Quicken 2015 makes life easier for individuals and investors (including especially real estate investors and small-business owners). But that doesn’t mean you want to spend any more time working with each whistle and bell in Quicken 2015 or reading more about the software program than you have to. Here are quick summaries of stuff you can do and information you can employ to make using the world’s most popular financial record-keeping tool easier and more profitable.
Windows Tricks for Quicken 2015 Users
More myself to more manual data entry because the Quicken for Mac 2015 doesn't. Importing data from Quicken 2015 for Mac: Imports from Quicken Essentials for to manually enter at least my last 4 years of transactions into Quicken for Mac. Mac Essentials wasn't great, but it was functional. I upgraded to Quicken 2015 - and was dismayed with. Quicken Mac 2018 is a glorious flaming waste of time if you want a semblance of tracking investments. I have been using Quicken Mac since 2004. I have diligently been forced into upgrading purely because mac has improved with time and no longer can run older versions of Quicken. I am now on the 3rd round of customer service calls. User Guide Quicken For Mac 2015.pdf - Free download Ebook, Handbook, Textbook, User Guide PDF files on the internet quickly and easily.
Quicken “plays” well with Windows. Accordingly, you can use a handful of standard Windows tricks to make your use of Quicken financial recording program easier — and faster.
To move quickly to list box entries that begin with a particular letter, press the letter.
To select a list box entry and choose a dialog box’s suggested command button, double-click the entry.
To move the insertion bar to the beginning of a field, press Home.
To move the insertion bar to the end of a field, press End.
To close a window or dialog box, click its Close button in the upper-right corner. (The Close button is the little box with an X in it.)
To minimize a window, which shrinks it to a tiny picture, Windows users need to click the first button in the upper-right corner — the one that looks like an underline. (Windows then places the minimized program on the taskbar.)
To maximize the Quicken desktop so that it fills the entire monitor screen, click the middle button in the upper-right corner of the application window if the button shows one window. If the middle button shows two windows, the desktop is already maximized. For previous Windows versions, click the up arrow in the application’s upper-right window.
To do a Help yelp, press the F1 key. This key works just about anywhere. Don’t press it in a crowded theater, though.
To start another application in Windows, click the Start button.
To switch to another application, click its button on the taskbar.
To change any document’s window size, position the mouse pointer on the window border and then click and drag the border. (If you can’t see the border because the window’s been maximized, click the middle button — with the two windows in it — in the upper-right corner.)
Cool Date-Editing Tricks for Quicken 2015
Within the Quicken accounting program (and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using Quicken Starter Edition, Quicken Deluxe, Quicken Premier, Quicken Home & Business, or Quicken Rental Property Manager), you enter dates again and again: the date you write a check, the date you record a deposit, the date you reconcile an account, the date you receive a dividend on some investment, and so on.
Fortunately, you can use several very cool, extremely handy date-editing tricks. Specifically, if the selection cursor is in a Date field, you can do these things:
| Press This Key | What Happens |
|---|---|
| + | Adds one day to the date shown. |
| – | Subtracts one day from the date shown. |
| t | Changes the date to today’s date. You can remember this because t is the first letter in today. |
| y | Changes the date to the first date in the year. Note that y is the first letter in year. |
| r | Changes the date to the last date in the year. Note that r is the last letter in year. |
| m | Changes the date to the first date in the month. Just to salve my compulsive personality, allow me to point out that m is the first letter in month. |
| h | Changes the date to the last date in the month. Okay, last time I’ll provide a memory tool: Note that h is the last letter in month. |
4 Tasks Every Quicken 2015 User Should Perform
Working with a richly featured, mature financial record-keeping software program like Quicken 2015 can present a bit of a challenge. The Quicken software just does so much. Here are four tasks that every Quicken user should perform on a regular basis:
Set up Quicken bank accounts for all your checking, savings, and money market accounts — and then use the Quicken software to carefully track the money that flows into and out of these accounts. Maintaining even just this simple cash accounting system lets you more easily monitor your finances, budget for the future, and identify money-saving tax deductions.
Just one quick aside for small businesses and rental property investors: The Home & Business and Rental Manager versions of Quicken let you easily set up and run simple cash-based accounting systems for a home-based business and for real estate investments. Use these great tools if you’re a real estate investor or business owner!
Use the Retirement Calculator to estimate when and how you can retire. Especially with the financial meltdown in the past decade, people need to get more proactive both about saving for and planning for retirement.
To use the Retirement Calculator, display the Planning tab, click the Planning Tools button, and choose the Retirement Calculator command. Here’s a free financial planning tip: Invest some time in figuring out how to really economize on your investment-related costs, because these costs (mutual fund expense ratios, financial advisory fees, trading costs, and so on) can eat away at your profits in a fashion that most amateur investors don’t understand.
