Quicken discounts of $20 off Quicken Deluxe and Quicken Premier are available for the next two weeks. Intuit is running the special offer since the personal finance software Microsoft Money is no longer available for sale.

Microsoft Money Discountinued

Although Microsoft Money will be supported through the end of 2010 many long time Money users are up in the air since they’ve been entering their financial data into the personal finance software package for many years.  Being able to go back and look at reports on past financial data is one of the benefits of using a software package for analysis and planning.

Since people want to be able to look back at their personal finance history over time, they’re concerned that they won’t have those years worth of financial data they entered in Money alongside new personal finance information they enter in the future in a new package.

In a recent email, Intuit gave an update on their ability to help out former Microsoft Money users.  According to the email, Quicken is able to transfer up to 10,000 transactions from Microsoft Money and they are working on making it easier for people to transfer more of their data into Quicken.

Quicken Discounts

Intuit is also offering a Quicken discount of $20 off the following products for the next two weeks:

• Quicken Deluxe

• Quicken Premier

• Quicken Home & Business

• Quicken Rental Property Manager

You don’t need any special Quicken coupon codes, the discounted offer is available to anyone who wants to start using Quicken or upgrade Quicken versions.

Quicken Online is a separate product from the desktop versions like Quicken Deluxe, but it does have some similarities. One of my favorites features of Quicken in general is it’s ability to automatically categorize your spending based on where you made a purchase.  Quicken Online learns from all the data its users upload, so the more people that use the tool, the better it gets at recognizing and categorizing transactions.

One suggestion I had during the Quicken Online review was for the Intuit team to add in the ability to aggregate user data for comparisons.  If you’ve ever used TurboTax you’ll remember the section towards the end where the software shows how you compare to other tax filers.  I think it would be interesting and useful to see how you compare to other Quicken Online users in terms of where you’re spending your money.

The Trends feature of Quicken Online already offers some insightful data you can use for comparisons but nothing that compares your spending behavior to other people.  Of course you can get a good snapshot of your income and expenses with the current Trends section.  The charts make it easy to see where you’re spending most of your money for the current month and trending over time as well.  Another cool feature is that Quicken Online looks at your highest spending categories and makes savings suggestions on how much you could save a year by cutting a certain percentage of that spending.

One last thing about Quicken Online and Intuit products in general that I think helps add to their usefulness is a program they call their Inner Circle.  It’s a user feedback program that anyone can join.  You have to sign a non disclosure agreement but you get early access to new features in some of their products and can offer your feedback so they can incorporate user preferences into their products. That wraps up the Quicken Online overview, if it sounds like a useful tool for your money then give it a try, it’s free – Quicken Online Signup

Quicken Online was developed with the goal of helping people live within their means.  In my conversation with Barron, he discussed how many people only have a little bit of money left over each month and can’t afford to pay late fees or bounced check fees and need to watch their money carefully.

Since Quicken Online is available from anywhere via a mobile device it’s setup to help consumers make quick buying decisions when they’re at the store.  You can set it up so you can check your bank balance on the go so you know before you buy something what your balance is and whether you can afford it.

Quicken Online Mobile

If you use your phone to record checks written in Quicken Online you can take a quick look at how much is in your account and what checks are still outstanding before you spend money that you don’t have.  Mobile access is available on all phones at m.quicken.com, using the WAP protocol to give you access to Quicken Online.  In addition to checking your balance the software also has an ATM list, to help you find your bank’s ATM and avoid fees when you need money.

Intuit has also created an iPhone app that makes the ATM feature more intelligent.  The iPhone app for Quicken Online will find ATM’s near your current location and highlight those that belong to your bank.  You can also check your credit card balances from Quicken Online mobile so you have a dashboard of all the money you have in the bank and all the money you’ve spent.

Next post we’ll talk about the trends page that helps analyze your spending patterns and suggests ways to cut spending and save money.

Quicken Online is a free, web-based personal finance tool you can use to keep track of your money.  Quicken Online product manager, Barron Ernst, got on the phone with me a while back to talk about the tool and some of the features it offers.  I’ve been busy with our new baby and my job so I’m just now writing up our conversation.  We talked about a lot of things so I’ll break it up over a few posts.

I’ve been using Quicken at home for more than 10 years so my first question was, “is there any benefit for me to use Quicken Online?” What I didn’t realize is that Intuit has setup Quicken Online to be more of a cash flow tool than a total personal finance application.

The desktop products, like Quicken Deluxe and Quicken Premier, have capabilities such as investing research, portfolio management, tax information, net worth tracking, etc.  You could spend hours with these Desktop tools doing financial analysis and planning. 

Rather than try and squeeze all that into Quicken Online, Barron and his team created the online version to be a tool to help you know where your money was going for cash flow purposes.  It’s setup to help you avoid overdrafts, not spend more than you make, and to look at how you spend your money and make spending recommendations.

They’ve seen a lot of people using the advanced features of the destop software at home but also taking advantage of the “anywhere access” offered by Quicken online.  Next time I’ll look at the mobile options they’ve created that let you use Quicken Online when you’re out to help make spending decisions.