It does have some limitations, but if you want to do a quick snapshot of your spending, it works very well. My Credit Union keeps three months worth of online data, so it downloaded that pretty easily. So the bottom line over the last three months is it said we are overspending by a couple of thousand! Sounds about right with Christmas. 
It only does budgeting very simply by comparing the last month with the four month average. But it did point out that gasoline is killing us!! My wife drives a van that only gets about 17 MPG with her usual driving, so she must be driving a lot more than I thought!
One thing that is misleading is that we often get cash back when using the ATM card at the grocery store, so a lot of cash is lumped in with groceries. Any suggestions on how to handle that? I'm pretty sure I will buy regular Quicken with one of those tax software package deals very soon, maybe with one of my Christmas Gift cards, since I know it lets you split transactions like that and the web version doesn't. By the way, I tried the free equivalent at mint.com, but it didn't accept my credit union accounts.
Free one month trial of Quickenonline is pretty nice
January 26th, 2008 at 08:31 pm
January 27th, 2008 at 12:10 am 1201392625
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It is so much better than pen and paper. There is just so much you can look at and track with such little effort. But that's the accountant in me. I would never do it by hand - way too much time. I just spend minutes a week and know where every penny goes. My 2 cents!
If you know how much cash back you get you can split the categories when you code them. Say you spent $50 on groceries and $20 on cash back. The charge will be $70. Split it $50 to groceries and $20 to "cash." If you know where the cash went you can split it further. I just have a category for "cash" myself. Since we don't deal much with cash at all.
I also saw a suggestion to set up an account (like a bank account) called cash/wallet. In this case, in the split, you would have transferred the $20 to this cash/wallet account. Then as you spend it you can post the expenses as you spend down your cash. It's a good idea. (The idea is to essentially track all the cash in your wallet). Does that make sense? I can find a better explanation if I lost you.
We deal so little in cash I haven't bothered. I pretty much know where the $200 cash we spent last year went. But if you deal in cash a lot I like the "wallet account" idea.
January 27th, 2008 at 03:35 pm 1201448100
January 27th, 2008 at 05:14 pm 1201454040