I got into the Quicken Online beta
November 17, 2007A few weeks back I put my name in to get on the Quicken Online beta. I just got my invite today and signed up, so far it’s pretty good. Though I’m not sure it’s good enough that I really would want to replace the desktop financial software with this online version.
Now one nice feature is of course that Quicken Online is, well, online. I signed up for it on my laptop but I can view it from anywhere, unlike with the desktop software that you can only run from one PC.
And I did like that Quicken Online takes full advantage of the fact that it is online. You set up connections to your various bank accounts and they all get displayed automatically. Plus it does a pretty good job of categorizing your expenses automatically, though surprisingly it did not realize that my payments to “Countrywide” were in fact mortgage payments. Those I had to categorize manually.
Several of the tabs in the beta aren’t actually working yet–you hover over them and you get a little help window that says “Coming Soon!” Specifically, the online bill-pay and the link to tax prep. It’s the tax prep that really seems cool — that is the part I have trouble with today because I’m not consistent about setting up the tax categories. If their auto-categorization can pick things up and provide consistent categorization I might actually find some additional deductions. Which might make it worth paying for this service.
Now that’s the rub though–in terms of the packaged software I don’t have to upgrade very often. Every few years really, so I don’t spend that much money. If the annual fee for Quicken Online is more than, say, $20, it’s going to cost me more than buying the software version. So then I have to decide if the tax-prep support makes up for the additional cost.
We’ll see, I haven’t seen anything on their site yet detailing what the final costs will be.