Update: The giveaway has ended and the winners will be announced shortly.

Note: This is a long article containing an in-depth review of the new version of Quicken. If you are just interested in the giveaway of Quicken 2010 Deluxe, scroll to the bottom of this article.

It took me a long time to warm up to Intuit Quicken. When I first saw the software in the early or mid 1990s, I wasn’t very interested. That’s not the software’s fault; at that time I most likely did not see the need for tracking money I did not have. When I finally realized I needed to build some control of my personal financial situation, I first looked for free solutions.

After several months of spending less than I was earning and tracking my progress using freeware, I evaluated Microsoft Money alongside Quicken. Money looked nice and ran smooth while Quicken was clunky and unattractive, so I stuck with Money for a few years. After some time, I came to realize that Money’s features for dealing with investments were not as comprehensive as I would like, and for some reason it interpreted the downloaded data from my 401(k) incorrectly. I decided to give Quicken another shot.

While Quicken wasn’t perfect, it worked better with the transaction data I downloaded from the banks and offered configurable reports. So I stuck with it, and I still use a desktop version of Quicken almost every day. I receive questions about why I haven’t switched to popular Web 2.0 applications like Quicken Online (review here) or Mint.com (review here). These websites offer interesting features, particularly those powered by community aggregate information, but they lack some of the basic investing functionality that I get from the desktop version of Quicken.

Quicken 2010 review, first impressions

I received Quicken 2010 Home and Business in the mail yesterday and gave it a test drive tonight.

The upgrade from Quicken 2009, including downloading updates to the software online, took about ten minutes. Tens of thousands of transaction records needed to be converted to the new version, and this took the bulk of the time for the upgrade.

After the upgrade was complete, the software brought me to Quicken.com to register. Although I am already registered at Intuit, I was required to provide my information again before using all of the software’s functionality. Although required, the registration process was quick.

I was impressed with the new version’s look and feel. The interface is redesigned to be cleaner, and switching from one page to another within the software seems to move faster. One of my biggest complaints about Quicken has been its sluggish display but this seems to be greatly improved.

Quicken 2010 opens to a new main screen with three horizontal sections. The top includes a pie chart describing your spending within categories and the middle of the screen lists your anticipated expenses.

The focus here is on your cash flow: how much is left in your spending accounts at the end of the month. Here is the top half of my screen. Click on the thumbnail to view the image full-size (and note the exceptionally large tax expense thanks to quarterly estimated payments).

The bottom section of this screen is new. According to Quicken, it would take 5 minutes to begin tracking spending goals. I began creating spending goals, which seem to form a softer style of a budget. Unfortunately, because I use sub-categories, Quicken’s “average monthly spending” in categories like “Auto,” “Dining,” and “Entertainment” were inaccurate. As a result, the “suggested monthly goals” were not appropriate. I solved this by choosing my own categories, such as “Auto:Fuel” rather than “Auto.”

After assigning several categories to watch, here are my results so far for October. [click to continue…]

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