Quicken 2008 Premier - Where Is Your Money?

Quicken 2008 Premier provides you with vital information regarding the ways you are spending your money, where it is going, and what you have left. Not only that, Quicken 2008 lets you track your bills, enabling you to pay them on time. It provides you with email notifications when bills become due, and can alert you via text messages as well. [See image 1] Your Quicken financial manager also helps you with your taxes. You just need to categorize the deductible expenses as you go so you can manage your finances throughout the year.

Quicken 2008 Premier even lets you integrate your PayPal account with your personal financial accounting system, and transfer your transaction details from PayPal. Quicken 2008 lets you manage your expenditures, savings, investments, and assets. With this personal finance software you are in a better control of your finances, so

you know exactly where you stand at any time.

The menu system of Quicken 2008 Premier provides easy reach to your account balances and quick access to your account books. [See image 2] Quicken 2008 provides tabs, which make maneuvering between cash flow, investments, property, and debt very easy. If you make a comparison between Quicken 2008 and Microsoft Money's account registers, you would find that Quicken 2008 has a straightforward approach compared to Money's account registers. With Quicken 2008, you just need to click on the "Account Bar" to your left to open the account registers. The registers open to checkbook styles, and all you need to do is to add the transactions you have. These transactions can be easily edited as well.

Quicken 2008 has been designed with new tabs at the top, which provide easy access to your activity centers and you can access them from any area you are working on. [See image 2] For example, if you are working with cash flow, you can easily click on the relevant tab and navigate away to the Property and Debt tab to check your loan balances. [See image 3] This feature of "intuitive tabbed navigation" makes Quicken 2008 that much more user friendly, and that helps makes this personal financial accounting software so popular.  

Quicken 2008 Premier's online banking includes the ability for all of your online banking to be in one place, accessible by one password. [See Image 4] Quicken 2008 can update your balances and download your transactions over the Internet directly from most financial institutions.

By using "one step update," which is found in the menu system, Quicken 2008 Premier automates data downloads, which can be scheduled at a particular time of the day, or on certain specified dates. You'll need to close Quicken 2008 for it to process its scheduled updates. If you attempt to open Quicken 2008 while it is running the scheduled updates, it will ask you to wait until it completes its updates.

The "one step update" feature schedules updates from various sources, such as your online banks. A typical use of "one step updates" would be to first use Quicken 2008's online set up to bring your PayPal account into Quicken, and then use "one step updates" to automatically update Quicken with the data from PayPal.

I wouldn’t advise using this feature for the time being, as I encountered problems with reconfiguring my PayPal password after Quicken 2008 made the data transfer. This process requires a PayPal password reset which would take you through answering quite a few security questions. Apparently, this is a known issue that Quicken developers are looking into. Until the issue is resolved it's wise to use a cash account to record your PayPal transactions.

Quicken 2008 Premier lets you tag transactions, which allows similar transactions to be differentiated, yet fall under the same category. You can tag transfers between accounts as well, and in this way you are able to identify the transfers, since these cannot be categorized. For example, you may have an expense category called "car expenses," and you would use this category to record all of your car-related expenses. You would then categorize the transactions using "car expenses," and tag them as maintenance, fuel charges, and so on.

Quicken 2008 Premier is your anytime, anywhere personal accounting system which enables you to set your financial goals and receive suggested spending limits. It provides you with tools to manage your cash flow, thereby managing your spending and saving in a transparent way. Quicken 2008 incorporates updated, exclusive investing tools that have the latest asset allocation and investing guidelines. With these tools, you can compare your portfolio with the averages in the market, evaluate stocks before purchasing, and make intelligent decisions.

At $89.99, Quicken 2008 Premier is mostly meant for estabilshed families or individuals who have various types of investments, stocks and property, and college expenses.

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