Review by Carrie

After tracking my personal income/expenses on spreadsheets, I decided to try Quicken. Set up is easy, but Quicken really, really wants to interface with your bank accounts & makes it a little difficult to set up an account not using an interface.

My banks charge anywhere from $5 - $10/mo to download to Quicken, Quickbooks or Money. The only answer I could get from my banks was that Intuit charges the banks for downloading (I do not whether this is true or not, but the banks would not budge on waiving the monthly fee unless I had an exorbitant amount of money in my account). I can download to an excel type file from my bank, but can’t figure out how to import that into Quicken. I still have to play with this and report findings in the future.

I was able to set up my accounts & manually input my information. Once this is done & assuming that I can keep up with the manual data input, the Quicken software should do a good job of helping me track my accounts. It seems that it can be as basic or fancy as I want.

I will update once I have more data to manipulate in the software. So far, so good. However, I downgraded my star rating because of the charges for downloading my bank transactions and the fact that Quicken doesn’t readily explain how to import an excel file into their software.