Product Description

Quicken Home & Business is software for easily managing and organizing your personal and home-based business finances, all in one place.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50 in Software
• Brand: Intuit
• Model: 409944
• Released on: 2009-10-10
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English

Features

• Quicken Home & Business 2010 easily organizes your personal and business finances
• Organizes your finances and makes portfolio management easier by bringing your accounts together in one place
• Shows you where your money is going by automatically categorizing your personal and home business expenses
• Lets you view your profit and loss at a glance, so you always know how your home based business is doing
• Helps you choose the right investments to reach your goals and identifies ways to minimize taxes on your investments

Amazon.com Product Description
Quicken Home & Business 2010 gives you the personal finance features found in Quicken Premier plus tools that make it easy to see how your home business is doing.

Manages both your personal and business finances together in one place. Click to enlarge.

See where your money's going. Click to enlarge.

Always know how your home based business is doing. Click to enlarge.

Helps maximize deductions and simplify your taxes. Click to enlarge.

See your most important info in one place. Click to enlarge.

Getting started is a breeze. Click to enlarge.

Easily organizes your personal and business finances

Includes all the features and tools of Quicken Premier, plus:

• Easily organizes your personal and home based business finances, all in one place
• Shows you where your money is going: automatically categorizes your personal and home business expenses
• Lets you view your profit and loss at a glance, so you always know how your home based business is doing
• Upgrading your Quicken? See "What's New in 2010" for the latest features and benefits

Features and Benefits

Manages both your personal and business finances together in one place
Organizes your financial information by bringing your personal and home-based business accounts together in one place--including banking, credit card, loan, 401(k), and investing accounts. Avoid the hassle of going to multiple websites: see your complete financial picture with just ONE password. Access over 6,700 banks, brokerages and other financial institutions--including PayPal.

See where your money's going
Quicken Home & Business automatically categorizes your personal and home business expenses. So it's even easier to track business expenses you paid for with a personal account.

Check in anytime to see exactly where your personal and business finances are for the week, month or year.

Always know how your home based business is doing
View your business profit and loss at a glance: Quicken Home & Business gives you an overall snapshot of what's coming in for the month, what's going out, and what's left in your accounts.

Helps maximize deductions and simplify your taxes
Captures all your deductions, including mileage and expenses for specific jobs, or even household expenses that you can partially write off. The business tax deduction summary lets you instantly see your tax deduction status throughout the year to help avoid any April 15th surprises. At tax time, save time by creating Schedule C reports for your accountant. You can also easily export your data directly to TurboTax to prepare your taxes quickly and accurately.

Simplifies estimating and invoicing
Easily create, print, and save professional-looking estimates and invoices for your clients and customers.

Provides comprehensive investing and planning tools
Easily tracks, analyzes, and helps you optimize your investment portfolio. You can see changes in assets, liabilities, and net worth with one click: we show how your investments are performing across all your accounts.

Helps you make better buy/sell decisions
We help you identify top-performing investments, so you can make smart decisions on buying or selling. For example, use Morningstar Ratings to compare mutual funds and see which ones best fit your investment goals.

Watch your savings grow
We make it easy to get on--and stay on--a budget. Set suggested spending limits and savings goals based on the information you enter into Quicken Home & Business day-by-day.

An intuitive "Spending Planner" summarizes your actual spending and compares it to what you planned to spend for the month. Check your progress at a glance, and quickly see where you have room to spend or need to save more.

We can also help you create customized plans to reduce/eliminate debt--and to save for a house, college, retirement or large purchase.

Never miss a bill
See what bills--personal and business--have already been paid, what's coming up and if you have enough left in your accounts to cover them--all in one convenient place. Set reminders to pay bills on time and instantly check the status of past bills.

Enjoy free support when you buy, install or upgrade Quicken
If you need help purchasing, installing or upgrading your new Quicken personal finance software, free phone support is available. For more information, visit our Help & Support site.

100% Satisfaction Guarantee
If you're not 100% satisfied, return your Quicken Home & Business 2010 personal finance software with your dated receipt within 60 days of purchase for a refund of the purchase price (return shipping and handling charges not included).

Save money and shop smart
Our free service--Quicken Picks--seeks out the best online coupons and discount offers just for you, on the stuff you care about. You also get cash back on all your purchases, helping you save even more. You can sign up for Quicken Picks anytime within your Quicken software.

Easily import from Microsoft Money
If you've been using Microsoft Money personal finance software, we can help you transfer your valuable financial information to Quicken.4 With our easy-to-use Data Converter tool, you'll be up-and-running with Quicken in practically no time.

What's New in 2010

Already using Quicken? Reasons to upgrade now:

New--See your most important info in one place
The new Quicken home page puts all your most important financial information in one easy-to-understand window, so you can see how you're doing at a glance.

Improved--Find the tools you need, faster
The improved menu and toolbar make it easier to find the tools you need to help organize your personal finances.

New--Getting started is a breeze
It's simpler than ever to put Quicken to work for you--so you can reach your personal finance goals faster. With the new Guided Setup, you just answer a few simple questions; we'll show you how Quicken works, and what to do next. You'll see your total financial picture come into focus even sooner than you expect.

New--Avoid late fees and penalties
We help you avoid overdraft fees and penalties--by showing you how much you'll have left in your account until your next paycheck.

Improved--Check for accuracy
We've made it easier to review your transactions, so you can quickly spot anything that looks inaccurate or out of place. If a transaction requires follow-up, you can flag it with a reminder.

Improved--Get tips from other Quicken users
With Quicken's Live Community, you can get help and advice from other Quicken users without ever leaving Quicken. If you have a question about something specific you're trying to do, just look to Live Community on the right of the Quicken screen for the answer.

