REVIEW
David Shapshak
Quicken 2001 Deluxe, about R429
Once Microsoft has its eye on your particular segment of the software market, you might as well pack up your bags and go home, many in the information technology industry believe.
Like its now dominant Internet Explorer, through which Microsoft took on Netscape and won, the feeling is that the software giant can bring its considerable resources to bear on the small fry and either buy or squeeze them out.
Not so with at least one major product that Microsoft has brought out. Microsoft Money has not been able to dislodge Quicken, an early personal and small business accounting package that is still the market leader.
In a recent column respected technology commentator for online magazine Zdnet, David Coursey, highlighted Quicken as one of the few products that bucked the trends and an early obituary.
“Intuit, the maker of Quicken, seems to still be doing quite nicely. It’s perhaps the only packaged applications company that has been assaulted by Microsoft – and won. But there was a period of time, around the release of Microsoft Money, that some people thought Intuit’s days were surely numbered,” he wrote.
Score one for the little guy. Quicken has come a long way and the latest edition, Quicken 2001 Deluxe, has more features and added value than every before.
Quicken is the ultimate financial manager. It lets you balance your finances (most major banks let you download your statements in the Quicken file format), create budgets, generate reports, do tax planning; while it has improved its chequebook balancing and investment tracking.
For the uninitiated, it can take a fair bit of time to familiarise yourself with the interface, which is much easier to use and more intuitive in this edition. It has an icon-based one click toolbar that is customisable, while you can specify what you want to be displayed.
A navigation bar down the right-hand side gives you quick and easy access to a variety of personal financial options, which sum up the major functionality the software offers: personal finances, banking, investing, your household expenditure, tax, planning options, small business functionality and reports and graphs.
Using the banking facility is really simple. Download your bank statements and then use the existing expense/income categories to “tag” all the items (from cellphone bills to household groceries, medical expenses to petrol). New categories are easily created and using this enriched information your personal finances come to life. A variety of graphs demonstrate how you are using your money and what percentage whatever expenses are consuming.
By seeing what you are doing with your money in such a graphic way, it makes it easier to save money. The investment tracking lets you keep an eye on all of your varied investments and see how they are performing.
For small businesses, many of whose proprietors have their personal and business accounts tied up, it is invaluable. It keeps track of your invoices and customer payments, generates job estimates, can calculate your VAT, tracks your income and expenses and will put it all into a graph. In short, it does the business bookkeeping with a minimum of fuss. Quicken will even print out cheques for you.
Additionally, it lets you create and print professional estimates and quotes for customers, as well as converting these to invoices. Both can be generated as an HTML file that can be e-mailed to a client.
The planning section lets you plot a variety of things, based on your net income, assets and liabilities. Your current income, savings and investments can be modelled very nicely. It even has a debt planner that you can use to plan for “what if” debt scenarios.
Alerts are a useful feature that do just that: alert you when you need to be reminded to pay a bill or get a cheque from a client.
It’s no wonder that Quicken has maintained its top-dog status.