Quicken is the best-selling financial software across all personal computer platforms, and it’s not hard to understand why: it’s easy to use yet loaded with features that help you take control of your finances.
Many of the new features in Quicken 5.0 are changes designed to make the program easier to use. There’s now an icon bar with buttons that provide graphical access to Quicken’s features. The new QuickMath feature lets you pop up a “paper tape” calculator in any dollar-amount field, which is useful for adding up several numbers when you want only the total. QuickMath also lets you set up macros for frequently used calculations, such as currency conversions or sales-tax calculations. The online help system has been improved, with a new, question-based how-to interface.
The most useful improvement. Financial Calendar, gives a picture of your transactions over time. Transactions appear on the day they occur; future transactions appear in blue type on the future date. To schedule a transaction, you can double-click on a date in the calendar; that brings up a register screen for the date, description, category, payment or deposit transaction, and so on. Via pop-up menus, you can also select one of ten preset intervals (weekly, quarterly, bimonthly, and so on) for recurring transactions, and you can have Quicken remind you of a transaction a specified number of days in advance.
You can also drag a transaction onto Financial Calendar from the program’s QuickFill list. The QuickFill feature automatically completes an entry every time you enter a transaction. For example, the next time you type the first few characters of a transaction with a payee you’ve entered before. Quicken completes the remaining data. You can also drag and drop any QuickFill transaction onto the check register, and you can now drag and drop categories onto the register to save typing.
There are a few limitations for recurring transactions. You can’t specify that transactions occur on a particular day of the month (such as on the second Friday of every month). Neither can you set a recurring transaction for the last day of every month. Say your company pays you on the 15th and the last day of the month. The 15th is no problem; but because months have 28, 30, or 31 days, you must manually create 12 transactions — one for the last day of each month.
Intuit’s Tax Planner module allows you to use your financial data to estimate your base tax position and to create up to two alternate tax scenarios. Tax Planner uses the improved Tax Links to assign some or all of your Quicken categories to specific line items on the IRS tax forms. When you click on an IRS line item, help text briefly explains the line item and suggests the types of categories that can be assigned to that line.
Tax Planner lets you calculate your tax position based on the Quicken information. You can even modify the information to get “what-if” scenarios reflecting different tax liabilities. With Quicken’s inclusion of Tax Planner, MECA’s Managing Your Money no longer has a competitive advantage in this area. Intuit also sells MacInTax, which reads Quicken files and uses Tax Links to complete your tax return. I did not test MacInTax and Quicken together, however, as MacInTax for the tax year 1994 had not yet been released.
Some of the changes are long overdue. The Reconciliation window is now larger and resizable. You can now sort transactions by type, number, or date. Quicken Quotes lets you download stock and mutual-fund quotes via your modem, and the updated price is automatically entered into your records; you can download the quotes either from CompuServe or from Intuit’s new 900 number. The 900 service costs $1 per minute, and most calls take less than a minute. Investment portfolios now give price histories in text lists, in addition to the price graph.
Quicken’s reports have been improved, mainly with the addition of two report types. Most useful is the QuickReport, which allows you to show all transactions for a particular payee, category, or account. Quicken has finally added a Comparison report type, which displays an income-and-expense report for two user-selected time periods. For example, you can see your expenses for the current year and compare them with last year’s expenses.
Quicken 4.0 required several maintenance releases, and it appears that Quicken 5.0 needs one, too. The first bug I found is a problem with converting Quicken 4.0-created Memorized Reports to version 5.0: any reports that contain a “Year to Date” date range always display the date on which the report was converted to Quicken 5. Another problem arose while the program converted large (close to a megabyte) Quicken 4 data files to Quicken 5 format. On several occasions, Quicken 5 froze during the conversion, and I had to restart the computer. (Quicken 5 automatically backs up the Quicken 4 files before it attempts to convert them, so data loss is not a problem.) Technical support suggested an easy work-around: open and reindex the data in Quicken 4 before conversion (by pressing ⌘-option-B), then use Quicken 4’s Save a Copy command to get a “clean” Quicken 4 file, which then converts easily. Intuit told me that the company was aware of both of these problems and that a maintenance release was forthcoming.
The Last Word
As good as it is, Quicken for the Macintosh still lags a bit behind Quicken for Windows, which has a CD-ROM with useful financial tools and reference information. I’d like to see Intuit bring the Mac version up to parity with the Windows version. Quicken 5 is an incremental but still welcome improvement over the already excellent previous version. The addition of Financial Calendar and new ease-of-use features keep Quicken comfortably in front of the financial-program pack. If you’re unhappy with your current finance program, it’s worth taking a look at Quicken to see if it meets your needs. If you’re not already using a personal financial program, Quicken 5 is the one to get.
Negrino, Tom. (February 1995). Quicken 5.0. Macworld. (pg. 70).
Intuit, Inc.
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Quicken_5.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
