5 Quicken Tips From an Expert

Quicken has been my favorite personal finance program for many years, both for my own income and expense tracking and to help my clients take control of their own finances. Getting your head around your budget, your cash flows and your net worth can be overwhelming, but Quicken allows you to take it step-by-step and track each piece quickly and accurately.

Over the years, I have built up an arsenal of short cuts and tips for using Quicken to its fullest potential. Here are my top five:

1. Set up the automatic bank download

One of the most tedious tasks in Quicken is inputting each check register transaction separately. Quicken has an interface with most banking online services that allows you to automatically sign in to your bank and download all recent transactions. This saves a lot of time, especially if you have multiple accounts. Transactions from often-used vendors can be set up with a category pre-filled. For example, if you have frequent transactions for Shell gasoline, you can program Quicken to apply the Auto: Gas category for each occurrence.

2. Set the tax line items

One of the fields that are often left blank when setting up income and expense categories is the tax line item. The purpose of this field is to tag a category to correlate to a specific line item on your tax return. Then, you can print out a report that summarizes all of your tax-related transactions for the year. Common tax expenses are charitable donations, mortgage interest, property taxes and child care expenses. In the Home and Business version, you can set all of your business income and expense categories as Schedule C items to make tax preparation fast and easy.

3. Create a zero-balance budget

The one thing that most wealthy individuals have in common is that they know where every dollar goes'"and you should too. When setting up your 12 month budget in Quicken, first ensure that it is a reasonable and doable budget. Be sure to include fun things like vacation and spending money. Then, look at the money left over at the end of every month and decide what to do with it. It can be used to either pay down debt or to go to savings. You may choose to do both at the same time. Go back into your budget and allocate the leftovers to savings or debt reduction until the amount remaining is zero. In order to build wealth quickly, it is important to know what you plan to do with every dollar to help get you there.

4. Balance your checkbook

The only way to know for certain that you have input all of your banking transactions is to balance your checkbook every month. Quicken makes this an easy process through its balancing function. When you receive your bank statement at the end of every month, you input the bank balance and compare it to what you have posted in Quicken. If there are any checks you have written but not cashed, these will show as outstanding transactions between the bank balance and the Quicken balance. This way, you can make sure that you have entered and tracked everything.

5. Enable the Emergency Records Organizer

Under the Property and Debt tab is the Emergency Records Organizer. This is a great place to store all of your vital information about your assets and debts. You can store contact information for your doctors, lawyers and bankers amongst other professionals that you deal with. You can add medical records for each family member as well as school information for the kids. The report function allows you to print out various lists and reports to provide to family, lawyers and beneficiaries.

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