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Customer Reviews

Worth the upgrade
I've been a Quicken user for almost 20 years and my last version was 2008. I was hesitant trying 2010 so soon after its release because I, along with many others, have been stung by bugs that have plagued earlier versions and have previously taken months for Intuit to fix. I'm glad I made the switch.

PROS
- 1 data file instead of 6 (plus an Attachments folder). It was about time! The single file at 101MB was a little larger then my previous files at 96MB.
- MUCH more resource friendly. The 2008 version frequently took up 1GB or more of RAM on my 3GB Vista Home Premium system. This version takes up only about 1/10 that. The many accounts I have (credit card, investment, banking) and the size of my file are probably atypical so your resource usage may vary.
- Faster loading of the application and updating of accounts. Hitting One Step Update is MUCH faster than before. One Step Update was the one action that slowed my system down and upped the memory usage quite a bit under 2008 and earlier versions. It still ups the memory usage but not nearly to the extent of before.
- More stability. 2008 used to crash intermittently - during One Step Updates. It might be too early to tell but so far no crashes.

CONS
- As other users have mentioned, the UI hadn't changed much in many years. This version is certainly no exception. It's still intuitive enough for new users to get up and running quickly. I'm not sure about MS Money users though (I tried MS Money a couple years back and I was thoroughly confused!).
- Memory leak? Previous version have suffered from this so it's nothing new. When I first start this version, it uses 57MB of RAM. After having it up for an hour and running One Step Update a few times, the RAM usage went up to 140MB. The more updates I do, the more memory used without any signs of the program releasing said memory after the operations have completed. Still, the vastly smaller memory footprint doesn't make this a real issue.
- Yearly updates. They're always rushing a new version out the door every year and it shows. They should spend a couple of years fixing/overhauling things or throw more developers at it (i.e. have an elite team of developers working on a revamp separate from the team that does incremental annual updates).

Overall, if you have had resource issues and update problems, and/or like the convenience of 1 data file, then 2010 is worth the upgrade. If you're perfectly happy with your current version then there is no compelling reason to upgrade other than Intuit shutting off online updates for versions over 3 years old (2007 users will HAVE to upgrade to keep downloading transactions from financial institutions and, if the past is any indication, you will have until April 30, 2010 to do so).

mixed emotions about this product
First, I would never have bought this product except for the demise of Microsoft Money. The only use I have for Quicken is to track my investments.

Second, Quicken Home and Business 2010 itself easily loaded on my Vista computer.

That said, my opinion is that for me converting Money to Quicken was a pain. Quicken kept coming up with error messages about open files, template.*, failure to recognize, etc. It seemed Quicken did not recognize the existance of Money on the computer. When I went to the help section, it gave me info for converting up to Quicken 2009, which is totally different, and totally useless, for use in Quicken 2010.

A tip: under file, go to file import and then to Microsoft Money file. Don't be surprised to get error messages. Do not use the separate "Data Converter" program as it is for 2009 and older only.

Why can't Quicken include a user manual on the disk or on their site? Why rely on "community groups" to possibly have a solution? Quicken can include promotional material for sale of checks and a credit card in the box but can't include installation and use information?

How did I get it to work? I thought about installing the suggested trial download of Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe to see if that was a newer version that Quicken might recognize. When I downloaded it, it wanted to eliminate my existing copy of Money, which really concerned me since I didn't have a disk for Money, as it was preloaded on the computer when I bought it. So I backed up the program to a cd, along with a data backup. I then decided to see if Quicken would recognize the Money on the cd for conversion and it did. So my Money data was converted to Quicken.

Now that it is there I must admit it is nice. I set up the desktop to open to my investment file and it updates the info well. I will continue to tweak the desktop to my preferences as I figure it out.

One of the big wastes for me is that Quicken wants to include all kinds of banking, credit card, bill paying, etc info on the program. No thanks, so I had to create nonsense files like my bank name being "none of your business bank." Then I have gone back to delete as much of the nonsense as I have been able.

Bottom line: so far a good product but be prepared to spend time to set it up. I have about 4 hours into getting Money to convert.

Converting over from Money 2007
With Money going away, I decided to give Quicken a shot after not using Quicken for over 10 years. I have only been using Quicken 2010 for 1 hour, but I will update my reviews as I get more time on it.

First of all, I had a 50MB Microsoft Money 2007 file to convert with over 10 years of data from investment accounts and various other types of credit card and bank accounts. It seems like Quicken will be a solution I am happy with going forward once I am able to cleanly get the file working that I want. I may decide to just start fresh with 2010 data in quicken and forget importing a lot of historical data.

The automatic data converter from a Microsoft Money file worked decently enough where I think most people will be able to live with it or manually fix a couple errors and live with it. I may need to wait for Intuit to update the converter a bit and re-import or just start from scratch in 2010. It does NOT seem like I can move stuff over one account and .QIF file at a time because Quicken stopped supporting that conversion a couple of years ago. In summary, although the converter moved most data over, if I can't get all accounts over cleanly, I would prefer to just start from scratch with data in the new year.

Here are the import problems in order of importance to me:
-some investment transactions not created correctly. quicken error message says quicken creates transactions from the transaction side, not the cash side.
-I can't find the quicken conversion error log file. It popped up right after file conversion, but I can't locate the file anymore.
-Bills that had been paid off and complete in MS Money show up as overdue in Quicken. hundreds of them!
-Accounts that had been closed in MS Money are now back alive again in Quicken and I can't figure out yet whether it even has the concept of account closed.
-several memos in MS Money transactions were truncated for being too long. I had thousands of transactions and this happened on less than 25 so this is a very minor issue. I am not sure of the exact character truncate limit but my guess is it is around 30 characters.