Highly recommended, even for current users of older Quicken versions
Written: Jan 03 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ease of use, feature set for the price, online account access
Cons: Bill calendar could use a few minor feature additions
The Bottom Line: Quicken 2005 Basic has a number of features that are a vast improvement over the previous versions. I highly recommend it, especially at its fairly low price.
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| f8ster's Full Review: Intuit Quicken 2005 Basic Full Version for PC (283... |
As a previous user of Quicken 2002 Basic, I was very pleased with Quicken 2005 Basic. It has a number of features that are a vast improvement over the previous versions. I highly recommend it, especially at its fairly low price.
Quicken 2005 Basic allows you to manage most of the standard kinds of accounts, expenses, and bills you'll have, and your major assets and other liabilities. It also has basic support for stocks and brokerage accounts. (Quicken Premier has more features for active stock traders.)
Since upgrading from Quicken 2002, I have eliminated 3 spreadsheets: one for tracking due bills, one for tracking stocks, and one for tracking net worth. I can now do all of these suitably in Quicken 2005 (all 3 features were there in Quicken 2002 but had enough flaws that I used Excel instead before).
Here is a rundown of the major features of Quicken 2005, with some comments:
Checkbook Reconcile: this is the oldest and most useful feature of Quicken -- the ability to balance your checkbook. The screen for doing this is intuitively laid out, and makes this chore easier. It hasn't changed much over the years. Once you've entered all of the transactions from your check register, click the 'Reconcile' button, and Quicken lists all of the checks, deposits, etc. -- you just quickly click each transaction that shows up on your statement. There's a 'Difference' total at the bottom, so it's easy to see your checkbook is balanced if that number is 0.00. When you're finished, you can print a reconcile report, or you can also finish later if you can't get through the whole thing in one sitting.
Online transaction updates: this is my favorite new feature. A more limited set of features was available in previous Quicken versions but I find Quicken 2005's implementation to be usable and very nice. This feature allows you to set up online transaction downloads from your checking account, brokerage accounts, and credit cards, and have the transactions entered in the account registers semi-automatically. The transactions get downloaded, and are shown in a separate area of the screen below your register. You can click one button to accept them all, or go through them one by one if you need to skip, delete, or change them. I found that once I set up the proper 'renaming rules' (see below), accepting all of the transactions is very quick and works very well.
'Renaming Rules' for online tranactions: if you use the online transaction updates described above, you'll often find that the bank's name for the payee doesn't match the ones you like to use. For example, a purchase from the grocery store might come across as 'Safeway POS Store #393' with no category, but you like to have it entered in the register as just 'Safeway' with the category 'Groceries'. Quicken 2005's 'renaming rules' allow you to do just that. You can either set these rules up manually, or simply edit the Payee field as you're accepting each transaction, and Quicken will memorize the renaming rule for you. This is great, because after the first time, the transactions are downloaded into Quicken with the correct Payee, Category, Date, and Amount. This is a _huge_ time savings for keeping your check register up to date, and also makes reconciling easier and reduces entry errors. This is a major improvement over the previous version and this feature alone makes the upgrade from previous versions worth the money.
Credit card transaction downloads: another benefit of using the 'online transaction updates' described above is that you can download individual credit card transactions into a separate account, and use the same categories to track expenses. The 'renaming rules' above also assist here, and make tracking expenditures by category much more accurate. I wasn't tracking expenses by category from my credit cards before, and now I can, very easily. This is nice.
Note that not all banks and brokerages provide online transaction downloads, but most do, even my two local credit unions. Most major credit card companies should also.
PIN Vault and one-step update: this feature allows you to save the logins and passwords for the online accounts you have, so that you can automatically update them with one click using one-step update. For example, let's say you have a checking account, a brokerage account, and two credit card accounts, and you have online access to them all. You can store the logins and passwords in Quicken so you don't have to type them all in each time you want to download your transactions. The PIN Vault is protected by its own password (which seems excessive if you already password-protect your Quicken file, like you should). One-step update will go through all the online accounts you have set up, download any transactions and stock price updates, and give you a summary screen showing what it did with buttons to access the register for each account that has new transactions.
Account Bar: this is a little strip on the left-hand side showing all your accounts with their balances. It also shows a little flag next to the account if there are new downloaded transactions or bills due. This is nice -- you can just click on the account with the flag, and it shows you exactly what actions are pending. You can change the layout of the screen to move this account bar, and you can also customize it to include/exclude accounts from the totals. It separates your accounts into Cash Flow, Investing, and Property & Debt, and subtotals each.
Cash Flow Center: this screen contains your cash flow accounts -- checking, savings, and credit card. You can also create arbitrary accounts (e.g. 'Cash in Safe') and include them here.