Create a category list that makes tracking your spending and tax deductions easy. Within Quicken, you organize your financial information using income and deductions categories. Any stream of income you want to separately track or monitor, for example, requires its own category. And any expense that you want to regularly tally — perhaps the expense represents a tax deduction — also requires its own category. You can set up categories by choosing Tools→Category List.
Balance bank accounts each month with only a few minutes of effort by clicking the Actions button and then choosing the Reconcile command. (The Actions button appears in the upper-right corner of the Quicken window whenever a bank register shows.) Reconciling a bank account lets you catch and correct bookkeeping errors with your accounting records.
Quicken 2015 Shortcuts That Save You Time
Want to save time working with the Quicken 2015 program? Consider using and memorizing a handful of the keyboard shortcuts listed in the table here. Using Quicken keyboard shortcuts requires a bit of memorization work up front, but it usually pays rich dividends in the form of data-entry time savings.
| Shortcut | Why You Want to Try Really Darn Hard to Remember This |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+S | Displays the Split Transaction window (so that you can use more than one category to describe a payment or deposit). |
| Shift+Delete | Cuts out the selected text in a field and moves it to the Windows Clipboard (so that you can paste it into some other field). |
| Ctrl+Insert | Copies the selected text in a field to the Windows Clipboard (so that you can paste it into some other field). |
| Shift+Insert | Pastes what’s on the Clipboard into the selected field. |
| Ctrl+P | Prints the contents of the active window. (Well, almost always.) |
| Ctrl+O | Lets you open another Quicken data file. |
| Ctrl+G | Go to date. |
| Ctrl+K | Displays the financial calendar. |
| Ctrl+B | Puts you on the fast track to backing up your data. |
| Ctrl+A | Displays the Accounts List window. |
| Ctrl+W | Displays the Write Checks window. |
| Ctrl+L | Displays the tag list. |
| Ctrl+T | Displays the memorized Payees list. |
| Ctrl+J | Displays the scheduled transactions list. |
| Ctrl+U | Displays the Portfolio View window. |
| Ctrl+V | Allows you to void a transaction. |
| Ctrl+Y | Displays the security list. |
| Ctrl+H | Displays the Find and Replace window. |
| Ctrl+M | Memorizes the transaction. |
| Ctrl+R | Reconciles dialog. |
| F1 | For those times when you just have to say, “Aaagh! Help! Help!” |
| F11 | Maximizes register view. |
| Alt+Home | Goes to the Home Tab. |
| Ctrl+Shift+C | Goes to the Category list. |
| Ctrl+Shift+M | Goes to the Manage Hidden Accounts dialog. |
| End four times | Goes to the last transaction in register. |
5 Free, Reliable Websites for Quicken 2015 Users
Quickbooks For Mac
The web represents a treasure trove of information about personal finance, small business, and tax accounting that Quicken users will appreciate. Individuals, investors, and small business owners just beginning their research, however, often aren’t sure which websites offer the most reliable information. Here are half a dozen sites that provide lots of reliable information you can use.
| Site | Why It’s Useful |
|---|---|
| Social Security Administration | The Social Security Administration website lets you estimate your future benefits. (Despite what you sometimes here people say, Social Security will “be there” for future generations. But benefits will probably be scaled back for at least some recipients, which you can read more about at the Social Security Administration’s website |
| Bogleheads | Basically, the online fan club for Vanguard Group founder John Bogle, this great forum provides tons of investment planning and record-keeping advice — all influenced by a strong belief in the superiority of a passive, low-cost investing |
| Quicken | Find lots of stuff for Quicken.com users, all from the maker of Quicken — Intuit. Note that if you register at the Quicken.com site, you also gain additional functionality within the Quicken program. For example, you can usually download stock price information for free. |
| Internal Revenue Service | Most people by now know that the IRS website provides downloadable forms and informational booklets. What some people don’t know, however, is that it also provides access to U.S. tax law (both the Internal Revenue Code and the Treasury Regulations). |
| Evergreen Small Business | The author of Quicken For Dummies has a blog with several hundred pages of small business, personal financial planning, and tax-related information, including free downloadable copies of many of his old (but still useful) books. |
Quicken 2018 For Mac Review
Jim and Dan, there's a lot of history that gets us to where we find ourselves today. The developers are well aware that Quicken Mac does not have all the functionality of Quicken Windows nor the legacy Quicken 2007 for Mac, and they are working to build many of the features users have been asking for. Progress is being made, but the progress is slower than both users, developers and Quicken management would have liked or expected. Why? This is likely way more information than you wanted, but I think if you read though it, you'll gain an understanding of why things are where they are and what the future holds...
