Interestingly, however, Web-based finance apps appear to inform many of the improvements in Intuit's 2010 desktop line. A major interface overhaul begins with a home screen that reflects the simplified design esthetic of sites such as and (the latter is in the ): You see three stacked modules, starting with a colorful pie chart showing the previous month's spending by major categories along with (in large type) the total spent.
The middle module shows what bills are coming due in the next two weeks, along with Quicken's calculations (based on your input for income) of how much money (again shown in large type) you'll have left in your spending accounts after paying them. And finally, you get bar charts showing how your spending for the current month in key categories (categories you choose) tracks against your budget for those categories.
Overall, the new home screen is attractive and informative, but as with previous versions, you're free to customize it to your preference: Adding, for example, an investment account module by clicking the View button at the top right of the screen was as simple as adding a button to a Windows toolbar.
Like its Web-based brethren, Quicken continues to offer automated downloads of transaction data from financial institutions--but few, if any, can match its breadth of support. Intuit says Quicken 2010 supports some 6700 financial institutions that hold approximately 90 percent of all U.S. deposits. (However, over 10,000 small institutions still aren't supported, so check with yours if this feature is important.) I didn't run into a single problem in setting up automatic data downloads from various checking, credit card, and investment accounts at the Bank of America, Chase, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab. As in previous versions, you can rename transactions (which sometimes download with cryptic abbreviations), and Quicken lets you set up rules so that this is done automatically.
Intuit says that one major improvement drawn from anonymized analysis of Quicken Online usage is improved auto-categorization of downloaded transactions based on payee. It's still not perfect--I had to change roughly 20 percent of its categorization decisions--but the software gets better over time as it learns from your own categorization choices. Since categories can be associated with line items in tax returns, accurate and complete categorization can be a big help at tax time--and is of course vital for useful financial planning.