Investing Center: this screen contains brokerage accounts, IRA, 401k, etc. The default view is the list of stocks/bonds/etc. you have in your accounts. If you use one-step update, this screen also shows daily gain/loss for each stock. (If you're a heavy stock trader, it looks like Quicken Premier has more features for you; it's about $50 more.)
Property & Debt: this screen shows any accounts you've set up for your house, cars, boats, etc. Note that Quicken 2005 lets you set up separate accounts for your house and mortgage. This sounds odd, but it's good, because it helps you track your net worth. For example, let's say you owe $100,000 on your mortgage, but your house is worth $175,000 -- the separate accounts can track this, and accurately reflect the $75,000 in equity you have against your net worth.
Amortized mortgage accounts: one thing Quicken seems to have eliminated is the amortized mortgage account. In Quicken 2002, you could set up a loan with a standard amortization, and as you made monthly payments, Quicken would guess the principal and interest parts of the payment based on a standard amortization schedule. I can no longer find a way to do this in Quicken 2005.
Updates from older versions: if you're a user of an older version of Quicken, Quicken 2005 will convert your data files to the new version. They're not backward-compatible, so Quicken makes a full backup of the old versions of the files first.
Budget: another feature of Quicken is the ability to establish and monitor a budget. Quicken 2005
allows you to do the initial setup of your budget based on historical data, which is semi-helpful. You'll still need to do some manual massaging unless you've been very strict about categorizing your spending in Quicken in the past.
Account hiding and excluding: one nice feature is the ability to hide accounts completely (for example, if you have old transactions in an account so you don't want to delete it but you don't want it to show up in the totals or reports). You can also exclude active accounts from the Account Bar totals or any reports or graph totals.
Reports and Graphs: Quicken 2005 Basic has a number of basic reports (net worth, budget spending vs. planned, how much did I give to this payee, etc.) You can view them either as reports or graphs (Quicken picks either bar graphs or pie graphs depending on the type of report and data). They are fairly customizable, and you can filter the accounts, categories, payees, dates, etc. shown.
Customized reports may be 'memorized' (saved) so you can run them again later.
Scheduled bills/transactions: Quicken 2005 allows you to enter your 'bill calendar,' and you can schedule upcoming bills very flexibly. Bills can be scheduled with a wide variety of dates (e.g. monthly, on the 6th day of every 3 months, on the last Wed of every month, etc.). You can set up a default amount, and Quicken can guess the amount based on the last few transactions it finds for that payee if you want. When using the online transaction update feature, Quicken will recognize any transactions similar to those already in your scheduled transaction list, and will ask you "is this the 1/5/05 scheduled transaction for Company XYZ?" If you click Yes, it'll mark that particular bill reminder as "cleared". You can also enter transactions from the reminder list with one click, or click "Skip" to skip the currently scheduled payment & it'll pick up on the next one.
There are a couple features for the scheduled transactions I'd still like to see. For example, I'd like a field that allows you to indicate whether a bill will be deducted automatically, or if it's one I have to write a check for. Also, I'd like the ability to group the transactions (e.g. pay by check, pay online, auto-paid via direct debit, auto-paid by credit card, etc.) However, it's pretty good as it is, and I have finally ditched my Excel spreadsheet in favor of this feature.
Unlock additional features: one interesting thing is that Quicken 2005 "Basic" is really the full-blown Quicken product with a bunch of features turned off. If you want to upgrade from Basic to, say, Premier, you can do so online, and Quicken will unlock (enable) those features with no additional software installation or update.
Entering notes: there's a "Notes and Reminders" section, but I can't seem to find a way to enter a Note anywhere. It would be nice to have a place to store a few notes.
Online bill pay: Quicken offers an additional online bill-pay service (for a fee) that appears to be integrated with Quicken 2005, but I haven't tried it.
Write checks: if you prefer to print checks from your printer instead of writing them by hand, you can buy checks that'll work in your printer, and with a couple clicks, you can print a check and have it entered into your register. I've never bothered with this, because I find I have to then keep two sets of checks around, one from the checkbook and the other for the printer, and the numbers get all mixed up. Of course, you can hand-write on the printer checks, but they're generally more expensive, and it's always seemed like more trouble than it's worth unless you're printing a bunch of checks at once. Hand-writing a check doesn't take me that much effort.
Overall, Quicken 2005 Basic is a very full-featured financial management program, and it's really not "basic" at all -- it has most of the features you'll need to manage your home finances quickly and reliably. For the price, it's a great buy. If you're currently using an older version of Quicken, it's also worth considering the purchase, because they've significantly improved some of the features.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
f8ster
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Location: Camas, WA, USA
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Consumer electronics enthusiast
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