Poll: Do you use Quicken (or commercial equiv) to track spending/budget?

[Nords]

I've tried it twice (years ago), but never thought it was worth the discipline, so I built my own spreadsheets. But now that we almost never write checks any more, and downloading transactions is far more readily available, maybe we need to reconsider.
Just wonder how many of you use a commercial software to handle your personal spending?

I've been using Quicken for nearly 20 years, and if you've been using your own spreadsheets then you're not gonna be happy with Quicken.

I used to download checking account transactions, but their cryptic comments on the payments may not be what you'd like to read. Quicken also "encourages" upgrades every three years or so by expiring the download feature. If you don't use downloads then you don't care, but otherwise you need to buy a new version, install it, convert over your data, and so forth.

What frustrates me are the small errors that build up over the years. I don't thing Quicken was ever designed to handle 150,000 transactions but it's tremendously annoying to have the program insist that my money-market account share value is $0.999996.

I just started using iBank 4, importing 18 years of banking and investment history from Quicken with only a little fiddling needed. Mostly stuff like changing "Buy" to "Buy to Close" on option activity and similar corner case stuff.
The underlying database iBank uses is the very well tested SQLite package.

Interesting. I don't know if Q09 even handles options trades-- I've just been selling call options as a short-term cap gain.

My daughter's been annoyed with Quicken Essentials. Maybe she'll be happier with iBank on her Macbook...

 

[sengsational]

The primary purpose of any accounting system is to have an independent reference point against which to reconcile the reports from the custodians of your assets.

I agree, but spent too much time keying stuff. Net worth and ROI stuff go into Excel, and day to day transactions go into MYM (a very old copy). I tried Quicken and the Microsoft one when MYM was abandoned by Nations Bank, but there was nothing new there, and neither gave me what I wanted for asset tracking (roi and asset allocation). I like not having to be on the annual upgrade$ track!

--Dale--

 

[jclarksnakes]

Once again I find myself voting differently than most on a poll here on the forum. For me closely tracking spending seems too much like work. And you know what I think about work.....I would rather eat dirt. I do occasionally glance through the CC bill and the checkbook so that I have a general idea where the money goes. Many years ago I thought my two daughters had one horse and we were renting another for one of them to ride. I was looking through the checkbook and noticed stable expenses were kind of high. I asked DW about it and she confessed that they had bought a second horse and not told me about it.

 

[Sirka]

Used Quicken for many years

I've used Quicken for many years. I manually input the day's receipts into Quicken each evening. I also download transactions from all my financial institutions daily. The manual inputs should match the downloaded inputs. If not, I investigate. When we go on a road trip, we use a card with a $0 balance and use it for every expense (no matter how large or small) on the trip. I don't input manually or download while on the trip. When we get home I put the card away and download transactions from the credit card company to Quicken. That way I have a very detailed trip journal

I input recurring bills into Quicken 30 days before the due date. I keep enough money in my main checking account to pay all bills in the next 30 days. All bills are paid by electronic transfer. My bank will send a paper check through USPS to anyone at no charge to me.

I use the quicken spending reports for expense control and budget purposes. I can look at my expenses by current month, last month, last 12 months, last year, or by custom range. The chances are very good that our future expenses will be about the same (adjusted for inflation) as our past expenses. Note that the expenses are normally organized by category, not by payee.

I use the Quicken investment reports to track my investments on a daily basis. We have investment accounts at more than one institution.

+1
this pretty much covers it for us. I also do month end reports for our spending and investment income. Paste it into spreadsheet so I can monitor spending versus income, and look at the charts I have created over the years. I can see spending in each category year over previous years and month over month.
I wish Quicken would fix their bugs, each time I upgrade, I hope, but am disappointed, again. I have tried other software, but always come back to Quicken (since ver.1). Now it's the only game in town IMHO, until I get a smart phone and some apps...??

 

[W2R]

I've been using Quicken for nearly 20 years, and if you've been using your own spreadsheets then you're not gonna be happy with Quicken.

That would be me. I have been using Excel for this purpose for a long time, and have developed spreadsheets that I like. Every few years I think of trying Quicken but so far I have not bought it.

I used to download checking account transactions, but their cryptic comments on the payments may not be what you'd like to read. Quicken also "encourages" upgrades every three years or so by expiring the download feature. If you don't use downloads then you don't care, but otherwise you need to buy a new version, install it, convert over your data, and so forth

(emphasis mine) Interesting! I did not realize that it is possible to not use downloads with Quicken. Knowing that, I'll need to look at Quicken again. One of my objections to Quicken is my reluctance to provide it with my account information. I'd rather enter transactions manually since I don't have many of them.

