In the early 90s, Intuit introduced Quicken, personal finance software that would grow to be the market leader.
In fact, it's the only desktop program that supports every aspect of personal finance so comprehensively.
Its current owners have now introduced a new web-based personal finance solution, Simplifi by Quicken.
This new service was designed for a different market, targeting a younger demographic, as well as any other consumers who want to track their financial accounts, keep an eye on day-to-day spending, and work toward savings goals.
It's not "Quicken lite," but rather an entirely different approach.
Being so new, Simplifi by Quicken has not had the years to mature that its closest competitor, Mint (owned by Intuit) has.
Mint remains our Editors' Choice.
It's free (though you'll have to look at ads for related services), and it offers some tools like bills, budgets, credit scores, and alerts that Simplifi by Quicken (which costs $3.99 per month or $39.99 annually) lacks.
On the other hand, Simplifi by Quicken offers a fresher user experience, a more effective dashboard, and innovative views of your data that keep you in constant sync with your finances, like watchlists, a spending plan, and reports.
Why a Personal Finance App?
If you've never used one, you might wonder what the benefits of using a personal finance application are.
Most obviously, they provide one site where you can consolidate all of your financial accounts, including checking and savings, credit card, and brokerage.
Once you've made an online connection to your accounts, you'll be able to view their (nearly) real time activity and balances, both individually and in one consolidated register.
This means you can sign in anytime and see which transactions have cleared your accounts recently.
This ability can alert you to two kinds of trouble.
You may learn that someone has gained access to your account or that one or more of your balances are in dangerous territory.
You can also check the mobile app while you're staring at something you want to buy but don't know if you can afford it.
And, they can simply remind you of transactions you've forgotten (but your bank hasn't).
There are other benefits, too.
You may want to create budgets for individual spending areas or at least compare money coming in to money going out for a given month.
Are you saving toward a specific goal, a new car or a house or a vacation? You'll be able to track your progress—maybe even link a goal to a savings account.
Depending on which application you use, you might be able to get your credit score (Credit Karma comes to mind) and manage bills.
Security for personal finance applications is robust.
Their developers use technology similar to what the big banks use.
You still need to be vigilant about keeping such sensitive data safe by, for example, never using an Android app or iPhone app on a public Wi-Fi network.
Jumping Right In
Simplifi by Quicken setup is indeed simple.
Once you create an account (a 30-day free trial is available), you provide your name and ZIP code.
That's it.
In order to provide all the feedback that Simplifi by Quicken offers, you'll need to give it access to your financial accounts—all of them, for the best results.
That involves searching for the institutions that provide your online checking and savings accounts, credit cards, investments, loans, and other financial instruments.
Once you enter your username and password for each, the site imports your most recent transactions and continues to update itself.
Critical Categorization
The first thing you'll want to do once you're all connected is to go through each account register.
Set aside some time for this, as you'll be dealing with anywhere from one to three months' worth of transactions.
This might be enlightening.
You may notice, for example, that you're still paying for a subscription that you thought you'd cancelled.
The most important thing you'll do here is assign categories to transactions, so you know where your money is coming from and where it's going.
Simplifi by Quicken comes with a default set of categories, like Auto & Transport, Dining & Drinks, Entertainment, Groceries, and Utilities.
You can add, edit, and delete categories on the master list, and you can change the categories that the site has already assigned to transactions.
Simplifi by Quicken, like other financial applications, makes educated guesses about expenses.
You can modify these, and when you do, matching entries that download will "learn" from this and be categorized correctly in the future.
You'll also be categorizing and tracking your income, of course.
If you're a W-2 employee and get regular paychecks for the same amount, Simplifi by Quicken works great.
You just find one of those deposits and make it recurring, then click the "Is Recurring Income" link to open a window where you can designate the frequency.
Your paycheck deposits would, of course, come in from your bank anyway, but by making them recurring, they'll be a part of your Spending Plan (more on that later).
If you're self-employed or have a side gig and your income varies from month to month, the site will not be as useful.
This isn't to say you shouldn't use it.
In fact, the ability to categorize expenses is critical for self-employed individuals.
You'll need that information when it comes time to pay estimated taxes and prepare your annual return.
You just won't have as complete a picture of your projected balances at the beginning of the month.
Simplifi by Quicken may be too limited if you're self-employed and have a complex business.
You might want to consider a small business accounting solution.
You can see our reviews here.
You can take other actions with transactions, like designating them as one-time or recurring bills.
Simplifi by Quicken's bill-tracking capabilities are not as advanced as Mint's, but you can include them in your monthly expenses.
You might want to add notes and attachments and split transactions and record a transaction manually.
