What Is Quicken
What Is QuickenQuicken is software for managing bank accounts and cash flow. I have used it in the past on a PC. It is possible to create a section for each bank account and credit card and keep running totals in duplicate with the ones which the bank has. If you have the right arrangements, it can also print your cheques for payments. It can also be told about standing payments, create budgets, etc etc.
The balancing of a cheque book is to check against a statement that all the cheques issued and cheques paid in have actually been acted upon ("cleared") so that the money you think you have and the money then bank thinks you have check out.
-- JohnFletcher
Thanks.
Wow. Supplementary question: Why would anyone bother with all that? Since the bank's idea of how much money I have is pretty much definitive, if I want to know I just phone them and ask. Or get a statement from an ATM. Do people really sit down and type in the details of all the cheques they write (assuming that, since the have this program, the write a lot of cheques)? I've written one cheque this year. Most of the time I don't even know where my cheque-book is.
Lots of people do. They also reconcile their credit card stubs against their statement. This is a good idea because banks make a lot of mistakes with accounts and charges etc.
Are there figures available for how much of this goes on? I'm having trouble understanding how there is a market for product like Quicken. (But then, I didn't fill in the stub on that one cheque I wrote, so I'm probably not in their target demographic anyway) Come to think of it, my bank has made a few huge, glaring errors with my account. But they were huge and glared, so no software support was required to identify them. If there are a few mistakes too small for me to notice, well its difficult for me to get exited about that.
The point is to know how much money you have before your bank does. When you write a check, you know that you're X bucks poorer. The bank will only get to know when the check is deposited and is cleared. This matters most when you have a very tight budget - you want to know whether that check is going to bounce, and your bank can't tell you that. There is, of course, the paradox that if you have a tight budget you're not likely to be able to afford a computer or Quicken itself.
Quicken by itself is probably not worth the trouble unless you really need to keep to a budget. But Quicken with on-line bill paying service from your bank is great! It automates a lot of the tedious data recording parts of the process, and you don't have to hunt for stamps or mail envelopes for most of your bills. -- AndrewSemprebon
Combined with online banking, Quicken does two things for me that are rather spiffy: It gets the bills paid on time, mostly automatically, and it lets me know how much money I really have and when I'm going to have it.
I used to call the bank if I wanted to know how much money I had. I used to forget to do bills, so they'd go late. And if things got down to a crunch, it was a bit difficult to know how much money I really had.
With Quicken and online banking, bill paying goes like this: Every few days, I load up Quicken and pull all the credit-card/debit receipts out of my wallet (usually 2-10 of them). I enter all them into the register, recording the date and the amount. This takes, oh, 10 seconds per receipt. If I have bills waiting to go out, I take them off of my in basket (my monitor) and enter them as "send" transactions, dated 5-10 days before the bill is due (more time for bills that are more sensitive to being late. Cable can be late; car insurance, I like to get there early). If I just got paid, I enter the amount for that, too. For those "send" transactions, the bank will print a check, stuff it in an envelope, address and stamp it, and send it timed to arrive on the date I specified.
All the receipts and the bills I entered get clipped together.
Now I have Quicken connect to the bank. It uses encryption (RSA) over my regular internet connection. It tells the bank when I want the bills paid, and then it downloads from the bank every transaction to my account since I last connected. For each transaction, it shows me the corresponding entry in my register, and I click on "accept." If a transaction comes in that I haven't entered in the register, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Usually, it's a receipt I lost and didn't enter. I haven't caught a mistake yet, although I did catch a restaurant *crediting* a small amount ($5 or so) to my account. That was very strange. I never did find out why they did that.
As I accept each transaction, I remove its recept or invoice from the clip and feed it to the shredder. If a transaction didn't match, I'd keep the paper, but that hasn't happened yet.
