May 12th, 2008
Earlier this year, Intuit released a new Web-based version of its legendary personal finance management software Quicken called Quicken Online Edition. Created especially for newbies to managing money, Quicken Online can help you tackle your financial challenges with simple, user-friendly features.
In this Quicken Online Edition Review, I take a look at some of Quicken Online’s features, strengths and weaknesses, and possible uses.
What Quicken Online offers
Once costing $3 a month, Quicken Online is now totally free. This program will automatically update itself from your bank accounts and credit cards every night, provide bill payment reminders via text message or email, and allow you to create and track detailed personal budgets, all while protecting your financial information with state-of-the-art security features.
Quicken Online allows you to view invoices, transaction details, account balances, and more anywhere you can get online. You can also create charts and graphs that quickly analyze your spending habits.
What Quicken Online lacks
Due to its fairly low price and younger target audience, users experienced with Quicken desktop software will find Quicken Online to be fairly “light” on features. Quicken Online does not support investment tracking, nor can it export data to Quicken Desktop or integrate with TurboTax. Expect some of these features to be added, however, as Quicken determines what users want.
Quicken Online security
Quicken Online is as secure as any financial institution’s website, perhaps even more so. Quicken requires more than just a username and password to login to your account. In addition, Quicken will not store your account numbers, and SSL and 128 bit encryption makes your financial data unreadable as it is transferred to Quicken online.
The only downside to all this security is that it can be difficult to initially link some bank accounts to update Quicken. (Though this is not unique to Quicken – it also happens with similar programs like Yodlee, Mint, and Mvelopes). The good news is once your accounts are linked, updates will be automatic going forward.
Final thoughts
Quicken Online is the perfect introduction to using technology to manage your money, and for those who don’t need complex features, you can’t beat the cost: free! If you’ve never used Quicken before, I strongly recommend you try Quicken Online Edition for free.
I'm David, an ex- financial journalist and recovering debtaholic. I'll help you get out of debt, get saving, and get on with life. Sound good? Please subscribe (RSS or e-mail) or follow me on Twitter.
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Is this program able to communicate with my bank using qfx
Three weeks into Quicken Online – and I’m dumping it. It is a nice thought, but riddled with issues. The worst of which is the inability to consistently get data synced with your financial institution. You may successfully get Quicken Online to link with your accounts, but then either never get transaction data or a generic “unknown” error. Their outsourced Tech Support for the product is essentially non-existent as you will get nothing more than generalized form letters back and never any resolution. Quicken recently isolated their community forum for the online product from their paid products, and based on the number of complaints and issues in the Online forum, one can take a stabbing guess as to why. Sometimes, things are free for a reason.