Quicken for Mac was originally developed for the 'Classic' Mac operating system of the 1980s and 90s, and when Apple switched to the Unix-based Mac OS X in 2001, developers were aware that while Apple aimed to maintain compatibility as long as possible, eventually the underpinnings of old Mac OS would be retired and programs would have to be re-written for the new operating system. After the release of Quicken 2007, the developers at Intuit realized that so much of the code of Quicken was inexorably tied to things in the old OS, there was no viable alternative except starting over to build a new Quicken Mac using the more modern tools, database, graphics and frameworks of Mac OS X.
So starting in late 2006, that's what they aimed to do. It was a very big project, since Quicken 2007 was the culmination of nearly 20 year of code development. The team working on the new version didn't set out to create a look-alike of Quicken 2007, but to re-think the features and design of a program that had originally been developed when everyone had 12' monitors. The project was called Quicken Financial Life, and after two years of development, it never made it out of beta testing. During this development cycle, Mint.com was born -- a web-based financial management tool which looked clean and colorful and was easy to use. Recognizing the threat to Quicken's market dominance, Intuit purchased Mint in 2009, and installed its founder, Aaron Patzer, as the head of the Quicken division. He quickly revamped the stalled Quicken Mac project to make its user interface more like Mint, with colorful charts and graphs -- but there was still a huge amount of functionality missing. He decided to release an underpowered subset of Quicken, called Quicken Essentials, in early 2010. It didn't track investments, had rudimentary reporting, and lacked a great deal of other functionality from the legacy Quicken -- but it was something they could put on the market while they continued development. He promised Mac users a full-fledged Quicken Deluxe would follow the next year. It was not to be. Reviews and users disliked Quicken Essentials because of its limited features, so many users continued using Quicken 2007, and Intuit continued not bringing in much revenue from its Mac product. Intuit then underwent another management shake-up, with Patzer leaving the Quicken division, and the Mac project completely stalled.
It wasn't until late 2012 that Intuit hired a new product manager, Marcus Aiu, to pick up the pieces of the Quicken Mac development project. With only a handful of developers on the team, they needed to revamp some of the core code in Essentials to conform to changes in the Mac operating system, and then to develop the missing investment tracking functionality. After two years of development, in August 2014, the modern Quicken Mac came to market as Quicken 2015. Most of the people who beta tested that product argued that more features and fixes were needed before the product was released. Marcus explained that this essentially was a minimal viable product that they planned to rapidly iterate with user feedback. They felt it was a long-needed enhancement for users of the ill-fated Quicken Essentials product, but knew it didn't yet have the functionality to meet the needs of many longtime Quicken Mac users or Quicken Windows users.
Marcus posted this simple explanation shortly after Quicken 2015 was first released, something I wish the company would have displayed more prominently: 'I don't expect many Quicken 2007 or Quicken Windows users to purchase the product until it has the features they need. The bottom line is: we released what we felt was a great release [upgrade] for Quicken Essentials users, and the plan is to continue to enhance the product adding legacy features that appear in other versions of Quicken throughout the year.'
They've made a lot of progress since then, and added many major and minor features users have clamored for. But they thought they'd make much faster progress in adding features; they lost a lot of time re-writing code for changing Internet communications protocols, changing servers at Intuit, and eventually moving off some of Intuit's servers after Quicken separated from Intuit. At the time Quicken became an independent company in 2016, the CEO stated that Quicken Mac feature parity with Quicken Windows is a goal. (Cynics will note that Quicken Windows has its own share of problems that Quicken Mac ought not to emulate!) They also announced they were doubling the size of the Mac development team to build new functionality more quickly.
So where does that leave us in late 2018? I would argue that for all the shortcomings in Quicken Mac 2019, things seem headed in the right direction -- but the path is going to continue to be one of slow progress with bumps along the way. Quicken 2019 is vastly improved over the original Quicken 2015 four years ago, and even over Quicken 2017 two years ago. The developers don't pre-announce features, so we don't know exactly what it coming or when -- but they have hinted at some long-desired improvements coming in the not too distant future, including continued work on bringing powerful, flexible reports to replace the lame reports that still exist from Essentials 8 years ago; user control over payee matching and transaction auto-categorization; and user control over including account transfers in budgets.
Sorry if that was too long, but to me, the recounting of the entire tortured, twisted history helps me have some perspective and understanding of why things aren't at the level we'd yet like, and also judge the quality and pace of development over the past number of years. It's going to take another year or two, or more, to add many of the features that users are waiting for, but all indications are that they are headed in the right direction.