Quicken Review: Features & Pricing for 2022
This article is part of a larger series on Accounting Software.
What We Recommend Quicken For
We consider Quicken a solid choice for individuals who are looking for a comprehensive solution to manage their personal finances and track their investments. Its high-end plan, available in the Windows version, gives you the ability to track your small business and rental properties in addition to your personal finances.
Who Quicken Is Good For
- Individuals seeking personal finance software: Quicken is primarily a personal finance software that can track your personal spending, savings, and retirement accounts, as well as help you prepare a budget.
- Simple businesses seeking an alternative to QuickBooks: Rental property owners can benefit from Quicken Home & Business to keep track of their tenants, rental rates, and lease terms, which isn’t possible with QuickBooks. If QuickBooks isn’t for you, Quicken and other popular options are discussed in our guide to the best QuickBooks alternatives.
- Landlords with just a few properties: Quicken, which made our list of best real estate accounting software, is well-suited to landlords with few properties who don’t need automation and advanced rental management functionality.
Quicken Is Not a Good Fit For
- Corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies (LLCs): Business entities should use a double-entry bookkeeping system like the software in our guide to the best small business accounting software.
- Sole proprietors with employees: There’s no way to manage and track company payroll. We recommend QuickBooks Online for sole proprietors because QuickBooks offers an integrated payroll service.
- Real estate companies with more than three units: Quicken lacks automation features and the adaptability of other real estate accounting software to support multiple units. We recommend Buildium instead because of its property management-specific features like tenant evaluation and specialized accounting functions.
Quicken Overview
PROS | CONS |
---|---|
Robust set of features | Limited accounting functionality |
Can manage personal finances in addition to rental property | Not appropriate for large number of rental properties |
Allows you to email custom invoices and collect payments online | Must download and install on your computer to use the web companion |
Powerful budgeting capability | Not a double-entry accounting system |
Every Quicken desktop application includes web and mobile companion app | The need to sync Quicken web and desktop manually before and after using |
Quicken Pricing
Quicken offers four plans that range from $35.99 to $103.99 per year while Simplifi by Quicken is fixed at $47.99 per year. The Home & Business plan is available for Windows only. Mac users can only get Starter, Deluxe, and Premier.
Pricing & Features | Simplifi by Quicken | Starter | Deluxe | Premier | Home & Business |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Windows Version Pricing ($/Year) | $47.99 | $35.99 | $51.99 | $77.99 | $103.99 |
Platform | Web and mobile | Desktop | Desktop | Desktop | Desktop |
Create a Budget | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Categorize Expenses | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Create a Customized Budget | N/A | N/A | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Manage & Track Debt | ✓ | N/A | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Free Online Bill Payment | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✓ | ✓ |
Free Phone & Chat Support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Priority | Priority |
Separate Personal & Business Expenses | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✓ |
Track Tax Deductions & Profit and Loss (P&L) | ✓ | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✓ |
Manage Small Business & Rental Property | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | ✓ |
Quicken offers 10% off on Deluxe, Premier, and Home & Business.
Quicken Features (Including Simplifi)
Quicken offers a robust set of tools that help you take control of your rental property and personal finances. Its key features let you manage your budgets and transactions, check out spending trends, track your investments, and more.
Your financial management journey begins on the dashboard or Home tab, which gives you a holistic view of your finances. The dashboard enables you to manage and track your budget, spending, and bills. You can customize the Home tab by creating multiple views and choosing which financial areas show up.
Quicken Home Tab
Personal Finance Features
Get a better handle on your household spending with Quicken’s personal finance management tools. Whether you’re creating a budget, managing your bills, or planning for your retirement, Quicken has the features you need to reach your goal.
- Expense management: Understand where your expenses go by sorting your accounts and transactions in one place. Create customized categories, track spending by categories and amounts or types of expenses, see spending trends, and get an idea of what your future finances will look like.
- Budgeting: Plan your personal or household expenses and compare them to your actual spending. You can easily track your budget on the web or a mobile device.
- Bank feed integration: Connect your bank accounts to Quicken to effortlessly track your income and spending.
- Bill management: Send your payments through Quick Pay for digital bills and Check Pay for physical checks. You can also set up automatic billing alerts so you’ll never miss payments again.
- Retirement planning: Quicken gives you an overview of your assets, holdings, and investments, including 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and individual retirement accounts (IRAs). It includes a Lifetime Planner―available in Windows―which helps you envision all kinds of financial scenarios.
Business Features
Quicken Home & Business is suitable for small businesses that need basic support for creating customer estimates and invoices, tracking accounts receivable (A/R) and accounts payable (A/P), and creating several reports.
