and an after-the-fact look at where I spend money. I like it, but obviously don't use all of the bells and whistles.

Plus it was free one year when I bought my tax software.

Sorry....not much help.

Is this for business or personal use?

Personal.

Mainly I'm looking to do budget analysis type stuff. I know I spend a lot on gas and a good slug on food, but I don't really know how much. Plus I'm pretty bad at planning and making sure I can actually afford all the random unplanned expenses that arise in life.

The Deluxe version of Quicken has what I want in it for the automatic downloads from my bank, BOA. But the online synchronization with the online Money tool seems pretty cool, but not like I need another way to waste time at work.

Do you use the online feature at all? That looks interesting but I am not sure if it is actually useful/beneficial.

I use Quicken, and it's fine. I run a AMc, so this is the easiest thing for me. It has about every feature you could possibly desire. I used to use Money, and that seems just about the same.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Damned if I do, damned if I do. Oh well.

Do you find it helpful? Analyze your expenses / expenditures at all? I used Quicken about 3 years ago and found the most annoying thing to be downloading my expenditures from my bank and getting things like "9382983293 Citgo 3234" and having to manually change it to Citgo as the name and in the gas expenditure type.

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it.

I think that if you download your statements, you will always get those types of transactions. I manually enter as a checkbook during the month, and then reconcile with my paper statement when it comes in.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

I have the latest version of quicken, but I still think their best version was 98. I really don't like the latest revisions. It's obvious, too much growth too fast. There is much less continuity of the user interface than in the past. I've never used Money so I can't comment on it. The thing is though, Quicken is basically the standard. It'll play nice with TurboTax and the rest of their offerings. So if you must get one of these two, I'd go with quicken.

I'm pretty good with Excel, so that's what I use to manage/track all of my finances. I like it because I can make it do exactly what I want it to do. Any charts I want, no overly complicated rules for how certain types of accounts need to be managed. I think quicken makes some things like tracking business stock options and retirement accounts too complicated. I also don't like how it tracks simple loans. It's like they try to help you too much. If what it's doing isn't correct for you, then it's a total pain in the butt. For example, my company doesn't use a typical options vesting schedule. Since quicken's model doesn't match it I find trying to use it to track options unusuable.

So if I'm just looking to do simple stuff like track how I spend money then I could get the same functionality from Excel? I'm not interested in any of the retirement or stock junk, I know I'm too stupid for that.

I probably new this but was too lazy to do it by hand. But I'm cheap enough to do it to save money.

If you do anything in Excel, you'll have to "write" it yourself. There's nothing in Excel that is set up for managing finances. If you don't know what I'm talking about (or are unfamiliar with Excel) then this is probably a bad idea. If you are familiar with excel and can setup some pretty functional spreadsheets, then I'd try it first and if it isn't working for you then I'd go to Quicken.

OK, so your main goal is to track your personal finances and monitor how you're spending your money. Well, this is exactly what quicken is for, but there are some benefits and drawbacks.

Pros:

The main part of the quicken interface that you'd use is just like a checkbook register. You can fairly simply enter in an expense and assign an expense category, memo etc...

These categories are tracked and you can look at all sorts of charts on how you're spending your money.

Quicken has budget tools built in so it'll help you look at your current spending and create a budget and track your spending against it.

It also allows you to download transactions from most banks and credit card companies, so that eases data entry.

Cons (I'll just list one, Im getting tired):

Do you use cash?? When I withdraw $200 for spending money, in quicken I enter that as an ATM withdrawl and the category is "cash". I might spend $50 on entertainment, $20 on lunches, $35 on groceries, $12 on a bottle of wine, $5 on girl scout cookies, $15 on new bike tubes... I don't have the patience to individually track all these purchases in quicken. Plus there's no place to download cash transactions from. In order to truly know how this money is spent or to take advantage of the budget tracking feature, entering this expense under "cash" is useless. I must go in and track my spending to the gnat's ass within the tool. That's just not going to happen with me.



I am much better served to sit down, create a spending plan for a typical week. Basically I decide to pay cash for everything then determine how much cash I'll need per week. So I estimate lunches, groceries, entertainment, gas... Then I give myself that amount of cash per week and that's all I get. Some of my estimates will be high, some low, but my weekly spending amount covers it. Then I track all other expenses. But again, I'm not monitoring all of those little things that I spend money on each week.

Quicken is a good tool, but to get real benefits out of it, you really need to be extremely detailed. Personally I do better when I operate at a slightly higher level. And I can create all the tools I need and track the historical things I care about like net worth, assets, debt, liquidity in Excel. I don't need a pie chart that tells me I spend x.xx% of my monthly income on groceries.

I've used Quicken for over 10 years to track all of our expenses and I love it. Very easy to use and gives you a lot of functionality for little work. If you want to track expenses, then I suggest you use Quicken rather than Excel. The expense categories allow you to track where you spend your money more easily than if you were to try to set that up yourself in Excel. Plus, reconciling your bank or credit card statement is a breeze in Quicken.

I don't understand why anyone would want to download expenses from their bank. I enter the receipts and then reconcile it against the bank/visa statement. How else are you going to know if there is a problem unless you enter the stuff yourself. If you download it from the bank, it seems to be saying that whatever they give you is correct (which is not always the case).

I've never used Money, so I can't comment there, but Quicken will definitely give you everything you need.

Dawn

The only thing I do online is download my Discover card directly into Money. For the longest time I just entered all transactions manually, but now my CC statements all come via email, and it is easier to just download the transactions. I do end up editing several transactions each time I download, but that's because of the way I started using Money a couple of years ago.

I do not find the cash thing to be that big of a deal, but then I don't spend much cash. If they take a credit card, they get paid by credit card. Easier for me to track, I get rewards, and I don't have to make many trips to the ATM. But that's just what works for me.

Use either one. I own stock in Microsoft and Intuit. I win either way.

Seriously though, I used to use Quicken, crashed that program, then switched to my free Money application and wished I still had Quicken. So, after a year, I switched back to Quicken. I like being able to pull my tax contributions into Turbo Tax.

Rocketboy

Another Quicken user here. I didn't upgrade this past year so I don't know what the latest and greatest bells & whistles are. But I thought it was very easy to use, and I tracked banking and investments. Plus I have a car loan that it tracked for me.

As for the comment on cash, I also took out money under cash. But whenever I could, I would use my debit card to transact at stores so that the data could be downloaded. Cash was used for small dollar purchases (anything under $20). I don't need to know why I spent $5-6 on lunches every week. Its just cash that I used up. Everything else had a category.

However, my harddrive crashed last month and my 5+ years of Quicken data is now gone. I have all the financial statements, but cc and other bills have since been destroyed. So I have to start from scratch. But Quicken did have a lot of data and I could refer back to see costs from several years ago which I really liked. I am going to miss that.

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Canadian resident again 10/31/2009