Review Date January 09, 2014

Quicken Deluxe 2014

  • Pros

    Comprehensive management of personal finances. Connects to numerous types of online accounts. Detailed transaction management. Good level of customizability. Online bill-pay. Easy navigation. Mobile versions can snap receipt photos and attach them.

  • Cons Too much for many users. Can't access everything remotely.
  • Bottom Line


By Kathy Yakal

Getting Around

Despite its depth, Quicken is easy to navigate, thanks to a user interface that has been cleaned up and streamlined throughout the years. Its default home page displays two simple, critical charts that tell you at a glance where your money has come from in the last 30 days and where it's been spent.

This content is customizable, though. You can select from a variety of mini-reports and graphs—things like Alerts, Calendar, Expenses and Income Year-to-Date—by clicking the Customize button. Each has its own set of options that can personalize your display. The data here is interactive: You can click on an entry to drill down into deeper detail. Quicken lets you create multiple Views containing different groups of content.

The left vertical pane lists all of your active accounts, along with your current net worth. The top toolbar has only three tabs in addition to the Home page: Spending, Bills and Planning. Links in the upper right provide access to information about your synchronization with mobile devices (you can send data to the Quicken Cloud, to be picked up remotely) and any active alerts (email and texts can alert you to events like Unusual Spending, Low Balance and Over Budget). You can initiate a synchronization right from this screen and select a budget to display on your smartphone or tablet.

Intuit has done a masterful job of tucking away access to the tools you'll need at the time you're likely to need them. So Quicken's look is deceiving at first glance. You don't know how much it can actually do until you start poking around. There's no real menu or program-wide navigational system that you have to keep revisiting (though there are some abbreviated menus that you may occasionally visit). Once you take off on a particular chore, you'll usually find its related activities within easy reach.

Exceptional Detail
The Spending tab give you access to the tools you'll need to manage and track your income and expenses (though you can set up a Home page view that gets you there, too). There's really very little visible here, just a view of either incoming or outgoing money that can be customized by date range and account.

But you can do tremendously detailed work on individual transactions. Highlight one in the list, and you can manage it in a number of ways. For example, you can change or add one or more categories to it, split it, enter notes and attach flags, void or memorize it, attach a file from your computer or one you've captured with your smartphone, etc. This excruciating level of detail sets Quicken apart from everyone else.

Quicken Deluxe 2014

You'll only need to click on the Bills tab if you want to be reminded to pay specific bills or you plan to use Quicken Bill Pay to dispatch payments electronically, either through the Quicken software itself or the website. Intuit has offered this service since the mid-90s, so the process is easy to use and as secure as a bank website.

Quicken used to be the go-to program for anyone who wanted to manage their personal finances on a computer. As more people have gone mobile and begun to prefer cloud-based solutions, though, it's been eclipsed by applications like Intuit's own It still provides detailed, flexible answers to your money in/money out questions, and it interacts with online tools where it can. Its Apple and Android versions give you remote access to the data you'll most likely need when you're standing in line waiting to buy something.

But its core remains on your hard drive. If you micromanage your personal finances, it might well be worth the location limitations to have access to that detailed level of financial minutia. For basic account management, categorization of transactions, budgeting and real-time, insightful reports, though, is a better solution, and our Editors' Choice for personal finance software.

By Kathy Yakal


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