Subtitles of the Movie

Let's begin our discussion by talking about the profit and loss aspect of the Quicken software. It is important to note when its appropriate to use Quicken. Quicken is a personal financial management tool. It was developed to allow us to track our income and our expenses. It is important to understand that it was not developed for a complex business. Let's talk a bit further about that. You will note on the screen that I am looking at the Business Tab of our Home page. You will note that despite the fact that it says Projected Profit and Loss it really does not look like a traditional profit and loss statement. Quicken tracks everything with the flow of our cash. You will note in business expenses it is showing the income that has come in, our income that has gone out, hence resulting in our profit and loss. Although we have a button that says our Profit Loss Details when we click on it, once again you'll notice it all evolves around what came in and what came out. Many times in business we're looking for more than just a simple accounting of where our money is going. If you have a simple structure, Quicken will work quite well for helping you see exactly where you're at. If you have a more complex structure, however; for instance, you have invoices that you send out, you have finance charges that you apply to those invoices, or you do payroll, Quicken may not be the best choice. Keep in mind that there are add-on programs available that will allow you to create these functions and then transfer a transaction into Quicken. However, I'd like to very quickly show you Quicken's sister program, QuickBooks, so that you can determine which is correct for you. Let's toggle over to our QuickBooks program. The first thing I would like you to note is that on the side I have Vendors, Customers, and Employees. QuickBooks will allow me to do a full payroll. You'll notice in Customers that I can do estimates, invoices, statements, even refunds and credits. These are items that are not available within Quicken. You will also note that from the Vendor's side we have the ability to track sales tax. If you have a business that requires you to track sales tax against each of your customer invoices you may want to consider an accounting program that will handle that task for you. I would recommend that you review our movies on Quick Books 2008. This may be a better choice for you if you are running a more complex business. Let's go back into Quicken, though, and talk about its strength and power. If I have a service-oriented business where my expenses are pretty straightforward, Quicken is going to be a much easier software program to come up to speed on. If I go to my Home page you will notice that Quicken is goal-oriented. It will allow me to set performance goals and then I can track how they're doing. This can be a valuable tool within a business. You'll also note that from the aspect of investing, it will track each of my individual stock options. For personal finances, Quicken is absolutely superb. It has wonderful integration with our bank accounts and our brokerage firms. For simple service-oriented businesses it's also wonderful. If you track your progress based on your checkbook you will find that Quicken works wonderfully. If all of my expenses are recorded in a checkbook and all of my income is deposited accordingly, Quicken is a wonderful start. Remember, also, you can always change to QuickBooks at a later period of time. One of the advantages of having the programs that are created under the Intuit umbrella is that they transfer back and forth to each other. You can start on Quicken and then transfer to Quick Books when you need a stronger business program. When tracking for your personal finances, Quicken is one of the most popular softwares out there.