- Invoicing: Choose from several templates to create customized invoices and add a payment link to PayPal. You can print your invoice or email it directly to your client.
- Estimates: Create an estimate, and then print or send it to your customer through email. You can track your estimates in the Estimate list.
- A/P and A/R tracking: Purchase Quicken Home & Business to start tracking your A/R (invoices), A/P (bills), loans, and fixed assets.
- Deduction finder: Know if you qualify for more than 100 common tax deductions. If you do, Quicken lets you add the tax-related categories you need to simplify tax time:
Quicken Business Tab
Rental Features
Quicken’s rental property manager provides helpful features to streamline landlord responsibilities. These features are available only on Quicken Home & Business. Its key rental features include the following:
- Contact management: Organize and manage all your contact details, including rental agreements, security deposits, and move-in and move-out dates, all in one place.
- Tenant management: Stay on top of your tenant lists, income, expenses, bank accounts, documents, loans, and property value.
- Market value tracker: Gain insight into your holdings and view snapshots of your portfolio by type, sector, or allocation, using its integrated Morningstar’s X-ray tool (Windows users).
- Receipt scanning: Make expense tracking a breeze by saving your receipt data as a QIF file or importing them to Quicken.
- Document storage: Store and manage documents related to your properties, tenants, and projects.
Quicken Rental Tab
Quicken Web Companion
In every Quicken plan, you can use the web companion for more accessibility. However, you still need to buy the desktop version to use the web version. There’s no difference between the desktop and web versions. The major downside is that the desktop and web versions don’t sync automatically. You’ll have to sync before and after using to ensure that the two versions are up to date with the recent changes.
Mobile App
Download the Quicken mobile app on Google Play or the App Store to manage your finances anytime and anywhere. After you set up your mobile app, your information will be synced between the mobile app and your desktop program via the Quicken Cloud. This mobile app isn’t a standalone service of Quicken. You still need to get the desktop version to use the mobile app.
Reporting
Quicken generates ample financial reports, including cash flow, profit and loss (P&L), account balances, transactions, payee comparisons, budget spending, cash flow comparisons, banking summaries, and a whole lot more.
Customer Service & Ease of Use
While Quicken is generally easy to use, some of its features aren’t intuitive, and you’ll need to devote time to learning to use them. Quicken offers multiple options for customizations, so you can make it completely personalized to your needs.
Quicken offers plenty of support options to help you get the most out of the software, such as a Getting Started guide, a community forum, and a help center. Quicken is also ready to respond to your questions over the phone and through live chat. Subscribe to Quicken Premier or a higher plan and get unlimited priority access to its customer care phone support for one year.
Simplifi by Quicken
Simplifi by Quicken focuses on personal finance. It doesn’t have rental property features like Quicken Home & Business, but Simplifi offers more streamlined finance tracking because it has both mobile and web browser access. Take note that Simplifi is different from Quicken. Unlike Quicken, Simplifi is purely cloud-based since it has no desktop app and you can use it via web browser or mobile app.
Here are some of Simplifi’s notable features:
- Spending and savings management: You can track your spending across all of your bank accounts, create income and expense categories, and set custom saving goals on Simplifi. The custom saving goals feature isn’t present in Quicken Starter.
- Budgeting: Create a one-month budget, budget for savings, and track spending history. As a personal finance tracker, Simplifi only offers one budget per month. If you need multiple budgets and rollover budgeting features, we recommend any Quicken plan.
- Bill management: Simplifi can auto-detect bills, alert you about unusual bills, and project cash flow. These features are useful in planning your spending and ensuring healthy liquidity.
- Debt, investments, and mortgage tracking: If you have debt and equity securities, Simplifi can serve as a tracker. You can include education (529) and custodial accounts, retirement 401(k), IRA, and 403(b). You can also track your home value and net worth.
Quicken Alternatives
Best for: Self-employed individuals required to file a Schedule C IRS form | Best for: Tracking more than three rental units | Best for: Real estate agents to track P&L by sale |
Software from $25 | Software starting at $50 per month | $0 |
Bottom Line
If you’re looking for a fairly straightforward solution for managing your business and personal finances side by side, then Quicken offers a pretty good value for your money. It has a good set of features, plus its mobile app gives you the ability to manage and view your finances on the go.
Quicken Home & Business particularly delivers the most value to small businesses and rental property owners looking for a simple way to manage their finances. However, the Home & Business plan is available only on Windows. We recommend that Mac users shift to Windows or choose an alternative software like QuickBooks Self-Employed or QuickBooks Online.