Quicken Starter Edition 2010 Review

Intuit - Market leader in accounting and electronic financial software with it's Quicken range of products. Now has a replacement for older versions of Quicken Basic 2007 and help here is on hand for those who use to use Microsoft Money and need similar software to run on Windows 7.

Personal Finance software assists with keeping a hold on your finances and seeing exactly where your personal finances, your hard earned money are coming, and going at a glance. This helps to work out when and where you need to adjust for finance changes. Helpful if one is planning to put aside money for a vacation, or college tuition, or even for calculating how much extra to help pay off that dreaded credit card. Or simply just to help out with balancing a home budget.

Quicken Starter Edition 2010 - Simple Money Management is designed to help you easily organize your personal and household budget.

It also provides

• Shows a step by step guide, screen by screen, for initial start up and assistance in creating a budget. See what dollars are going out as well as whats coming in
  
• Provides details on all your checking, credit card & banking details in a single screen.
• Imports for previous data from earlier versions
• Shows where your money is going and automatically categorizes them for you.
  
• See what bills are paid, those bills that are due and check to see if there is enough to pay for those upcoming bills. Upcoming bills are shown alert dates to help you keep track of future bills to pay
• Obtain free help and support after you have purchased your Quicken product
  

For Windows Users, if you are downloading the electronic version through this web page you will need the following system requirements;

• Windows XP / Vista / 7
• Processer - 1 GHz
• Memory - 1 Gb
• Hard Drive Space - up to 145Mb
• Monitor - 1024×768 with 16-bit color
• CD-ROM Drive - 4 X
• Internet Connection - dial-up, ISDN, Broadband
• Sound - Sound card and speakers recommended
• Printer - Any that support drivers using Windows XP / Vista / 7
  

After accessing and reading through many reviews of the product across various websites over a period of time. I can now draw these conclusions.

Although upgrading and importing from earlier versions is fine (2008 & 2009 editions) and Basic 2007, you cannot import 'higher order' editions, so you cannot import data from the 2009 Deluxe edition.

It has been found that on occasion not all the previous data, and not any data can and will always update. You may require the services of Intuits help desk. This makes the decision of importing or starting from scratch with the program a difficult choice to make. This also does not provide confidence in using any former Quicken product or previous versions of your datasets. Do a backup of your information before doing any updates.

New users may find the screen and data retrieval steps overwhelming at first until they are more familiar with the programs use.

Depends on whether you are happy to manually track and adjust your personal finances through the old pen and paper technique, or even using something like spread sheeting with Excel. To automate your finance information and see whats happening at a glance and obtain reports that help you make finance decisions, it does make sense.

use software to adjust your budget and automate your bills, rather than work it all out by hand.