In reality you could build your own spreadsheet to track this stuff, but Quicken was priced right and is well supported by Canadian financial institutions as the push to paperless and online banking has taken hold. There have been many competitors that have come and gone, Quicken remains the dominant player in this space, for good reason. It also works well for someone later in life with investments, both registered and non-registered, and many other accounts across many financial institutions. Quicken works well for the student or person just entering the workforce, I've convinced both my adult sons of the merits of using it to track things and use the budgeting features to plan ahead. Like myself, as our finances became more complicated and involved more than just a chequing account, more and more of our financial lives have been captured in Quicken.įor someone starting out attempting to track their paycheques and expenses, it's a pretty useful program, at a reasonable cost if you amortize the purchase over Quicken's three year sunset policy. Over time, they've added functionality to support investments, taxes, etc. Quicken replaced my DIY spreadsheet because it was easier to use and they'd figured out the chequebook paradigm pretty well. This was way before online banking, when you had to wait until month-end to get your statement mailed to you. My first financial tracking application was built in VisiCalc and was a simple chequebook program to track my expenses. I've been a Quicken user since the DOS days. liabilities / investment performance / etc., in a period you can specify as specific dates, or last quarter / year / current quarter / year to-date / last 5 years / all dates / etc? Then drill into bank / investment accounts for a specific period? How easy is it produce a graph of net worth / assets vs. How easy is it enter a one-liner for an investment transaction that matches your broker statement, including buys, sells, various forms of distributions, reinvested or not? How easy is it to set up recurring payments (monthly, semi-monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, etc) and have reminders in an internal calendar when they become due? Then choose whether to enter the transactions automatically or not? How easy is the concept of a transfer between accounts, debiting one's balance and crediting another one? How easy is it to have the cash balance of each account in a spreadsheet, in a single window? So, I'm guessing it is just the convenience of having these features ready-made as opposed to DIY. Not sure about the etc etc but you can do these stated things with a spreadsheet. Tracking cost base, various forms of investment income, tracking various expense categories, reminders of when payments are due, various graphs, reports, etc etc. Not trolling just a genuine question from someone who has never used Quicken or the like. Descartes wrote:If you enter your data manually then what is the tangible value that Quicken provides you versus a bespoke spreadsheet?
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