Quicken

The best feature I like is the way you can split items on a receipt into their own categories. For example, I go to Walgreens and buy cosmetics, copy paper, thank you notes, and business head shot photo prints. I enter Walgreens for the Payee, then I assign / split where the expenses will go in my categories. Cosmetic - Personal Care, Copy Paper, thank you notes - Business: Office Supplies, Photo prints - Business: Photography. I make my tax reporting a breeze for my Schedule C line items. I also love generating reports on income and expenses. Great for planning or estimating funds for seasonal work loads.

It actually has more features than I want to use. For example - the investment section, I tried to use it - but to enter buy - sell information and dividends and details was way too time consuming for me. I just as soon get my reports from my brokerage firm.

The hope that I could transfer my decades of data from "Quicken for the Mac 2007" to Quicken Classic Premier, for which I still have a subscription until Jul 2025.

Unlike Quicken for the Mac 2007, there is no pop-up window to show presently downloaded transactions before they are entered into the register. There is no practical way that I can match scheduled or other transactions already entered into my register with downloaded ones. Duplicate transactions are the result, and we are expected to regularly review our registers to combine duplicate transactions. That is time consuming and impractical.

For $80 Cdn / year this is a fantastic program for blended families with multiple sources of income and complicated expenditures that require organizing. As a lay financial planner, with a rental property and a second marriage, I have spent way too much time trying to organize the finances. What has taken me literally days to do on a spreadsheet has taken me 3 or 4 hours on Quicken. Monthly expenditures and small business management will likely take me 2 to 3 hours a month now, at most. Once you organize your Transaction Payees into Categories (a few hours the first time) you never need to do that step again! Spending charts / pie graphs are clear and 'quickly' ... you know where the money is going, almost to the moment. The program was super easy to show my wife how it works and unnecessary stressors have been eliminated.

I say almost because transactions from the bank are not simultaneously dropped into your application. Even if you update the account (refresh) it can take time for the new transactions to show up. Apparently the web app doesn't have this issue but the downloaded desk top version does. For me, no issue, but for someone who requires immediate updates it might be a problem.