Regular bills like house payments, I've entered into Quicken as an automatic repeating transaction. Every month, Quicken adds them to my register and notifies the bank to pay them. So all I have to worry about is making sure the money's there (if the money isn't there, it's not an overdraft - the bank just doesn't send the check. That's why I prefer online banking over auto-debit).
I think the service costs me something like $6/month. They like to brag about how you almost make it up in stamps, but I don't - I only pay ten or so bills a month. But where I do make it up is that the bills now get paid, and I know how much money I have.
Here's how the knowing-how-much-money part works. The register keeps a running tally of how much money I have in each account. I have it automatically enter my regular payments and estimated paychecks a month ahead of time. Now I can look at the register and find out about how much money (not counting the variable bills and incidental spending) I'm going to have at any point in the next 30 days. If I wanted to be picky, I could have it enter estimates for my variable bills too, but there are only a few of those so they're easy to remember.
Now I have confidence that the only money going in or out of my account is money I know about. I also know how much money I have and when I'm going to have it. "Look, on the 20th I'm going to have... fifteen dollars! Woohoo! We're having pizza!" -- WayneConrad
Quicken is used by the individual and small business to do their books. However most small business' use an upgraded model of quicken which is quickbooks. It has the ability to do ALL accounting functions for a small business. Wonderful accounting program. Very user friendly.
Apparently, the idea that Quicken is useful is an AmericanCulturalAssumption. (Or, at least, a non-universal cultural assumption.)
Why do I say this? Well, I don't know who the writer was, above, who didn't see the point, but there are clues that he (or she) is not an American. The spelling "cheque", for example. Plus only writing one check in a year. What American could get away with that? That's right. It was a UK-resident Briton. -- KB
One of the more jarring experiences of my first week in Australia - far more jarring than, say, driving on the left, because I was expecting that - was opening a bank account and being given a little booklet of about 15 checks. I assumed that it was a temporary supply until the big box of 200 arrived, but when I asked I was told "No, when you need more just come in and we'll give them to you." What's up with that?
What's up is that checks just aren't a big part of life in Australia. Very few businesses accept them, so it's cash, credit cards, or electronic funds transfer. (Without the interstate banking laws that make such things so difficult in the U.S., Australia has a good, nationwide EFT network so that you can run a bank card through a terminal at a store anywhere in the country and have funds automatically transferred from your account to the store's.) Bills? Most bills are quarterly rather than monthly, and most people pay them in person at the post office.
We wrote a few checks in the three years we were there, but I'm guessing that was mostly out of habit (combined with the fact that our visa status made it difficult to get a credit card).
Put it all together, and it means that, barring errors, the bank really does know how much money you have (since bank withdrawals and EFT transactions are reflected in your balance instantaneously). You can lose track of your credit card charges, but you get a statement each month and you can choose when and how much to pay. It's very common for people to run up to an ATM just to do a quick balance check. I imagine, if I had grown up in such an environment, I might just trust the bank to not make big mistakes, too.
In the U.S., we buy blank checks from our banks by the hundreds. I don't know any real numbers, but I'm guessing my wife and I, between us, write 400 checks a year. Bills, donations, and a a fair number or store purchases get paid by check. And banks make a lot of mistakes, not all of them glaring. Quicken helps a lot. -- GlennVanderburg
Wow again. Thanks for that exposition, Glenn. Do I understand correctly that that you pay the bank for these hundreds of cheques that you write? BTW, here's what I do: all my fixed monthly outgoings (utilities, rent, visa bill, student load repayments (still!) are set up to all go out of my current account (by EFT) within a couple of days of pay-day. The bank not only really does know how much money I've got, for all but a couple of days in the month, but nothing funny is going to happen to that amount without being very obvious the next time I run up to the ATM to get a balance. And I'm used to doing that while in other EC countries, too. -- KeithBraithwaite
Yes, we purchase the checks. (You don't have to buy from the bank; there are quite a few other places where you can buy checks for less money, but a lot of people still buy from the bank for convenience, and all told it's only a few dollars a year.) Oh, by the way, we wrote 584 checks last year.
