Quicken Review: Features, Pricing & Alternatives

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Your financial management journey begins on the dashboard or Home tab, which gives you a comprehensive view of your finances. The dashboard allows you to manage and track your budget, spending, and bills. You can customize the Home tab by creating multiple views and customizing which financial areas are viewable.

Quicken’s dashboard

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, it 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. You can also categorize transactions using multiple expense categories.
• Budgeting: Plan your personal or household expenses and compare them to your actual spending. You can track your budget on the web or a mobile device easily. The software lets you create multiple budgets based on categories that you select—or Quicken chooses for you based on your income and expense patterns. You can view your progress in a graphical format and adjust your budget as needed.
• Bank feed integration: Connect your bank accounts to track your income and spending effortlessly.
• Bill management: Very few other personal finance apps include bill payment, and you can use its free Bill Manager. Send your payments through Quick Pay for digital bills and Check Pay for physical checks. You can also set up automatic billing alerts so that you’ll never miss payments again. Note that same-day payments processed electronically through Quicken Deluxe incur an additional fee of $9.95 per month.
• 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.

As compared to its competitors which focus on shorter-term horizons like a year or two out, Quicken gives you a lifelong timeframe that analyzes your progress toward retirement and significant life events like buying a home or having a child.

Quicken Business & Personal is suitable for freelancers needing basic support for creating customer estimates and invoices, tracking A/R and 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 Business & Personal to start tracking your A/R (invoices), A/P (bills), loans, and fixed assets.
• Deduction finder: Know if you qualify for over 100 common tax deductions. If you do, Quicken lets you add the tax-related categories you need to simplify tax time.
• Business forecasting: Quicken can help you explore various “what-if” scenarios. For example, small business owners can forecast how their business might perform in a recession.

Quicken’s Business tab

Simplifi by Quicken focuses on personal finance. Unlike Quicken, it’s purely cloud-based since it has no desktop app. While it doesn’t have features for freelancers, like Quicken Business & Personal, it offers more streamlined personal finance tracking because it has both mobile and web browser access.

Essentially, the program analyzes your current income and spending habits to automatically generate a budget, which is less work and time-intensive than doing it yourself.

Here are some of Simplifi’s notable features:

• Spending and savings management: 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 is unavailable in the Quicken for Mac version.
• 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 other Quicken plan.
• Bill management: Simplifi can auto-detect bills, alert you about unusual bills, set spending alerts, and project cash flow. These features are useful in planning your spending and ensuring healthy liquidity. You can even share a snapshot of your finances with a financial planner or advisor.
• 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), IRAs, and 403(b). You can also track your home value and net worth.

Quicken’s rental property manager provides helpful features to streamline landlord responsibilities. These features are available only on Quicken Business & Personal. 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—in one place.
• Tenant management: Stay on top of your tenant listings (including tracking rent across multiple listings), income, expenses, bank accounts, documents, loans, and property value. You can also track occupancy rates and send reminders as needed.
• Market value tracker: Gain insight into your holdings, and view snapshots of your portfolio by type, sector, or allocation using Quicken’s integrated Morningstar X-ray tool.
• Receipt scanning: Make expense tracking a breeze by saving your receipt data as a QIF file or importing it to Quicken.
• Document storage: Store and manage documents related to your properties, tenants, and projects.

Quicken’s Rental tab

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, so you’ll have to sync before and after using them to ensure that the two are up to date.

Download the Quicken mobile app on Google Play or 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.

Quicken generates ample financial reports, including cash flow, P&L, account balances, transactions, payee comparisons, budget spending, cash flow comparisons, and banking summaries. However, it cannot generate a balance sheet for your small business or rental properties. If you need a balance sheet, you’ll need a double-entry bookkeeping software like QuickBooks Online.

The most notable difference between Quicken and Simplifi is that Simplifi is a web and mobile app, meaning that there isn’t a desktop application that needs to be installed.

Simplifi isn’t the mobile version of Quicken—it’s an entirely different personal finance app that was designed for iOS and Android users and web platforms. Quicken’s mobile app, on the other hand, offers mobile access to Quicken data for Quicken subscribers.

If you manage only a few rental properties and need a basic solution for creating invoices and tracking bills and tenant payments, then Quicken Business & Personal may be right for you.

Yes—specifically for landlords. Quicken is especially useful for individuals with real estate properties. You may want to read our comparison of Quicken vs QuickBooks to determine if Quicken is a good fit for your business.

No, Quicken doesn’t provide tax preparation services. However, you can use it to organize your tax-related data and export it to tax software like TurboTax.

Yes, Quicken has a mobile app that is available for iOS and Android users. The app allows users to track their expenses, view account balances, and receive alerts.