Accounting Software Review

Comparing Quicken and Money Plus

The biggest advantage of using software to manage your personal finances is the ability to house all of your financial information in one place. This allows you to see how much you have, how much you owe, and even when you owe it. You can also get a customized view of your complete financial position without having to remember all of the various user names and passwords of bank and investment websites that hold financial information for you.

Another advantage is that personal accounting software will store your financial information for as long as you want, without the space and time needed for filing paper statements. It can thus serve as long-term storage for easy tracking of spending by category. You can create budgets and do long-term goal planning, as well as create customized desktop mini-reports, get tax advice, and save documents in one place by scanning them.

However, the software doesn't do everything for you. You still have to set it up, which can take a few minutes to a few hours depending on the complexity of your financial information and how detailed you want to get. Though you can download a lot of information from financial sites, you'll still need to enter some transactions manually.

Money Plus and Quicken remain the two main competitors in the field of personal accounting software. (Microsoft Money 2008 has been renamed Microsoft Money Plus for the Deluxe, Premium and Home and Business versions; the most basic version, Money Essentials, has not been renamed.) Microsoft did not release a 2009 update, but Intuit released 2009 updates of all versions of Quicken.

We found the most thorough, credible and up-to-date reviews of Quicken, Money Plus and less-well-known financial software packages at About.com. PC World and CNet.com also cover Microsoft Money Plus and Intuit's Quicken (2008 versions) in detail. User reviews at Amazon.com provide a glimpse at the pros and cons of each package -- including Quicken 2009 upgrade trials and tribulations -- from a first-hand perspective. They also rate alternative financial accounting software You Need a Budget Pro. Slate.com rates and reviews Quicken 2009 and Microsoft Money 2008 against personal accounting websites like Mint.com, making it easy to compare the two software packages.

If you are using a recent version of either Quicken or Money Plus and it's working well for you, experts say there's no need to change. Still, you should consider upgrading -- especially if your software is no longer supported -- after three years for Quicken, two for Microsoft Money. In this case you will not get automatic updates and Internet-based features will no longer work, although the software itself will continue to function just fine. We say this because most users (understandably) don't like the arduous task of upgrading. Quicken 2009, for example, had a number of bugs when it was first released, and Intuit had to release two patches last fall to fix the problems -- a fact that is reflected in some of the user ratings on Amazon.com.