In another two weeks, I’m jumping Intuit’s ship, diving off the side of the SS Quicken into the cool waters of Excel. Over the past five years as a program administrator, I’ve learned just enough about how Excel works to set up a spreadsheet to operate as a checkbook. Using very basic skills (indeed), I’ve figured out not only how to create a running balance but also how to make Excel reconcile a checkbook against a bank statement. None of this is rocket science. What’s new is realizing I can make a generic program like Excel or its open-source equivalents do all I need Quicken to do. Because I don’t use Quicken for online banking, my needs for the program are pretty plain-vanilla: keep track of expenses and income, categorize them, create an annual tax report, and reconcile bank accounts. Quicken’s various planning calculators, especially the ones related to loans, come in handy, but similar calculators are all over the Internet. Sometimes when you’re looking at your checking accounts in Quicken Essentials for Mac, the running Balance column (1) shows up empty. Here’s how to fix that glitch. First, click on the Reset Filters button (2). It won’t look like anything happens, but that’s just fine. Next, click on the Date column header (3). Nor do I use Turbotax, Intuit’s companion to Quicken, billed as the answer to all your income-tax reporting problems. Why, you ask, do I eschew Quicken’s whiz-bang online features? Simple: I don’t trust Intuit, a corporation that issues ever-more-bloated versions of its program each year and then forces consumers to buy them by jimmying the code to render data entered in “older” programs unreadable. I can’t say how much I resent that. Also, customer service is nonexistent. It’s a consumer-unfriendly product manufactured by a consumer-unfriendly corporation. There is no way I’m going to put my personal data online through that outfit’s tentacles. I do my online banking directly with the credit union, thank you. Every financial institution that does business with me makes online transactions and statements readily available. All I need to do that is a reasonably secure browser, sayFirefox running on a Mac, for example. My taxes are so complicated, there is no chance on God’s green earth I could do them myself, nor would I trust Turbotax to stuff all my square pegs into its round holes. Income has, over the years, derived from salary, contract work, limited partnerships, securities investments, nontaxable bonds, mutual funds, a 403(b), an annuity, a whole life policy, alimony, Social Security, unemployment insurance, sales of real estate, a C-corporation, a sole proprietorship, an S-corporationit goes on and on. A vast array of laws and loopholes applies to these things, none of them even faintly comprehensible to the amateur. It’s also very frustrating that Quicken data will convert from PC format to Mac format, but not back. This means that when the day comes that I no longer can afford Macintosh computers—and that day arrived on Tuesday, after I bought the MacBook—to continue using Quicken I will have to start completely anew, losing all historical data.
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