Speaking of surprises. Last week, I was given a special tour of Quicken's
new product for 2006. Now, you have to understand, since most of my clients
have businesses, I usually recommend Intuit's other product, QuickBooks. But,
wow! This version of Quicken knocked my socks off.
Do you know how you're always looking for that cancelled check? Or you have
stacks of boxes and papers around, with invoices to file, or reciepts that
need too be filed.
Quicken 2006 lets you attach your go to your online banking site and attach
their copy of your cancelled check directly to entry in your Quicken check
register.
When you shop online and the site takes you to a receipt page, Quicken will
let you grab that page and attach it to the credit card entry in your register,
too.
Or if you have a scanner, you can scan receipts or documents and include
them with your records. Oh yes, you can attach the warrenties, too.
This is the first application I've seen that will truly make it easy to start
eliminating paper from around the house. And the time to file all those papers
away. (Which you can never find when you need them.)
Just imagine, if you get audited - all you need to do is pull up the report
of that group of expenses - and print out the report WITH all the attachments.
It can make getting ready for audits a snap.
Incidentally, because of the nature of Quicken is such that you can make
entries now, for transactions that took place years ago, you can scan in documents
from 5 years ago and have them filed in your bookkeeping system.
They've created an interesting new set of reports, too. You're going to be
able to see how much you've spent on a particular product, service, account
or vendor in the last 30 days, weeks, months, etc. Sure, you could reports
before, but these will be created it when you click on a line entry - without
having to pull up a whole profit and loss report, or cash flow report first.
Peter Karpas, vice president and general manager, Quicken Solutions Group
and his team talked to users and even followed them home and watched exactly
how they used the program. (Yes, they DID follow people home - with their consent,
of course.) They learned so much that they made 121 changes.
Of course, you'll still get all the kinds of investment reports and tools
you've always had. But everything will work faster, be easier to use - and
be much more useful.
This is the very first time TaxMama has been able to say - go out and get
Quicken!
I don't know if the product has hit the shelves yet. But watch Intuit's site
for it to appear.
http://go.asktaxmama.com/quicken
I can hardly wait until they do this with QuickBooks, too.
