Review by Tanya McHenry

I used quicken years ago, and I pretty much stopped using it when they insisted, strongly, that you have to upgrade each year to the new version to get any sort of support or downloads. I started using Spreadsheets after that, and have done pretty well. Well, Quicken 2013 seemed like as good as time as any to give it another go… and I ran into the same problems I had before. For all the pretty graphs and promises of budgeting, it’s just not flexible enough to handle things like manually adding accounts and dealing with student loans like you would think it would.

I’ll address manually adding accounts. Even though a couple of my Financial Institutions are listed as being supported, they’re not. No amount of customer service with these financial companies resulted in anything other than we don’t support quicken. Fine, I will just manually add them which sounds easy but wasn’t. I made a slight mistake with one, and no matter what I did, it took my loan and dropped it to zero even though I kept changing the current balance to well above zero. I had to delete it entirely and start again. When I tried to manually enter one of my 403b, similar problem, except it insisted i enter the tickers for each of the funds I have. Well that took forever, and the end result is they all show zero even though I entered the number of shares I have. Finally, Student Loans. Quicken will not allow you enter a loan without a number of payments expected and a start date. Problem with Student loans is they behave a little differently. You defer them, or the payments shift based on you paying more or less… Quicken doesn’t accommodate that well at all. It tries to tell you the loan is already paid off or projects some pretty bizarre numbers.

Now some positives do exist. Before, because I like a lot of people purchase a lot of things on my credit card and pay them off for points, Quicken would just shove all of that under credit card purchase and basically make the category part of Quicken useless. This time around, the categories are working pretty well, and only a few are miscategorized. If you want to know where you are spending your money, this helps a lot. The small exceptions are going to be those one stop shopping places which will only be assigned one category… but you can easily split them into more; this takes time.

If all your financial institutions work with Quicken, you want to categorize everything and have a little help budgeting and projecting, this could help you. If you wind up having multiple institutions that don’t play nice with quicken, are good enough with spreadsheets to make your own graphs and categories… this might be a pass. All I can think about when I use it is how inflexible parts of the software is and get annoyed by it.