Personal financial software like Quicken Premier is difficult to top regarding budgeting and basic reporting, and it is probably unbeatable regarding tax filing and investment monitoring. With Quicken Premier, a premier software program that covers all aspects of financial management, you should never again find yourself in the red.
Quicken Premier is the gold standard when it comes to the most effective piece of software for managing one’s personal finances. Since its founding more than three decades ago, it has been dedicated to assisting consumers in all aspects of financial management. Today, Quicken is the most popular brand of financial software sold in the United States.
Quicken can cover every transaction, whether you want to build a budget with spending restrictions and notifications to ensure you do not overspend or sync all of your bank accounts, and credit cards into one location. Because there are so many different reporting features available, keeping tabs on both the money you’ve spent and the money you’ve saved is simple. And if you have assets to your name, you can manage them using Quicken Premier. This gives the software a clear advantage over other programs, such as Buxfer or Moneydance, through which you can monitor what you possess in your portfolio.
Getting Started
When I began using a new budgeting system, I had to manually record all my transactions. This presented a significant risk since it was possible for a single oversight to throw off my whole financial plan. Financial institution and brokerage company account information may now be sent directly to and from Quicken Premier. Additionally, it will automatically update new information as it is received. When new transactions are added to the system, the program will immediately classify those transactions into appropriate budgets according to where the charges were incurred.
This procedure of assigning is highly accurate; but, if the algorithm makes an erroneous assumption about a transaction, you have the option to amend it. You can also alter the categories as required, including the transaction type, group, and description, as well as adjust the tax line item. For example, you may designate a paycheck as dividend income. Any unwanted categories may be buried to further reduce the amount of clutter.
Creating A Budget
The ability to build a budget is one of the key features that can be found in software of this kind. With a budget, you can keep track of your expenses and avoid going into the red. This may be accomplished quickly and with little effort using Quicken Premier. You can choose which categories to include in your budget and exclude others you do not need, such as parking or tolls. After that, a list of things to budget will be generated, and all you have to do is set the spending limit for each category. If the costs are already included in a category, you can view the quantities, which will assist you in determining how much money to allocate to each area of your budget.
There is the customary color-coded representation of the current condition of your budget, and you also have the option to create alerts if you are worried about overspending within an area you have budgeted for. Therefore, if you are out shopping and you are getting close to a certain limit, Quicken will respond to the purchase information it gets from your bank and will either send you an email or text message to let you know that you are going to go over your allocated budget. If one of your categories spends less money than planned, you have the option of maintaining the same limit for the next month or rolling over the surplus funds into an increase in the overall budget for that category for the following month.
The Premier and Home & Business packages are the only ones that provide a function called Bill Pay. This feature enables you to utilize Quick Pay for digital payments and Check Pay for non-digital payments. The Bill Pay feature is limited to these two packages. Each month, the plan includes 12 electronic payments and three check payments.
Savings Goals
You also have the option on Quicken Premier to create savings goals. With this feature, you may take the money you saved by not spending it and put it toward a major purchase or a trip. Quicken Premier has tools and objectives for saving money and planning that may assist you in allocating funds for a variety of specialized uses. You are the one who creates the account and decides both the target amount and the due date. You get to decide which of your accounts will have money transferred out of it every month.
Because Quicken does not have authority over your bank and cannot order a transfer, it simply conceals the funds from the account, allowing you to move the money to the savings account manually later. This is only possible if you have an actual savings account established with your financial institution.
In addition, the Quicken Premier program allows you to schedule future expenditures without having those expenditures impact your existing budget or balances. Setting future transactions and reminders on the calendar may assist you in not forgetting upcoming obligations. For example, if you know that the payment for your auto insurance is due twice a year, in January and June, you can use the calendar to help you keep track of these dates.
Reports
Several useful reports can be generated with Quicken Premier. These reports will provide an overview of your spending patterns and plot them against your income. You may save them for usage in other applications or your records. The reports include banking, spending, comparison, investment, and tax reports. These report categories may often be further subdivided into components, such as cash flow, expenditure by the payee, budget, and revenue vs cost.
