When you boil Quicken down to its essence, it does six things:
- You can track your tax deductions.
This feature makes preparing your personal or business tax return easier for you or your poor accountant, Cratchit.
- You can monitor your income and outgo either on-screen or by using printed reports.
Usually this stuff is great fodder for discussions about the family finances.
- You can you print checks.
This device is mostly a time-saver, but it can also be useful for people who are neat freaks.
- You can track the things you own (such as bank accounts, investments, and real estate) and the debts you owe (such as home mortgage principal, car loan balances, and credit card balances).
These things are really important to know.
- You can make better personal financial planning decisions about such matters as retirement, your children's future college costs, and your savings and investments.
Every little bit of help . . . helps.
- You can enjoy the opportunity to pay bills electronically and, in some cases, even do all your banking electronically.
If you opt for online banking, be sure to educate yourself about the processes and fees associated with this techno convenience.
Tracking tax deductions
To track your tax deductions, make a list of the deductions you want to track. To do so, pull out last year's tax return. Note which lines you filled in. This method works because there's a darn good chance that the tax deductions you claimed last year will also be the tax deductions you'll claim in the future.
Monitoring spending
Never hurts to pay attention to where your money's going — especially when the dough seems to disappear on the mundane little necessities of life: groceries, clothing, baby food, cable television, and, well . . . you get the picture. To keep track of how much you spend on various items, you can use the Quicken categories.
 | If you want to monitor a particular spending category, decide up front what the category should be before you begin recording your data. |
Your list of spending categories, by the way, shouldn't be an exhaustive list of superfine pigeonholes such as "Friday-night Mexican food," "Fast food for lunch," and so on. To track your spending on eating out, one category named something like "Meals" or "Grub" usually is easiest.
In fact, you can probably get away with a dozen categories, more or less:
- Household expenses (besides food)
- Rent (or mortgage payments)
- Utilities (electric, water, cable television)
- Entertainment and vacation
If you want to, of course, you can expand this list. Heck, you can create dozens and dozens of categories. You'll probably use only a handful of categories.
Printing checks
You can use Quicken to print checks. This little trick provides a couple of benefits: It's really fast if you have several checks to print, and your printed checks look very neat and darn professional.
To print checks, you need to do just two things. First, look through the check supply information that comes with Quicken and pick a check form that suits your style. Then order the form. (The check forms that come with remittance advices — or check stubs — work well for businesses.)
Preprinted check forms aren't cheap. If you're using Quicken at home with personal-style checks (such as those that go in your wallet), using computer checks may not be cost effective. Even if you're using Quicken for a business and you are used to buying those outrageously expensive business-style checks, you'll still find computer checks a bit more expensive.
 | Although you can order Quicken check forms from other sources (such as your local office supplies store), they're about the same price from Intuit (the maker of Quicken). If you want to order from Intuit, you can refer to the catalog that came in the packaging. You can also visit Intuit's Web site, Quicken.com. |
Tracking bank accounts, credit cards, and other stuff
You must decide which bank accounts and credit cards you want to track. In most cases, you want to track each bank account you use and any credit card on which you carry a balance.
You may also want to track other assets and liabilities. Assets are just things you own: investments, cars, a house, and so on. Liabilities are things you owe: margin loans from your broker, car loans, a mortgage, and so on.
Planning your personal finances
Your computer's computational horsepower makes it the ideal tool for doing complicated calculations. So maybe you're not very surprised that Quicken comes with six powerful calculators that let you make smarter borrowing choices, better mortgage-refinancing decisions, more accurate savings and investment calculations, and extremely helpful retirement and college savings calculations.
Banking online
If you want, you can tell Quicken that it should do the work of electronically paying some person or merchant. In other words, at the same time as you describe some check to Quicken — you do so by entering stuff into a window — you can say to Quicken, "I not only want you to record this check for me, but I also want you to pay for me."
If your bank supports online banking, you may also be able to move money between your accounts and get up-to-date statements electronically. Ask your bank for details about this service if you're interested.
To perform this sort of online banking, you need to have an Internet connection, and you need to do a certain amount of paperwork. Not to worry. The Quicken Online Banking features can save you scads of time, and the features are very easy to use. Basically, all you do is use Quicken in the usual way and then click a couple of extra buttons.
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