Better Budgeting With Personal Finance Software

If money management is a priority, consider Quicken or Microsoft Money

By Jeff Bertolucci, Contributing Writer, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

October 2005

As bank Web sites become more sophisticated, they're starting to offer money-management tools that approach those of established personal-finance programs Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money. Wells Fargo's "My Spending Report" and EverBank's account aggregation tools, for instance, are two examples of money-management features that bank sites didn't provide a few years ago.

So if bank sites offer these tools, why spend anywhere from $20 to $90 for a copy of Quicken or Money? Because despite their recent upgrades, bank sites are still light-years behind personal finance managers (PFMs). "In terms of bells and whistles, and massaging the data, bank sites aren't near where PFMs were 13 to 15 years ago," says Jim Bruene, publisher of Online Banking Report.

Take spending categorization. Quicken and Money provide a level of detail that the best bank sites can't match. In addition to automatically organizing expenses into categories -- restaurants, lodging and so forth -- PFMs show how much you've spent at a particularly retailer (such as Target). They also offer far more reports, charts, and budget and investing tools that slice and dice your financial data in numerous ways. Quicken 2006, for instance, has a new report called Current Spending Vs. Average Spending by Category. As its name implies, this report tallies your transactions in a specific category -- dining out, let's say -- and compares this month's spending versus your monthly average for the year. In seconds, you can easily determine if you're busting your culinary budget.

Overall, the 2006 versions of Quicken and Money are excellent money managers. Each is intelligently designed, useful for novices and experts alike, and has more financial tools that most people will ever need. Each works with your bank's bill-pay service, or you can use its own offering. For example, Quicken Bill Pay works with up to 10 different accounts and costs $9.95 per month. Money's service is free. (Individual banks may charge for these services, however.)

Which is best? We'll take Quicken by a slim margin because it has a few additional perks, including the ability to archive images of checks. This feature comes in handy if your bank supplies only two to three months of images, as is the case with Bank of America, Citibank, Wachovia and Wells Fargo. (Note: Quicken Basic doesn't archive check images, but the Deluxe, Premier, and Home & Business editions do.)

That said, stay away from Quicken or Money if all you want to do is pay checks, check account statements and quickly log off. If you're not a money geek who enjoys analyzing cash flows, viewing detailed reports of expenditures and creating dazzling pie charts of quarterly family budgets, stick with an online banking site. It's faster, easier and less expensive.

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