The Best of Both Phone, and Tablet
Entered CNET Catalog: 08/26/2007
SKU: 0028287016729
Manufacturer: Intuit Inc.
Manufacturer description
If you have a home business or are self-employed, you need Quicken Home & Business 2008. It is the only Quicken software that brings your personal and business finances together - while letting you manage them both separately - for a complete view of your financial picture.Product summary
The good: Quicken 2008 works with more than 5,300 online financial institutions, offers some helpful feature and interface improvements, adds new Bill Minder Gadget for Windows Vista users, TurboTax integration, free chat, and e-mail help.
The bad: Quicken 2008 is a minor upgrade with few new features; installation dumps icons on your Windows desktop.
The bottom line: Quicken 2008 is a solid finance package and a great choice for novices, but there isn't a compelling reason to upgrade from the 2007 version.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 09/05/2007
Quicken 2008 is a small upgrade of Intuit's popular personal finance program. This well-built money manager is easy enough for novices yet powerful enough for veteran number crunchers, although it feels like a warmed-over version of last year's model with a few helpful enhancements. That said, the 2008 version is a bit better at managing savings and investments, categorizing expenses, and tracking 529 college savings contributions.
Quicken comes in multiple editions, which have been retooled from previous years. The $30 Quicken Starter Edition, previously named Quicken Basic, provides a surprisingly robust set of tools. You can pay bills online, download bank transactions, and track tax deductions. For $60, Quicken Deluxe targets young families trying to save money for a house, college fund, or other big-ticket item. The $90 Quicken Premier--which we tested--is for older families with various investments, including stocks and property, and maybe a kid or two in college. For $100, Quicken Premier Home & Business aims to serve entrepreneurs who want to manage their personal and business finances with one program. Intuit is also working to build an online version of Quicken.
Setup and interface
Setup for Quicken 2008 is mostly unchanged from last year, and the process is largely automated and fast. Luckily, Intuit doesn't demand that you have a brand-new computer, as the application can run on Windows 2000 or more recent, and a recommended 256MB of RAM. Software installation took only 5 minutes in our tests on both Windows XP and Vista machines, and we successfully downloaded transactions from a major bank and a brokerage firm in about 10 minutes. Since Quicken's account registers automatically categorize your transactions, setup doesn't require a lot of manual labor. And tweaking is easy; to rename a transaction, for instance, select it and click the Edit button. Unfortunately, during installation Quicken rudely dumped four icons on our Windows XP desktop, including junk-mail pitches for credit report, credit card, and bill-pay services.
Features
Of course, Quicken 2007 did these things, too. So what's new in 2008? The biggest upgrade is My Savings Plan, a helpful feature for those of us who have trouble socking away money each month. Using My Savings Plan, you enter monthly spending budgets and savings goals--say, $200 per month for next summer's vacation. Quicken then charts your actual versus allocated spending. It also adopts the "rollover" concept popularized by cell phone plans by adding extra savings to next month's target.
Windows Vista users will like the nifty Quicken Bill Minder Gadget, a Desktop window that reminds you of upcoming and overdue bills, as well as other transactions. In addition, Quicken now connects to more than 5,300 financial institutions, including PayPal. That's 1,000 more than what Quicken 2007 supported--so the odds are good that your bank is covered.
Early users of Quicken 2007 complained of frequent crashes, although Intuit later released patches to address those problems. Thus far Quicken 2008 appears reasonably stable. We did, however, experience one particularly ugly crash that required us to reboot Windows Vista.
Other useful changes include the new navigation bar, which makes it easier to jump between Quicken's main sections, such as Cash Flow and Investing. The register now has better categorization and tagging features, which may prove helpful come tax time. You can select a transaction and either choose from a drop-down list of user-created tags, or enter a new tag. You also can view of list of expenses for a particular project, such as a kitchen remodel. In addition, tax-related transactions are now marked with a TurboTax checkmark icon in the register.
The new Quicken Bill Minder Gadget, which works only with Windows Vista, is an info box that appears in the Windows Sidebar along the right edge of the desktop. The widget pulls in critical information from the program, such as the number of overdue bills and upcoming transactions, and displays it where you can't miss it. There are two views to choose from: List or the tiny and therefore less-helpful Calendar.
Quicken 2008 can track a college savings account, known as a 529 plan. However, if you download your 529 plan information from a brokerage site, you'll most likely have to manually mark the account as tax-deferred, which is a minor annoyance.
Service and support
Quicken support is unchanged from last year. E-mail support is free, and Intuit promises to respond within a day. Chat help is also free and is available 24-7. Phone assistance is $24.95 per call. However, some support calls are free, such as if you're having problems installing the program or converting data from earlier Quicken versions.
