Quicken and QuickBooks

As a personal finance program, Quicken is much more than adequate. You can keep your books, generate reports, connect to your bank online, and even print checks using special checks that fit computer printers. The features go on and on. You can create budgets, figure out your taxes, and even order a copy of your credit report. Scads of helpful info about mortgages, taxes, investments and other personal finance issues are available, including handy things like mortgage calculators. Several financial planners let you plug in numbers to work out things like savings, refinancing, and retirement.

Quicken is the package of choice for online banking, and it works very well. Connecting to your bank over the Internet is exquisite. I travel all over the world, but as long as I have Quicken on my laptop, I can check balances, pay bills and transfer money between accounts easily. Getting logged on can be problematic, but the blame there lies with my bank and not with Quicken.

Quicken's investment accounts make keeping track of mutual funds easy. We curse the IRS for making us keep track of such esoterica as long-term capital gains, short-term gains, 401ks, etc. etc. as we thank Quicken for building all this junk right into the program. You can even track investment results online.

Memorized transactions save a lot of keystrokes. As you type the first few letters of a payee into an account register, Quicken will automatically fill in the rest, allowing you to use the info as is, or modify it before entering the transaction. The Windows application is excellent, and getting around the program is easy and flexible.

The only big beef about Quicken will be heard from those with some bookkeeping background. Modern accounting uses what's called a "double-entry" system, meaning that every transaction affects two accounts, one of which receives a "debit" and one a "credit." It's not a complicated system, but it may be confusing to the average non-bookkeeper, so Quicken does not use it. Instead, they divide accounts into two different types. Balance sheet accounts (assets and liabilities) are called "accounts," while expense and income accounts are referred to as "categories," and Quicken does not require (but does allow) a balancing credit for each debit.

Experienced bookkeepers may experience cardiac arrest at the thought of being able to enter unbalanced transactions, but the solution is simple. Don't do it. You can do perfectly normal double-entry accounting in Quicken once you get used to calling your income and expense accounts "categories." The only limitation is that you cannot enter transactions into "categories" directly. This is an annoyance, but can be gotten around.

Quicken is very stable. I've been using it for a decade, upgrading to the newest version from time to time, and have never lost any data, or experienced any major bugs.

Quicken is a bit inflexible, and doesn't provide for sharing information with other applications like spreadsheets. When you generate a report, you can copy it and paste it into a word processor or some such, but that's about it. It was never designed for business use, so it isn't surprising that it lacks importing and exporting functionality, but a little more open architecture would be nice.

Although Quicken does tend to force you to do things their way, and has a few small but annoying quirks, overall it's a good package that does its job well. Quicken is a good choice for personal users, and even for some small businesses. It's not a business-oriented package, however, and does not support things like payroll and invoices. For business users, Intuit offers the similarly-named but very different QuickBooks.

QuickBooks

Unlike Quicken, QuickBooks is based on a standard double-entry accounting system. It's also designed with more data-entry functionality. In other words, instead of entering transactions into accounts directly, you perform activities like creating invoices, receiving payments, etc. which automatically update the proper accounts.

Although QuickBooks doesn't have the artificial distinction between balance sheet accounts and income/expense accounts that Quicken does, it does display different types of accounts differently, which makes it confusing and hard to edit data. For example, when you view an Accounts Receivable account in the register, you can see each entry, but not the balance of the account.

Creating invoices is one of the things you need a business-oriented package for. The system keeps a file of all your customers, so when you create a new invoice, their billing information is automatically included. Alas, QuickBooks' invoicing is very limited in functionality, as well as difficult to use.

You can customize your invoices slightly by specifying what fields are to appear. By going to the Layout Designer screen, you can customize the layout, fonts and so forth of your invoice. This is very clunky and hard to use, and you don't get many options. You can't add any information to the invoice other than what is in the fields, and you have only very limited flexibility in how those fields are presented. The fields themselves can't be customized, so the invoicing can't be adapted to different types of billing. For example, online ads are sold by the thousand, but you can't set up a QuickBooks invoice to calculate the price per thousand. The price must be specified per item, which customers may find confusing if they're used to being billed by units other than one. Also, you can't set QuickBooks to default to your custom invoice. Every time you create an invoice, it will default to their generic invoice, and you have to choose your custom invoice manually, adding several keystrokes to your data entry tasks.

One extremely annoying thing about QuickBooks is that you are required to register, by phone! It's nagware that you paid for, if you can believe it. Every time you boot the program, a registration screen pops up, telling you to call a toll-free number to register. What happens when you call? You guessed it, you wait on hold until you finally hang up in despair. When you eventually get through, you have to go through a lengthy session of button-pushing. If you refuse to register, QuickBooks stops working after a few uses. Now, registration can be a wonderful thing, but not when a paying customer is required to wait on hold when a plain old mail-in card or email form would have worked just as well. This is the only software package I've ever seen that had this ludicrous registration policy.

The last straw is that our review copy of QuickBooks exhibited an occasional bug, failing to record transactions properly on the first try. Bugs are always annoying, but they're unacceptable in an accounting program. Did that last transaction take, or not? An accounting program with bugs is worse than useless, so it's safe to assume that these will be fixed in a future release (or the product will be discontinued).