Quicken 2002 Home & Business

Installing the upgrade is practically transparent, and new users will only have to pay attention for a few minutes before taking a quick coffee break and letting the computer do the work. Data entry is painless now that nearly every major bank and investment house has online information access, though this can be moderately tricky to implement, depending on the business in question.

Those who are a bit more daring can branch out from basic data maintenance and ask the onboard experts for advice on debt reduction, college payment, and many other common financial milestones. The program also includes information and guidance on starting and running a business, including helpful tax information. Links to helpful online services abound--though they're incomplete, they're a good start--and users should be able to find information on just about any topic they need.

Upgraders will find the 2002 version a bit slicker and better suited to Web transactions, but little is otherwise different. Those shifting from other packages or new to personal financial management software will have a short but steep learning curve.

Quicken 2002 Home & Business also lets users create customizable estimates and invoices, manage business taxes, and track accounts payable and receivable. This version also lets managers and employees track jobs, projects, and customer payments.

Will Quicken make up for sloppy budgeting, bad investment advice, or the heartbreak of tax day? No, but it will help users committed to financial responsibility achieve their goals without going crazy, and that's more than enough. --Rob Lightner

Amazon.com Product Description
Quicken 2002 Home & Business includes all the business features you need
with the ease you want. Because it's from Quicken, Home & Business provides
familiar, user-friendly approaches to managing your business finances. It also
includes the latest features of
Quicken 2002 Deluxe to help you
manage your personal finances easily.

Home & Business can help you handle many aspects of your business finances.
Create customizable estimates and invoices effortlessly with onscreen editing.
Utilize the user-friendly approaches of Quicken to help you manage your business
accounts. Quickly balance your checkbook and reconcile your statements. Get a
quick overview of your business on one screen.

See the financial status of your business and check your unpaid invoices all in
one place. With Home & Business you can monitor invoices and upcoming bills. Set
up account receivables and payables so it's easier to track your customer
invoices and bills from vendors. More accurately track your finances using
reports and graphs, and track multiple projects at once, including all the
estimates, invoices, and payments. Also simplify your business taxes by tracking
expenses and assigning categories such as Schedule C.

The Quicken 2002 Deluxe features will help you automatically categorize your
expenses, reconcile your downloaded statements, set up accounts and bills
faster, analyze your portfolio to see where you stand, and much more.

A major drawback to this program is how it prints invoices and statements. If you want to send your customer a nice PDF of your statement or invoice too bad you can't. If you want to send it via e-mail it has to be processed through Quicken which strips out your logo (if you've added it) and you can only send it as an HTML or TXT version then it launches your default e-mail program. What's that you say? You use an online fax service or you fax through a fax program? Well too bad. You can't do that through this version of Quicken and I'm not sure other versions let you either. I thought well then there must be a way I can just save the invoice or statement as a file and then process it any way I want to (e.g. PDF, image file, fax document etc) but no way this program won't let you do that and they won't even address the issue in their help. I had to find out by combing the web and finding other users having the same problem.

Another very annoying product feature is that they've set up defaults to try to get you to have Quicken go online and download your various bank account data from company websites from bank info to creditors. It constantly tries to get you to use Quicken to process these online services. There are a myriad of options and preferences you have to find and deselect so this can take a long time because they hide lots of preferences. It's been months already and I still cant' figure out how to get the darn alert message at the beginning to stop alerting me that Quicken's WebConnect feature is not setup to get all my data.

It also defaults to send "anonymous" user information via the web back to the Quicken developers at Intuit.

I say before you get sucked in check out alternatives. The only one I know of though is Peachtree because I hear the one from Bill Gates is even worse.