Quicken 2002 Deluxe review

Maggie Williams ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Nov 2002

We’ve compared the Deluxe version of Quicken 2002 with the standard version of Money 2003 in this review, as these products offer similar sets of features, although there’s a disparity of around £20 in price. Quicken 2002 remains a good-quality product, but it’s slowly slipping behind Money 2003 in terms of its features and online support.

A number of Quicken’s existing features have been redesigned or extended, but there’s little that’s completely new in this version of the product. A Portfolio Analyser enabling you to assess all of your investment accounts in a single view is the most significant addition, but there are some clear improvements to existing features. For example, the arduous setup ‘interview’ has been streamlined -- although at the cost of less step-by-step assistance for novices.

Features are grouped into seven ‘centres’ addressing topics such as banking, taxation and investing. These cover day-to-day tasks such as managing bill payments, as well as giving an overview of your general financial situation. There’s also a Reports and Graphs Centre for referencing Quicken’s copious analysis tools.

Intuit has formed an alliance with the Motley Fool to provide online information about new financial products. There’s a ‘Web’ button linking you directly to the site from within Quicken, but beyond this, there’s little of specific benefit to Intuit customers. However, the Motley Fool is an excellent general resource for financial research.

Technical support costs have been a long-standing bugbear for Quicken users, and this version of the product retains the same help charges as previous versions. The costly 75 pence per minute charge for phone support is still worth taking into account, particularly if you’re a first-time user. In addition to the technical support telephone line, there’s also a free support FAQ on Intuit’s Web site. However, at the time of writing -- several months after the product’s release -- there was still no Quicken 2002-specific FAQ on offer.

Although there are some improved tools for online banking, only HSBC, Lloyds TSB and NatWest are directly supported within the product. You can also import downloaded QIF files from other banks as an alternative, but this is a much more cumbersome process. As a part of our testing, we successfully imported two QIF files, and also converted a Quicken 2001 file with no problems.

As well as the Deluxe product, there’s also a Standard version of Quicken (£29.95 inc. VAT) covering basic money management tasks such as tracking income and expenditure. However, it doesn’t include features like share price monitoring or budgeting. Intuit has also extended the range of Quicken products with this release to include a Deluxe & Business version (£69.95 inc. VAT), which is suitable for tracking both personal finances and (very) small business accounts within a single package.

In the past, Quicken was the unchallenged leader in personal finance software. However, some lazy touches, such as the lack of online support for the current version of the product, suggest that it is slowly losing its grip to Microsoft’s rival Money package. Even so, Quicken remains a functional and usable package that will continue to serve existing customers well. The US has seen the release of Quicken 2003, but no dates are yet available for the next version in the UK.

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