You have the choice of selecting dates from a predefined date range, such as the current month or year-to-date, or choosing dates. The majority of the reports consist only of the presentation of data and numerical values; however, some of the reports also include graphical representations of the data, such as bar charts and pie charts.
In addition to the more conventional reports, you may also examine reports that provide a concise snapshot of your transactions and expenditures. The fast report presents a pie chart of expenditures broken down into categories such as bills, shopping, entertainment, and meals. The individual transactions are displayed underneath the chart. These rapid reports may be presented on your home page, which can be modified according to your preferences. Additionally, the data can be readily saved straight to Excel. There are also tax reports, and Quicken Premier is the only product in our line-up that allows you to export your data to the most reputable tax software applications.
Investment Tracking
Quicken Premier is the greatest personal finance software available if you hold securities, trade stocks, and other investment vehicles, and participate in other financial transactions. Quicken may be linked to your brokerage account for seamless data transfer of account balances and transaction history. The given investment management tools will allow you to analyze your portfolio in numerous ways, such as risk vs. return, and evaluate your holdings about the market as a whole.
You may establish retirement objectives for your money and assets in a manner that is similar to setting savings goals for yourself. Using the retirement calculator, you can receive an estimate of how much money you will have saved by the time you stop working by inputting information about when you want to retire and how much money you are contributing to your retirement account (IRA). You also can decide how much money you would want to have saved up by the time you retire and then calculate how much money you will need to put away each month to achieve that goal.
Accessibility and Price
Instead of limiting you to managing your finances via desktop software, Quicken now allows you to do it over the internet for the first time. On the web, you can see balances, budgets, accounts, and transactions with Quicken. You can also analyze spending patterns by category and payee and track the success of your securities.
You can monitor your budget and add or change transactions while away from your desktop using the accompanying app for Android or iOS phones. While it’s likely that Quicken Premier works best on a personal computer, you can still use it. Quicken Premier immediately syncs with its mobile applications without additional software, in contrast to other desktop programs, such as Dropbox, which need an intermediate tool to function properly.
You can monitor the current status of your budgets, alerts, and notifications, as well as the balances and transactions of your accounts using mobile applications. Quicken allows you to take photos of your receipts and keep them inside the application. It also gives you the option to manually enter transactions as necessary.
The Premier option typically costs $77.99 a year, making it the most costly of the range of packages offered by Quicken, except the business package, which is the most expensive choice. When this article was written, a new member discount of 10% was available, bringing the price closer to $70. In addition, you may take advantage of a risk-free trial period of 30 days. If you believe you will not miss any of the capabilities that the Premier package provides, the Starter package is available for $35.99 per year. Still, it does not include any features that are linked to investments.
Is It Recommended That You Utilize Quicken Premier?
Quicken Premier surpasses all other personal finance software applications on the market with the number of functions it provides for managing one’s financial resources. It stands out from other products on the market because of the general simplicity of its operation, the intuitiveness of its platform, and the strength of its features. Syncing your finances with your bank can save you time and guarantee you know every transaction. A straightforward budget allows you to place restrictions on your spending, and notifications ensure that you stick to those restrictions. The bundle is finished with excellent reports and several choices for investment monitoring.
Where Can I Get A List Of The Features Available In Accounting Software?
The finest accounting software systems all have comparable features; thus, while deciding which is ideal for your company, you need to consider which aspects are most relevant to your particular circumstances and needs. Taking all of this into consideration will assist you in selecting the accounting software that best matches your requirements. Regarding tasks such as accounts payable (A/P) and banking and cash management, some software is superior to others.
Other programs, on the other hand, are targeted more toward retail businesses and include cost monitoring, inventory management, and collecting and submitting sales tax. You may also want to consider whether the software comes with a mobile app, how effective its customer service is, and how well it handles accounts receivable (A/R) and financial reporting. These are all characteristics that the program should have. You may be interested in Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.
