I thought y’all might be interested in a a couple of online services to help with bookkeeping and potentially replace Quicken.
1) The first is a free service called Mint.com.
It was purchased a while ago by Intuit, the makers of Quicken. It’s an online portfolio of all your financial accounts—banks, investments, credit cards, loans, everything. It shows it all to you all at once, and lets you configure alerts and reminders and budgets. I started using Mint a few years ago, and it’s really fantastic and easy.
And the iPad app is gorgeous.
2) The second is a more complete accounting package called Xero.com, which I’ve used to replace QuickBooks entirely. They have a personal plan for $35/year. It can pull transaction feeds from your banks automatically. It makes the whole process of bookkeeping so much quicker and simpler.
If you get squeamish about entering your banking user names and passwords into a 3rd-party service, it’s worth understanding that Mint draws its information from clearing houses to which banks already publish our data. As with any online service, it’s crucial that you choose a good, strong password for Mint, Xero, and your banking.
jjmarcus tech solutions 