 

[Midpack]

That would be me. I have been using Excel for this purpose for a long time, and have developed spreadsheets that I like. Every few years I think of trying Quicken but so far I have not bought it.

That's where I am too. I noticed the poster who said he/she entered transactions in Quicken every day, that doesn't appeal to me at all. We update our transactions in Excel monthly, takes no more than an hour. Categories are entered with cascading drop down menus, so no chance of mismatches. Budget is built in, and all reporting is done with Pivot tables, showing totals and variances (red, green & diminished conditional formatting) in several slices and dices. It doesn't sound like we'd save a lot of time with Quicken even with online transaction downloading, but I'm going to do some research this week. It sounds like it's largely a function of how well the user knows what can be done with Excel or another commercial spreadsheet.

 

[Gumby]

I tried Quicken many years ago and found it to be a pain, so I constructed my own Excel spreadsheets to do the job instead. The benefit is that they do exactly what I want. The drawback is that there is probably some very useful function that I haven't thought to include.

 

[easysurfer]

Some like the envelope method which forces one to not spend more than what's allocated for that month. Often that was the way budgeting was done in the old days with physical envelopes. Virtual envelope software is out there like this one:

Budget (Windows) « Snowmint Creative Solutions LLC

Often, they get high reviews and are said as easy to use. I must have a mental block as I understand the concept with physical envelopes, but get lost when I've tried using the program.

 

[clifp]

We just started using Mint to track spending/bugets. We didn't really use anything previously so it is a big improvement.

I also just started using Mint. It integrates pretty seemlessly with my online banking from Schwab as well imports my Amex and PenFed credit card.

I am not all anal and tracking this stuff, but it does provide a pretty good overview of my spending.

 

[Ronstar]

Used to use Quicken, but my version wasn't compatible with Mac Lion os, and the program became useless. So I've gone the past several months budgetless. I started an excel based system today, downloading csv's from bank and credit card, then categorizing, etc. It took me a few hrs to do the last three months. I like it better than Quicken - I categorize each expenditure manually in the spreadsheet system which forces me to pay more attention to the transactions. It seems like it may give me a better understanding of my spending habits.

 

[NW-Bound]

The main reason I use Quicken to track expenses was that it requires me to do no manual input, as it downloads all the credit card transactions for me, and even classified them. It knows whether I spent that money at a gas station, or at a grocery store. As stated earlier, the only occasional edit I have to do is to reclassify some transactions into other subcategories. We have been using credit cards (paid in full at month end) as much as possible in lieu of cash, so the auto-download works out well.

And for investments, as I hold many individual stocks as well as MFs and ETFs, they pay dividends at different times through the years, and not having to manually enter these is worth the cost of the software. As some other posters have noted, I find it very useful to see my networth (spread across more than a dozen of accounts) and expenses in one spot. And the ability to drill down to any particular expense item (how much did I spend for electric last July), or when did I buy that stock, or how much a stock has paid me in dividends, gets me hooked.

I am sure that there are other software that will do the above. The point is that the software should cause the user less work, not more, or something is very wrong.

 

[Nords]

The drawback is that there is probably some very useful function that I haven't thought to include.

Yeah, like the pop-up window that says "Your ability to use this feature will expire in six months unless you upgrade to our new version!"

Spreadsheets were probably powerful enough for the way we started using Quicken in 1992 (I believe it was v5.0 for DOS) but I wasn't educated enough to make my own. These days I keep wondering when I should cut off my data files and start over with a fresh set of accounts.

Or I could just keep kvetching about this until 2022 when I have 250,000 transactions.

 

[Rustward]

I periodically go in and delete payees from the memorized list.

Edit --> Preferences --> Data entry and QuickFill


... Remove memorized payees not used in _____ months

 

[houstenh]

We used to use quicken. When Intuit decided it could not update my version anymore, I looked for something in the "cloud". I use mint now.

 

[tapper]

I selected 'Quicken' although I use Gnucash. At a point in my past I choose to flush Windows and transition to Linux and the Quicken folks refused to provide a Linux version. I also use Gnucash for my wife's business.

 

[sengsational]

I was looking through the checkbook and noticed stable expenses were kind of high. I asked DW about it and she confessed that they had bought a second horse and not told me about it.

lol! You'll think I'm nuts or something, but I kinda like to spend a couple hours sometimes just running numbers. Quarterly roi can sometimes get tedious if I'm interested in getting off to something else, but other times it's just kinda fun.

