Quicken Online Review: Track Spending Quick for Free

Quicken Online is a product I’ve been meaning to review for quite some time no more. It is now Mint.com.

If you’d like to do your budgeting using Quicken software on your computer, you can get free shipping from Quicken right now.

I finally got around to playing around with the online financial software this weekend. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to sign up (literally one page), how quickly I could connect my financial accounts (just minutes), and how smooth and clean the web interface was.

Understanding Your Finances

I firmly believe that to have success with our financial situation we need to understand what savings and investments we have, how much we owe, and what we’re spending our money on. This is literally step one to getting it right when it comes to handling money. I call it, seeing the big picture.

Why should we bother? Because we have goals for our money: giving more of it away, saving more of it for security, spending more of it on experience. To get to those things in life, we need to put forth a little effort. Taking the time to understand it all is step one.

That being said, Quicken Online will help anyone understand their full financial situation fairly quickly. Here’s the account sign up page…

Connect Your Accounts

After the ultra brief account sign up process, you’re greeted with a search box and list of financial institutions. Here you can search for all your financial accounts: banks, investment firms, credit card companies, other lenders, etc. Here’s a nice screen shot of the account finder page, followed by the account log-in page:

I was able to find all but one of my accounts. For some reason I could not locate one of our student loan providers, EdFinancial Services. I’ve had this problem with online financial software in the past. This has been a source of frustration as I’m not really seeing my entire financial situation in one spot.

Oh well, at least it’s just one account. Here’s hoping my review will get the Quicken Online folks to add that institution. Speaking of the Quicken Online folks, if you ever have a question about Quicken Online, you should connect with their social media queen, Chelsea. Follow Chelsea on Twitter.

Tracking Your Spending

Once you’ve connected your accounts, tracking your spending is automatic. When you connected your checking accounts, Quicken Online automatically imported 90 days worth of activity. So, you’re ready to see where you spend your money. You’ll likely have to go in an categorize some transactions, as the banks providing the data don’t always provide a good explanation of the item.

Set Goals and See Trends

I tend to want to stop at just seeing all my accounts in one spot. However, if you’re feeling ambitious, you can dig into the goals and trend sections of the website. Both look pretty cool and could be just the thing you need to achieve your personal savings goals or to curb some spending.

Security Concerns

Intuit, the creator of Quicken Online, go to great lengths to explain how they ensure customer security. If you have concerns in this area I challenge you to check out the privacy promise and security video.

The Quicken Online Blog

One last note about Quicken Online. They have a blog of their own, the Quicken Online Blog. There you’ll find quality articles on saving, budgeting, spending less, and Quicken Online product updates as well. Yours truly is actually a contributing guest blogger on a monthly basis. Read my post from last month on getting serious about savings.

Now it’s your turn. Share your thoughts on tracking your spending and using Quicken Online in the comment section below…

If you’d like to do your budgeting using Quicken software on your computer, you can get free shipping from Quicken right now.

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Last Edited: February 18, 2012 @ 12:51 pm

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Chelsea

Hi ChuckO,

I've seen you post this same message on quite a few blogs over the last couple of days.

We've expanded our list of financial institutions by quite a bit, and the problems you're reporting aren't something we're experiencing. You can troubleshoot this though within the product, by clicking on accounts, then clicking the specific account. Here you can refresh the account manually, or re-enter your credentials (believe it or not, sometimes it's just a matter of a transposed letter or misspelling).

Since Quicken Online is a free product, the support we offer is moderated by employees, and is geared toward helping users self-solve. QuickenCommunity.com is accessible to you anytime (and has been for a long time) In order to make it easier to navigate, it's organized by product. We're not separating Quicken Online users from the pack for any reason other than to make it easier to find help.

We're constantly working to improve the support experience, updating our Q&A (found here: https://quickenonline.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/quickenonline.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=7058).

Hope some of this helps.

- Chelsea, Quicken Online

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ChuckO

Three weeks into Quicken Online - and I'm dumping it. It is a nice thought, but riddled with issues. The worst of which is the inability to consistently get data synced with your financial institution. You may successfully get Quicken Online to link with your accounts, but then either never get transaction data or a generic "unknown" error. Their outsourced Tech Support for the product is essentially non-existent as you will get nothing more than generalized form letters back and never any resolution. Quicken recently isolated their community forum for the online product from their paid products, and based on the number of complaints and issues in the Online forum, one can take a stabbing guess as to why. Sometimes, things are free for a reason.

@Chelsea - Thanks! Added EdFinancial to the list.

@Lauren - That's great. I was surprised at how fast it was too. I hope it helps with the finances.

Hi PT,

Very thorough review. Thanks for looking at the product so in-depth.

@Jason & @PT: If you haven't done so, you can request that we add any financial institution we don't currently support here: http://twurl.nl/ruznws (we'll send you an email when we add it). We are always adding more financial institutions, so stay tuned for more soon.

On the goals page, you can also set up mobile and email alerts, so there's a lot that can be done to customize a plan for curbing spending with that feature.

Last thing, you can also follow @QuickenOnline on Twitter for news about Quicken Online (http://twitter.com/QuickenOnline).

Lauren

Just set one up, i literally less than 5 minutes! I'm excited, thanks for the post!

@Jason - I would think they'd naturally have more because their out-of-the box software has been around for a long time and they've had a chance to build relationships there. I can't say exactly though.