Quicken Online — Free Personal Finance Manager

Quicken — the guys behind some of the most popular finance tools in the home and workplace today — has finally learned from the Internet start-ups what the people want:  Free Personal Finance Management.  And they’ve launched Quicken Online to feed the starving masses. 

The Quicken Online manager is not unlike the rest of the personal finance managers — Wesabe, Buxfer, Mint — but it is worth talking about.

The setup is pretty basic, you select your banking institutions, enter your login information and Quicken takes over setting up your online account and retrieving your activity from the previous 90 days.  After you’re set up, you’re taken to your dashboard where the your accounts are listed and you can set up monthly bill reminders, and look at a pie chart that breaks down your spending habits.

The one thing that I particularly like is that the first thing on the dashboard is a header that reads “Am I Living Within My Means?” followed by three boxes that show you your “Money In” “Money Out” and “So, I Saved”.  I like the way this is laid out — It puts your monthly finance in very simple, blunt terms:  Are you spending more than you make?  And similar to Wesabe, Quicken Online has also integrated a community message board for their users.  You can submit questions and get feedback from other users and help others answer questions.

Classifying expenses is easy, you click on any unclassified expense category on the pie chart and a box pops up that allows you to select which category your expense falls into.  You can also edit/add a category if needed.  Although, if you have quite a few of the same expenses (meaning from the same vendor) it doesn’t look like there is a way to classify multiple transactions at the same time — like the way Mint allows you to do.  This could possibly be very time consuming if you use a debit card often and have tons of small transactions.

There’s a “My Budget” tab that takes you to a budget home page where you can create budgets for your monthly spending.  Once you set your spending limits, you can easily check to see how much you’ve spent for the month on an easy-to-read chart.  It also tells you exactly how much money you have left in each budget category, which is helpful when you need to see how much you have left in a pinch.  At the top of the page, it shows your overall monthly spending versus your spending goal — which you set to reflect your goal for the month.

The “Track Spending” tab is fun to use.  You click on the parts of the pie chart to view your spending habits in each category broken down by month, so you can see which months your various spending categories went up or down, for instance if your grocery spending went up $100 from last month.  This is helpful in keeping an eye out to make sure your spending is controlled.

The “My Transactions” Tab is basically your banking statement for the month.  You can see each individual transaction just like you would on your banks’ website.  You can also categorize expenses here by using the drop-down menu that pops up when you click on a category.

While Quicken Online isn’t all too different from the rest of the online financial tools that are out there, it is definitely a great management program and offers a simple and effective platform to manage and track your spending.  And while some people are wary of putting their personal financial information out on the web, many may feel safer viewing their finances over the web with a company that has a trusted history rather than with a relatively new start-up.  So hop on over to Quicken Online, try it out and let us know what you think.

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