When Mint and Intuit announced the latter would be acquiring the former, the Quicken team and Aaron Patzer, the CEO of Mint, now a vice president of Intuit’s personal finance division, claimed that their two similar online product offerings, Mint and Quicken Online, would continue to co-exist. This made little sense to me.
In fact, I asked, “How long will it continue to make sense to maintain two highly similar services under one roof?”
We now know the answer is, “Not long at all.” The acquisition has passed regulatory requirements and is now official. With this news, Intuit has also announced that Quicken Online will cease to exist within six to nine months. This phase out will move Quicken Online users over to the Mint software.
It makes more business sense for Intuit to consolidate these similar product offerings, and I figured that in time either this would be the case or Mint’s software would be re-branded with the “Quicken Online” name.
I am not a heavy user of either Mint or Quicken Online. I prefer the desktop software. With Patzer heading the development of the desktop software as well, I expect some improvements in a year or so with the next or subsequent yearly release.
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…]
I’ve been a relatively faithful user of Quicken for the past five years after switching from Microsoft Money and other more basic personal finance management software. Even though I continue using this software to track my income and expenses and to share my finances with the world, I have never been silent about the software’s drawbacks.
Here are the latest Intuit Quicken products available for download or for shipping.
More Quicken products are available here.
Unfortunately for Mac users, Intuit is still working on an updated version of Quicken. Quicken Financial Life for Mac is slated to be released in February 2010. I should have my hands on the latest edition of Quicken Home and Business in a few days and I plan on reviewing the upgrade as soon as possible.
My accountant has strongly suggested I move my business-related financial accounting out of my personal Quicken file and into QuickBooks. It has been a slow process so far, and I have determined that I have not done a great job of separating my business finances from my personal finances.
QuickBooks 2010 was released yesterday. The software comes in a number of different flavors and the variety is a bit intimidating. I downloaded the QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition in order to get started, but this edition of the software is limited to the point that it is insufficient for me. The Free Edition is limited to only twenty customers. In this version there is no connectivity with banks. While a very basic business could get by with these features, even running websites requires something more robust. One feature I would have liked with the free version, or the $100 (on sale for $80) QuickBooks Simple Start, is the ability to enter my bills as I receive them.
If you’re serious about keeping your books, it looks like your best bets are QuickBooks Pro ($200 on sale for $160) or QuickBooks Premier ($400 on sale for $320). You can also find editions of Pro and Premier that allow more than one user to access your data at the same time for an additional price.
Intuit also offers one version of QuickBooks for Mac.
My accountant says he has a few clients who upgrade their version of QuickBooks every year, so in order to complete their tax returns, he must also upgrade every year. It looks like I’d be best suited for QuickBooks Pro but I want to do as much as I can in the free version of Simple Start.
There are too many flavors of QuickBooks to list, but you can find discounted prices on all Intuit QuickBooks products here.
Soon. As in, October-soon.
It looks like the first iPhone app to bring us real-time traffic alerts, and that comes with offline maps, will be the Navigon MobileNavigator (Earlier CNET review. iTunes Store link.)
The AT&T Navigator (CNET review) also has live traffic data, but takes more time to download maps as you go, and while initially free, has a $10 monthly fee. Navigon has a steep $90 price tag, and you’ll pay $20 or $25 for the live traffic upgrade, but if you use it for more than a year, it’s already cheaper than the AT&T version.
(I’d like to take a moment to congratulate both Navigon and AT&T for sensibly choosing just one business model – monthly fee, or upfront fee – instead of both. Too many companies these days get away with a charge upfront and also making you pay monthly. I’m sure they have their reasons, but as a consumer, it just seems wrong.)
I’ve already recently cut at least 5 minutes off my daily commute by utilizing traffic data of other drivers. This is a win/win, since bad traffic throws me in a rage faster than anything else, and I’m not the most defensive driver. If I can have a tool with me that warns me of upcoming traffic problems, and helps me navigate around them, so much the better.
On the other hand, it seems I’m always driving to the same ten or twelve places. I’m not what marketers like to call a “road warrior” (isn’t this just a euphemism for salesperson?), so I don’t think I can justify the cost just yet.
