Free Quicken Online Review
By Pinyo • Oct 14th, 2008Until recently, Quicken Online costs $2.99 per month after a 60-day free trial period. Beginning October 13th, 2008 there is no longer a fee to use the Quicken Online program — yes, it’s free! Since I like free stuff, I signed up yesterday to get some first hand experience. In short, I like it. It’s similar to Mint.com (see Mint.com review here), but Quicken Online is simpler to use with a bit less functionality.
Set Up A Free Quicken Online Account
The set up was fast and easy. First, I went to the Quicken Online web site and select “Start Now”. The registration has less than 10 questions on just one screen — that’s it. Enter all the information and you are in.
Similar to other software in its genre, you first have to add your financial accounts. This step is easy as well. Search for your financial institutions by name and enter your username and password for that account when prompted. You can add all of your accounts, or just a few to try it out.
Four Main Areas To Analyze Your Finances
Once your account is all set up, there are four main areas to help you explore and better manage your finances.
Home — My Finances Dashboard
On the first HOME tab, you could quickly see the state of your finances — i.e., how much money came in, went out, and if you overspent or not. There’s also a nice pie chart that break down your expenses into categories so that you can quickly examine the group for opportunity to reduce your expenses. Lastly, there’s a neat time period slider that you can use to quickly see your cash flow for different time period.
The only complication I ran into is the fact that one of my financial institutions uses a double entry accounting system, making it a little more difficult to categorize income and expenses. For example, if you look at the picture above carefully, I didn’t overspend. The system treated some of my stock purchases as expenses against the savings account.
My Transactions
This tab provides full transactions listing so that it’s easier for you to categorize transactions and review activities across your accounts.
Track Spending
This is a neat tool that shows you top expenses by category. This is where you can use the Pareto Principle to reduce expenses without doing the manual tabulation work. Just click on the tab, and you can see where your money goes — viola! The second feature is the trending chart, which gives you and idea if you are doing better or worse with your expenses.
My chart looks worse than it actually is. If you look carefully, the biggest expense category is my recent stock purchases — that’s why the trend is way up in October.
My Budget
The last of the four major areas is a budgeting area where you can set budget for various categories of expenses.
Mobile & Email Alerts
Similar to Mint.com, you could set alerts to be sent to your mobile phone or email. Quicken Online offers the following alerts:
- Send reports of your financial highlights
- Send you bill reminders
- Send you balance and transactions alerts — i.e., if your checking goes below, credit card balance goes above, or if you post a large transaction
Community
Lastly, Quicken Online comes with a support community where you can chat with other users around the world. In addition, there’s also a blog where you find the latest information, tips, and tricks.
Overall, it’s not significantly different from Mint.com or Wasabe. However, I actually prefers Quicken Online slightly more than the other two due to its speed and simplicity. Have you tried Quicken Online? What do you think?
All posts by Pinyo
That’s cool that they went to free mode. Probably a good idea with all their competitors being free…although, how will any of these companies make money? (I guess just by recommending new financial products)
I’ll have to check this out now. I’m such a pf junkie right now…
@DebtKid Yes, that is how they make their money, by recommending other products and getting a referral fee or some such. I think it’s actually a better plan that way, being a paid service when there are so many free ones out there wasn’t going to get them a huge user base. Also, I can see several people buying their software if they have a good experience with Quicken Online. I still run Quicken 2005, and I’ll probably be upgrading to Quicken 2009 this year. Each new version hasn’t had any one thing that made me want to upgrade, but all of them combined have a few things that make me want to upgrade. It isn’t necessary, but I know I’ll probably use it for several years just like I did with the ‘05 version. I’m more a fan of the hands on approach with this than the “auto-pilot” approach, even if it means more time. I just don’t do like I should financially otherwise.
Thanks for reviewing this, part of my problem with online software like this is the lack of ability to have a cash account, and also, my primary financial institution tends to have problems with them. I use USAA, since my father was in the army, and as a teenager, I got some great deals with them (repaid for all ATM fees, good savings rate, instant transfers from savings to checking and vice-versa online, etc.) and enjoy their service. Quite a few people have problems with the regular USAA site and software like this, but I haven’t been able to get it to work at all for me, since I have to log in at the teen version of the site, otherwise I can’t do anything.
