Quicken 2008 Course

Welcome to Quicken 2008. My name is Lauri Matson and I'll be your instructor through out this series. Quicken is a wonderful personal financial package that's aimed at the home user or, small service-related business. Quicken is by far one of the most popular programs that's on the market today. Quicken, you will find, is a personal financial management application first. It's important to keep that under consideration. The accounting aspect of it is secondary, that means, it may not be appropriate for all business solutions. One of the advantages of Quicken is a wonderful integration with banking and brokering data. Quicken will automatically download this data for you. If your business is a service-oriented business you have a simple structure; that means just a few invoices and no inventory, it'll be perfect for you. If your business, however, is more complicated you may want to consider Quicken's sister program, QuickBooks. There are a number of advantages to using Quicken. First, it is much easier and simpler to use than many applications. Quicken has eliminated many of the options that are meant for more complex businesses, as a result, fewer options, fewer selections, easier to learn. It is also wonderful for checkbook-based income and expense recording. It really allows us to track everything based on what's coming in and what's going out. Quicken also has a number of wonderful features for tracking our stocks and other investments including automatic updates. There are a few limitations, however. First, Quicken only produces two business forms: a check and an invoice. If you need purchase orders or you're looking for customer statements, it will not be the right tool. It also does not work well for businesses that own inventory or businesses that require a detailed listing of their assets. There are a number of things that Quicken really does for us, though. First, there's a great variety of reports that we can work with; it does automatically connect and download from your bank; it'll create our budgets; it'll update our stock holdings; and it'll even automatically update them to their current market value. You can know, at a click of the mouse, exactly where you stand. You will also find that Quicken will set up loans so that it automatically calculates principal and interest. There is no need to worry about putting a complicated amortization schedule together for yourself, Quicken will do it for you. Now, do keep in mind some of its limitations. Again, it cannot create the more complex forms, such as purchase orders, statements, finance charges, things of that nature; nor is it a true accrual-based accounting system. It does allow us to do an accounts receivables and payables, but if you are truly running an accrual-based accounting system, you'll want to select another program. Check with your accountant if you're not sure which type of business system that you run. If you need a detailed record of anything besides cash, such as inventory, keep in mind that you may want to consider QuickBooks rather than Quicken. You may wish to look at our series on QuickBooks to determine if that's a proper tool for you. Quicken is a wonderful program. Do look through its abilities to see which one is going to work right with you.  

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