We found Quicken support to be fast, polite, but not always accurate. Our simple e-mail query that inquired whether we could upgrade from Quicken 2007 Deluxe to Quicken 2008 Starter Edition (you can't), was answered accurately within an hour. During our chat session, however, the Intuit tech representative insisted that we needed to reinstall Quicken 2008 in a new folder to view the Bill Minder Gadget, which wouldn't appear when Vista launched. To fix the problem, however, we simply had to change a setting in Windows Sidebar.
Conclusion
Quicken 2008 is a fine choice if you're dissatisfied with the wimpy money-management tools found at most bank Web sites. Indeed, Quicken Premier offers far more features than most of us will ever use. However, if you're already using Quicken 2007, there's not enough new stuff here to warrant an upgrade. And if you're currently using Microsoft Money, another great personal finance application, there's no compelling reason to switch to Quicken 2008.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5out of 5 user reviews
Beware of Bugs
Pros: The product is perfect for personal or professional use. I have been a user for over a decade and love how easy it is to manage my finances.
Cons: For the last three years Quicken and MS Windows have had conflicts. Look up "Quicken screen flickers" and you will see many unhappy customer comments. The solution offered by Quicken basically requires that you down grade your machine. Unacceptable.
out of 5 user reviews
Makes tracking your finances more difficult!
Pros: Tracks multiple credit cards and bank accounts...if the bank/credit card company is compatible. Multi account update is a breeze. Planning software makes paying off debt or saving for an expense easier. Tracks where you are spending your money.
Cons: Mismatched transactions leads to inaccurate account balances.
Setup is tedious and frustrating, even for simple accounts.
Confuses you about how much money you really have.
Displays assets in a confusing manner.
My problems started with getting all my accounts set up initially. The current version will not allow the download of .ofx files which many banks still use to provide a digital copy of your bank records. This wouldn't be a big deal if all my accounts were compatible with Quicken?which they aren't. When you encounter an error logging into your account through Quicken it tells you to call the bank and get a special Quicken access code...two of my banks had absolutely no idea what I was talking about despite transferring to several different departments. So I decided to just try it with the accounts that would update properly and manually enter the accounts that wouldn't. After a whole day of gathering and entering data I thought I had everything setup. Then I tried to do some planning for upcoming bills and such and realized that if I wanted to do that I needed to set up the accounts differently. There wasn't a suggestion regarding how to select the proper account type when initially adding an account or how the account type would significantly affect planning purposes and it was counter intuitive to logical thinking. So then I tried to change the account type but it wouldn't let me. Then I tried to delete it and add it again as a different account type and it wouldn't let me because I had planned transactions for that account. Then I tried to cancel the transactions and delete the accounts and in order to add them again. No go. So I started all over from scratch with all the accounts?I wasn?t amused. This only took a few hours and afterwards I thought everything was good to go.
This is when I got really really irritated. I had setup anticipated transactions for our salaries and various bills in the upcoming months in order to determine the daily, weekly and monthly cash flow so I could pay off some debt as fast as possible without causing overdrafts. The problem I experienced is when you try to ?schedule? a paycheck/bill Quicken adds/deducts it from your checking account on the date you specify. This seems great until you try and sync with your actual downloaded account statement. It will not match transactions even if they have the same name and dollar amount on the same date, which totally screws up your account balance. This seems like a pretty basic function to me so not getting that right is simply unacceptable. I even tried to tweak it so that it wouldn?t actually enter the transaction into my checking account and would just appear for planning purposes but was unable to do so. What good is financial software if you can?t try and plan with it?
On the bottom left hand of the program it displays your total net worth. This makes it difficult to determine your day to day cash value if you also want to track investments....at least for me.
I did like how it displays where you have spent your money. I found the categories automatically assigned to the expenses to be pretty accurate but you can tweak them further to get a more accurate picture. While this is a helpful feature most of my banks and credit cards also offer this feature for free. Quicken really just combines it for all accounts.
Overall I found Quicken to be overly complicated and confusing. The bottom line for me is that it just didn?t work like I thought it should. If you just want to track a few basic accounts and not do any planning Quicken may work for you, then again, most banks offer pretty detailed records online so you could save some money. For me it was as a simple choice to uninstall this program and look for something else.
out of 5 user reviews
Doesn't do what it advertises.
Pros: Interface with banks for transaction download, Invoicing, Statements, business accounts can be kept separate from personal accounts, interfaces with Tax software to make tax time less effort.
Cons: Lack of support and support people who don't understand the product. Features that don't work, cost for upgrade software which doesn't really upgrade anything.
out of 5 user reviews
I tried to change column widths and from then on it was disaster. Many emails/calls achieved zilch
Pros: Same as older versions
Cons: Would not update stock prices and caused no end of grief
out of 5 user reviews
H&B is Poorly supported by Intuit, No Books yet, Buggy
Pros: Offers a lot of potential
Cons: Evidently not tested. Tax line items incomplete
Also, the investment module is buggy and support is very poor. It evidently relies on a server that is down without any graceful alternative.
