This blog site is not about selling, therefore, I hesitated in publishing this blog entry. However, getting your finances under control requires that you have a means to monitor how you are spending your money. Quicken desktop products have been around for ages – but their online version provides a simple interface to quickly check what bills are coming soon – and how much money you have already spent.
Quicken Online provides a fast and free means to manage spending and monitor your financial goals. If you do not have an account on the Quicken site then simply register, verify your email address, and get started immediately.
After registration, you will enter login information for your accounts. Enter your bank accounts. credit cards, and loans. This allows the site to download transactions from the last 90 days. The site will also refresh transactions every 24 hours (except Wells Fargo accounts). Once you have these accounts entered – the real fun begins.
Categories
One of the pains of the desktop product is assigning categories to transactions. Quicken online will attempt to categorize your spending and income for you. You can change any wrong categories as well as fix unclassified ones. My initial setup only had 15 or so unclassified transactions.
Charts
Once you have the transactions, you can start using the power of Quicken Online. First, check out the tab called trends. The site provides a pie chart as well as a statement regarding your income minus expenses during the time period. You can easily change the time period from 30 days, 60 days, etc. Play around with the dates to see how you have been doing.
Apple iPhone
Maybe you own and use an Apple iPhone. Intuit has a free app for you to download from the iTunes app store which provides you with a quick easy way to monitor your accounts. The only challenge to the iPhone app, is that you cannot tell Quicken Online to refresh any accounts not updated in the last 24 hours – you’ll have to do that from a desktop. Regardless, the iPhone app is a great way to remind yourself how you are doing with your finances.
Now that you know about Quicken Online, please set up an account today and start monitoring your finances. Let me know how it works for you.
