There are some tools in my toolbox of apps that I’ve used for so long that I don’t even think about them anymore. When I finally sat down to make a list of the essential tools that I use, several of them surfaced, and frankly I was a bit surprised at how dependent I am on them. Quicken is one of those tools.

I started using Quicken in the dark ages of the computer industry. I’ve had variations on my computers since way back in 1986 when I installed a version on the Mac. Over the years, I migrated from the Mac version to the Windows version and haven’t looked back. Even though I now use a Macbook Pro as my primary computer, I still run the Windows version of Quicken via Parallels on my Mac.

The core idea behind Quicken is very simple, manage your finances as if it were a checkbook. You can even operate in a view that looks like a checkbook. If your bank supports the feature, you can download your transactions from the bank and even balance your Quicken checkbook without having to do anything on paper.

Quicken also allows me to have multiple accounts visible in one place. We have accounts at two financial institutions, and at our credit union we have several sub accounts. Quicken allows me to import transactions into each account and sub-account and then manage them all electronically.

While I’m extremely careful to bring all my receipts home and put them in my financial inbox, there are always a couple a month that slip through. When they do, I’m assured that Quicken and the electronic import will grab that data for me. Then all I have to do is figure out what we spent the money on.

Over the years we’ve gone hot-and-cold with the budgeting features of Quicken. As a listener to the Dave Ramsey radio show, as well as a believer in his philosophy, Quicken helped us dig ourselves out of a some debt in the mid 1990’s. Since then we’ve been able to track everything we do, and as Dave says “give every dollar a purpose”. Having abandoned the budgeting feature of Quicken for a customized spreadsheet, then a dedicated budgeting application, I’m now moving back into incorporating the Quicken Budget in our financial system. I’m striving to have all my financial data in one place, and Quicken is that place.

I’m using Quicken Premier, despite not really using all the features in the product. I upgraded to the highest level of Quicken several years ago, and haven’t downgraded back to the more appropriate Quicken Deluxe. Last year, I also started to use Quicken mobile. This allows me to enter information when I’m traveling. This saves me some time when I get back home. I don’t have to enter the data from a stack of receipts into Quicken, I just do it when I have downtime during travel. It’s a great time saver.

For a long time, I scanned every receipt into Quicken. This was a really helpful feature when I had to go back and review a transaction months (or even years) later. Unfortunately, this caused the Quicken database to grow very large, and slowed the program. More importantly, the scanning took a lot of time. And the images were often lost in Quicken. I never really discovered why so many images when missing, but I have about a year’s worth of images that are no longer accessible. More devastating is the fact that I shredded all those receipts, so I have no way to go back and review them. Since that fiasco, I’ve started scanning my receipts into Evernote, via Evernote Scannable, and then saving the physical copies into a manila folder labeled for each month. So for 2015, I have four hanging folders labeled Q1 through Q4. Inside each hanging folder are three manila folders, one for each month of the quarter. The current month has a large, red paperclip attached to the tab so that I can quickly locate where to file the latest receipts. When I encounter a situation where I need to review the actual physical receipt, I use Quicken to locate the month when the transaction occurred, then I locate the correct manila folder and browse through the receipts. While this isn’t as convenient as looking at the receipts electronically directly in Quicken, it’s worked for me.

Now that I’m scanning the vast majority (somewhere above 90%) of my receipts into Evernote, I’ve replicated the file-folder system. I can use the OCR (optical character recognition) search capabilities of Evernote to try and find a specific receipt, or I can go to the year and month’s folder and look for the receipt that way.

It’s also so easy to categorize every single transaction that I almost never enter a payment or deposit without a category. That allows me to look back at any time period and see where we’re spending our money. Doing that on paper is virtually impossible. Because all our bank accounts are in Quicken, it doesn’t matter which account we used to pay someone, the transaction is properly categorized and shows up in the reports.

Setting up recurring transactions is a snap. Regular bills that need to be paid can be setup with a few clicks and reminders can be attached so I never forget to pay a bill. I would love to say that I pay my bills on a regular schedule every single month. Unfortunately, I’m not my mother. I pay our bills a couple of times a month, but more often than not I get a reminder from Quicken about one that I had forgotten was imminently due. Because we make most of our payments electronically, it easy for me to get the reminder, pay the bill, and enter it into our financial tracking system in a matter of minutes. In fact, I’ve even made payments from my phone when I was away from home. Pretty slick, if you ask me.

I gave Quicken for Mac 2015 a test run prior to migrating my PC version, and frankly I found it wanting. That’s why I ended up sticking with the Windows version, even though it meant adding Parallels to my Mac. I’ll write about Parallels another time, but suffice it to say that I definitely got my money’s worth when I purchased Parallels. Of course, I tracked that expense in Quicken as a Software Expense for easy handling at the end of the year.

Quicken also integrates very handily with TurboTax. Here in the US we have to file our taxes by April 15th every year. I’m able to use the categorization in Quicken to feed into TurboTax so that many of the transactions from the year are automatically populated in the right place in TurboTax. That capability saves me a bunch of time during the data entry phase of our tax preparation.

Overall, Quicken is an essential tool that I use constantly. With the addition of the mobile version I’ve found that I’m very efficient with my data capture. I’m able to watch our expenses very carefully, and feel confident that nothing is slipping through the cracks. If you’re looking for a way to manage your finances in an electronic form, Quicken is well worth considering!