Hopefully these things will get worked out in the future. What I’d really like is for what I do on the Quicken software to get posted to a secure site online so I can view and edit it elsewhere, while still able to do things offline. Sort of like POP email access for my finances, heh. Then I can take advantage of things like the text message alerts, etc, while still using the offline software. I suppose it would have to be more like IMAP, though. And now that I’m getting a little techy with my rambling, I’m gonna call it quits.
Now that you’ve tried both Mint and Quicken, do you prefer one over the other? And why?
Wow, thanks for this article - you have no idea how timely this is for me!! I have been keeping track of everything in various spreadsheets, but I’ve been thinking about wanting something with more functions. I don’t have money for software in my budget, however!! I am going to check it out this weekend.
@DebtKid — For Mint.com, they are making money by referring other financial products to their users. I believe Quicken is trying to leverage the free online software to generate more sales for their premium products.
@John — I agree, it’s not perfect. For example, my credit union is not listed and my brokerage account has a lot of credit/debit transactions that just make it more complicated.
@Frugalchick — After using both Mint.com and Quicken, I prefer Quicken because it’s simpler and easier to use. For those who really want a lot of control and move capabilities, I would highly recommend Mint.com. I believe Mint.com just launched their investment portfolio module, which no one else has at the moment.
@Dawn — Definitely give it a try. It’s a nice tool.
It looks like it got un-Free. It tried the service last week. This week when I sign in I am prompted to sign-up for a paid service starting in December. WTF?
This seems like bait and switch to me!
@Michael — I just tried logging in and noticed the same thing. I sent them an email seeking clarification. If they are indeed doing a bait and switch, that’s not cool at all.
@Michael — I clarified it with my contact. That was a glitch. The software is free.
nice review w/ screenshots. linked!
When you take a second look at what this kind of free really means, it starts to feel a little less than what free should be. Getting you to sign under the free banner and then using your connection with Quicken as their direct platform to present, promote and offer other paid-for products and services, as well as mentioned above in this blog, simply using the free account as a bait to get you eventually to upgrade to the paid service hoping to use the “suck in” effect once you get used to the service, are some of the things you get with this free service.
But all of the above to me is not as crucial as one other aspect called privacy. What is common with all the big financial firms regarding online personal finance is the fact that they take not only your personal identity but also access to your bank accounts. This to me is the real deal breaker and if you want to compare all this to what totally free really means plus anonymous usage where you never give out your personal identity and access to your bank accounts, check out this little personal budgeting utility called Out Of The Dark (OOTD) located on the web at:
http://www.myexp.org/OOTD_gate.php
A friend told me about OOTD recently and I used it for about half a year now and it’s too good to be free. Maybe not as features rich as Quicken but if what you want to do is personal budgeting, it’s great and it also has a vibrant users billboard to converse with other OOTD users and tons of great help and guidance through the online help and OOTD blog.
Happy budgeting
It’s great that these personal financial management toolds exist but I have to be honest i am not a big fan of them, when you can acheive the same with an excel spreadsheet or pen and paper. Whilst I embrace most technology, I think that these are in my personal opinion a great waste of money that could be put to better use elsewhere
It’s hard to see waste of money on something that is free, as it is to see keeping paper notes or a computer with software installed which costs money, being better than having the entire budget in one place that can be accessible from anywhere in the world without having to carry papers or risking loosing them.
I personally think that we are already in the new era that is beyond paper notes and a desktop computer with software installed. Online is the way of the future.
Quicken also licenses this product out to banks for use by their customers. My bank, First Internet of Indiana uses it. I loke it because it uses the UI that you see in your review. Recently, my Quicken Online account switched to a new UI I do not like.
The reason I like it compared to Mint is the RealBalance feature in Quicken Online. I can enter a check written but not cashed and get my actual balance. This is the electronic equivalent of a check register. Mint does not do that yet.