It's possible here to have most of your bills automatically withdrawn, but the sense of control is hard to give up when you're so accustomed to it. Therefore, I only do automatic withdrawals for bills that are genuinely fixed, and I manually pay the ones that vary in amount from month to month. The additional friction in the system here is also what gives rise to bill payment services like PayTrust? (www.paytrust.com) that still give you control over when and how much, but let you avoid the tedious check writing, envelope stuffing, and mailing.
Incidentally, it's all but completely pointless for me to do a balance check at an ATM, because all of the checks still in the pipeline between me and my bank mean that the bank's picture of my commitments is never current. But my checkbook always knows, because I carefully record everything.
This is yet another example of how our resistance to standardization (along with the way responsibility is divided between the national and state governments) gets in the way sometimes. -- GlennVanderburg
Are chequebooks in decline at all in the states? although they are hardly used in the uk now they are still supposedly useable most places, but there have recently been grumblings from some big retailers saying that they might stop accepting cheques (even ones guaranteed by a card).
I've used Quicken for 10 years to track and reconcile spending, and for tax preparation, but not for having my bill payed automagically. The process of entering data from the check register and ATM stubs, entering data from paycheck stubs, and running the monthly reconciliation procedure takes about 45 minutes a month. Running a few of the canned reports, plus a few simple custom reports, has given me a lot of insight into where the money goes each month, and what the trends look like. -- DaveSmith
To me, the best thing about Quicken is answering questions like "Where did all my money go?" or "Am I any better off than I was a year ago" or being able to look at my income and outgo independently.
That said, I think Quicken is a terrible program. I use it because it's the best in its category, but best doesn't imply good.
I was writing my own, but I hit a stumbling block a couple years ago : I don't enjoy writing GUIs. I have a lovely command line interface that does everything Quicken does, only smaller, faster, better, more generally etc. Anybody who wants to do the GUI part give me a holler at ajewell@cinci.rr.com. -- AndyJewell
For me, it's definitely the on-line bill-payment that hooked me. I have no interest in seeing graphs and charts that show what I'm spending my money on; whatever I do spend, it's either because I have to, or because I want to, and I'm certainly not going to let a silly little graph change my needs or wants. But I, like (I suspect) many programmers, am terminally lazy. I mean, to pay a bill, you've got to write a check, tear it out of the book, record it in your register, fill out the slip from the creditor or vendor, put it all in an envelope, lick the envelope, turn your desk upside down looking for a stamp. (Stamps, made out of little bits of paper, that you have to moisten and stick on an envelope? What century is this, anyway?) You might even have to write the address on the envelope. (I don't know about anyone else here, but I can't remember the last time I actually wrote down more than a few words in a row, never mind an entire mailing address. And then, you've got to remember, as you're stumbling out the door all squinty-eyed in the morning, to actually put the thing in the mailbox and raise that little flag. Doesn't a few mouse clicks and keystrokes sound so much easier? ;-) -- MikeSmith
When Quicken started charging $10/month to electronically download banking transactions, I dropped it. Who are they kidding anyway? If they're going to charge $10/month, why don't they give the software away for free? Sheesh. -- AndyPierce
They do, basically - they keep upgrading you for free. I bought Quicken v6 back in like 1998, and since then I've been upgraded by Intuit to 2001 and 2005 without having to pay. Then again, they're getting $120 a year from me for the bill-paying service. Now that my bank (HSBC) has free online banking and bill-payment, I think I'll be dropping Quicken soon. -- MikeSmith
Was WhatisQuicken
Quicken is the one indispensable PC app. Could never balance a checkbook without it. I have this technique called "mental arithmetic" that gets the job done quickly and free fo charge. :-)
I use MS Money - it allows me to see how much extra I can put into savings based on future income and bills I've already entered -- CadeRoux
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