Review by Tall Timbers

I’ve been using Quicken since 1992 when I got a free copy as a promotion when I bought some other software product. At some point I started keeping our full financial records in it, including cash transactions. I’m glad I did. I now have a nice historical record of our living costs over the years. I can tell you for example, that in 2009 I spent $9500.59 for groceries and $3470.33 dining out for a family of six. Escalating energy prices brought along pretty high inflation and in 2012 I spent $11,112.46 for groceries and $5704.92 dining out. There is all kinds of useful data you can easily draw out by using the reports feature in Quicken. In 2009 we spent $3188 on fuel for our vehicles. In 2013 that figure jumps to $6656. There’s some serious inflation… I currently track 32 accounts in my primary Quicken file. They include, cash, checking, savings, investments, IRAs, and property accounts. Everything is in one place and it makes it all quite easy to manage.

If my Quicken file ever became corrupted and I didn’t have a good backup I’d be devastated. For that reason I make redundant backups and replications to more than one location.

Now, what about Quicken 2015 specifically? I really don’t know why I purchase Quicken again every year. But I’ve gotten in the habit. The last few years have seen a Quicken full of bugs introduced to market. For that reason I waited a while before getting the 2015 version. Posts by others throughout the internet world indicate that the 2015 version was quite buggy as well. When I read about users Quicken data files getting corrupted… I worry. Quicken must do a better job and ensure they put out a solid product when it first hits the shelves.

Quicken is a very useful financial program. To get the full benefit you need to use it for 100% of your finances… except maybe for your under-the-table black market activities :). You don’t need to replace it every year. Every 3 or 5 years would be often enough. For 2015 the only really noticeable change that I saw was I could request a free credit score through Quicken. I started that process but aborted it when I was asked to provide my social security number. At that point I decided I didn’t really need to know what my credit score was. Quicken is already such a full featured program that Intuit must have to jump through hoops to figure out stuff they can add to the program.

As the program gets more and more bloated I would imagine that new Quicken users might find it more difficult to figure the program out…