--Dale--

 

[Midpack]

Thanks for all the responses. It seems the ratio of Quicken et al users has been fairly consistently running about 2:1 over Excel et al. If I didn't have so much experience with Excel (from work days), I'd probably switch to Quicken based on this. Thanks again...

 

[LuckyRugger]

YNAB (You Need A Budget), best software I've used to date. I've used spreadsheets for years because Quicken or MS Money just showed me where my money went. My spreadsheets took a while to develop and maintain and only I could use them, sure I could graph whatever I wanted to but that was the only upside. Every year we define our budget for the year, and we look at it in detail every quarter and make adjustments as needed. YNAB is great for us, there are iphone apps that syncs your phone to your home computer that way you have your budget right in front of you and you can record transactions on your phone if you want too.

I paid $39 at the end of last year during one of their sales, black Friday or cyber Monday. If you download their trial you'll be added to their email list and then they will send you promotions.

 

[JakeBrake]

YNAB (You Need A Budget), best software I've used to date. I've used spreadsheets for years because Quicken or MS Money just showed me where my money went. My spreadsheets took a while to develop and maintain and only I could use them, sure I could graph whatever I wanted to but that was the only upside. Every year we define our budget for the year, and we look at it in detail every quarter and make adjustments as needed. YNAB is great for us, there are iphone apps that syncs your phone to your home computer that way you have your budget right in front of you and you can record transactions on your phone if you want too.

I paid $39 at the end of last year during one of their sales, black Friday or cyber Monday. If you download their trial you'll be added to their email list and then they will send you promotions.

Quicken (2012) will allow me to input recurring transactions up to one year in advance or one time transactions through the year 2099. I think that will do me.

 

[W2R]

YNAB (You Need A Budget), best software I've used to date. I've used spreadsheets for years because Quicken or MS Money just showed me where my money went. My spreadsheets took a while to develop and maintain and only I could use them, sure I could graph whatever I wanted to but that was the only upside. Every year we define our budget for the year, and we look at it in detail every quarter and make adjustments as needed. YNAB is great for us, there are iphone apps that syncs your phone to your home computer that way you have your budget right in front of you and you can record transactions on your phone if you want too.

I paid $39 at the end of last year during one of their sales, black Friday or cyber Monday. If you download their trial you'll be added to their email list and then they will send you promotions.

I downloaded the free trial of YNAB a few months ago, but decided it doesn't meet my needs. As I recall, it wants an actual budget (such as, $50/month for clothing, $300/month for groceries, etc) and then tells you how you are doing relative to that budget. It looks like a terrific software package for that task. That is not what I want, though. I just want to see how much I am spending and where my money went. So, I deleted it after a couple of days. To YNAB's credit, they do not send me promotions (I think you can opt out and if so, I did).

You're right - - budgeting and recording spending are two very different functions.

 

[Independent]

I use a very old copy of Quicken, and input all my transactions manually.

We're a "mostly cash" household, so auto downloads don't save much time. I like the fact that I see each item as I enter it.

I only use Quicken as a payment register. All my analysis is done by downloading Quicken reports to Excel, then using pivot tables.

 

[jflore1978]

i use a free software called spending viewer Personal finance expense budget spending tracker its free upto 2 accounts. easy to upload transactions, it assigns categories
automatically based on your settings, lots of reports to track (Report by category, by month, by year, by payees, by budget).
Setup budget by weekly/monthly. It is really fast, shows years worth of data in less than a second, and all in a single screen with single click.

 

[foxfirev5]

We use a highly developed index card system for our budget/bills. It's kind of a redneck cash flow system that no matter what, you save out of every income source. I have found it helps immensely if you have no mortgage, car payment or credit card balance.

 

[dmdunca44]

Another YNAB user here. For years I used Quicken to record and track spending. I also used a simple excel spreadsheet to forecast and budget. I switched to ynab a few months ago because I wanted to get better at actually budgeting (Quicken's budget feature was too buggy).

I really like ynab as a budgeting tool. It does not have the whistles and bells of Quicken (esp reports), but it really is great for budgeting.

I still use a simple excel spradsheet for forecasting and for tracking our investments (it helps that our IRA accounts are in just four VG funds)

 

[ejw93]

Mint does a great job of tracking spending w/o purchasing any software. All automated- Works great for me.