Have you used the Navigon or AT&T apps? What do you think?
Navigon GPS iPhone app to get live traffic, Dong Ngo, CNET, Sep. 16, 2009
Photo credit: borderlys
The news in personal finance today is that Intuit, the makers of Quicken and TurboTax, purchased internet start-up Mint, a service that has come into its own in the past few years. The two companies offer competing products: Quicken Online and Mint are both free web applications that aggregate your financial information across a wide variety of banks, credit cards, and investment accounts.
We’ve reviewed both offerings at Consumerism Commentary. We offered one of the first looks at Quicken Online as well as an early look at Mint, both from 2007. We’ve also spoken to representatives from each of the companies for the Consumerism Commentary Podcast. On May 3, we spoke with Aaron Patzer, the CEO of Mint and on June 7, we spoke with Barron Ernst, the product manager of Quicken Online. Both interviews offered interesting insights into the software and the philosophy behind the companies.
There has been fierce competition between the two companies as they raced to announce higher user numbers. Intuit challenged Mint not too long ago to substantiate their claims that they were adding 3,000 users a day. Any bitterness seems to have subsided for the time being. Mint seemed to be winning the battle over users, and it’s not a bad move for Intuit to buy the competition.
Each application has its own strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I use the desktop version of Quicken to manage my own finances. I don’t believe the software is perfect, but I prefer it above any of the web-based applications.
With this deal, Intuit obtains customers it was unable to reach and Mint obtains the backing of one of the best-known software brands. Intuit will continue offering both web-based services for free, and there are no current plans to integrate one set of users into the other piece of software. How long will it continue to make sense to maintain two highly similar services under one roof? Consolidating the users of the two separate services into one larger user base would solidify the surviving software’s spot at the summit among other similar services such as Geezeo.
Read Quicken’s announcement | Read Mint CEO Aaron Patzer’s opinion
Until now, I never paid much attention to the different companies and providers, but I’ve learned that not all GPS devices are equal. I’ve recently been tempted by the TomTom app for the iPhone, especially in connection with the car kit. Turn-by-turn directions, as well as charging my phone, and playing music through the car’s speakers? Yes, please.
But I don’t just go throwing around $100 at every iPhone app. I figured it was at least worth a little research, and I found that one of TomTom’s special attractors is something they call IQ Routes. In short: they gather anonymous user data to provide:
… the driving experience of millions of TomTom users into your maps, calculating your route based on actual speeds driven on roads compared to speed limits. With TomTom IQ Routes you always get the smartest, most efficient route. Saving you time, fuel and money by driving like a local.
Much the same as GMail’s method of eliminating spam e-mail, TomTom “crowdsources” traffic routes in order to save you time. The good news is that you can try out their route planner for free right now and see if it can shed any light on some of your normal routes.
When I started my new job last November, I spent weeks trying different scenarios to and from work, and thought I had it nailed, so I was shocked when I tried the route planner and found a new way home that saved me 5 minutes.
And as we all know, time is money, and in this case, fuel. Give it a try yourself and let us know in the comments how it works out for you.
For the increasing number of Mac users in the audience, today’s the day to start deciding whether you want to upgrade your operating system: “Snow Leopard” is on the scene.
Number-wise, this is a move to OS 10.6. It will only work on Apple computers with an Intel processor and at least 1 GB of RAM. For anybody whose Mac came with 10.5 (Leopard), this should include you. And for you, it’s a $29 upgrade. (Users of 10.4 “Tiger” will need to spend more if they want to upgrade, but it’s still possible.)
The $29 fee is kind of a double-edged sword for me: it’s the cheapest operating system upgrade of, I think, my entire life. And yet, because it’s so inexpensive, that must mean it’s not necessarily worthwhile. Apple’s been pretty upfront about that, though… most of the changes are pretty boring.
Here’s what I recommend for right now:
Personally, I’ll be watching to see what new gee-whiz features Apple will soon introduce that won’t work on anything earlier than 10.6.
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