Simplifi By Quicken also allows you to toggle a button to exclude an entry from Reports and/or your Spending Plan.
Do you have to deal with all of the historical data that came in during your first import? No.
You can start your checking and categorizing from the day you first sign in.
But if there has been a recent problem, you can clear it up quickly.
You may also have annual fees that won't come around again for another year.
I found one of those, a $100+ yearly charge for a service I'd forgotten I'd signed up for and didn't need anymore.
I also found a credit card withdrawal for $593.15, a charge that a company was not authorized to initiate.
I missed these when I checked my online accounts individually, maybe because I've so rarely encountered problems with online accounts and wasn't looking carefully enough.
The two times my accounts were hacked were due to offline exposure of bank cards.
Admittedly, I don't check every day because it takes so long with multiple accounts.
Simplifi by Quicken only requires one login for all of them, so I'm far less likely to miss something since I can scan transactions from all of my accounts quickly.
And, I can view my register in any of several views, like by date, account, payee, and category.
Fast Feedback
Simplifi by Quicken displays its intelligence in other ways, too.
If you carefully document every transaction that came in during your first imports (and this is another reason to do so), you get instant feedback on your finances by way of your Spending Plan.
This tool uses simple addition and subtraction to calculate how much money you have left to spend for the current month.
It adds up all of your scheduled income and subtracts from that the bills and subscriptions it's identified as well as any other money you've spent.
You can see all of these transactions listed by date.
This is a great idea, but it assumes that you've been conscientious about documenting absolutely everything.
A daily check of your transaction register should remind you of anything you've missed.
Simplifi by Quicken offers more targeted feedback in another way.
You can create Spending Watchlists to track money you've spent in areas where you tend to overspend.
The site allows you to set these up by category, payee, or tag, and to specify a maximum if you'd like.
Your Watchlists are displayed in boxes on one screen; each shows your four-month average and year-to-date totals, as well as the current month's amount spent so far, projected, and your target.
You can create both ongoing Watchlists and one-time tallies, such as for holiday spending.
These tools are Simplifi by Quicken's answer to budgets, which it doesn't offer because its developers and early users found that people spend discretionary money differently each month, making it difficult to come up with the perfect plan.
This seems like an effective compromise to me.
You're still watching your money closely, but you don't get locked into absolutes that might make you give up on the whole concept because you're not meeting overly strict goals.
Mint, on the other hand, does offer budgeting tools, but they're flexible.
You create individual budgets for each category that can be easily adjusted.
Mint subtracts your budgeting spending from your budgeted income on the Budgets page so you can always see what will—theoretically—be left over.
It also tracks your actual numbers as they increase and allows you to schedule email and push notifications for budget overruns and numerous other situations.
Simplifi by Quicken does not offer this critical tool but is looking at adding it in the future, aiming to do so in a way that won't overload users with alerts.
Mint also provides easy access to your current credit score, which Simplifi by Quicken doesn't do.
Saving, Investing, Reports
Simplifi by Quicken does a commendable job of showing you where you are and where you've been financially.
But you can't have a personal finance website without including some tools to help plan for the future.
So, Simplifi by Quicken offers its Savings Goals feature.
You can create tracking records for goals like a vacation, an emergency fund, or a new car.
You simply name it and set a target amount, then make an entry when you either add to it or remove some funds for another purpose.
The site keeps track of how much you've saved and where you've saved it.
It displays your current monthly contribution and calculates your average monthly savings.
Mint's savings goal tools are more advanced.
The site helps you define your goals in detail, like by determining how much you need to save, and allows you to link your goals to financial accounts.
Simplifi by Quicken's investment tracking is fairly basic in this debut version.
You can connect to your online brokerage accounts and view a mini portfolio of your holdings.
Reports are important to the success of a personal finance website, too; you need to be able to view your data by applying a variety of filters.
Simplifi by Quicken calls these Insights.
It offers five types of content here: Income, Spending, Net Income, Savings, and Net Worth.
When you select one of the first three, you're presented with multiple ways to view it in both chart form and transaction list.
Click Spending, for example, and your choices are By Month, By Category, By Payee, By Tag, and Current vs Last.
You can look at all this data for the last six or 12 months.
Mint offers a comparable tool called Trends.
The User Experience and Mobile
The target market for Simplifi by Quicken wants simplicity and a friendly, understandable, uncluttered user experience.
These consumers don't want to hunch over their PCs for hours doing the recording, planning, and reporting that Quicken users must do for the software to be effective.
They don't want to have to wade through multiple layers of menus and complex features.
They want to log in, quickly see their account balances, find out how much spending money they have left this month, or check their portfolios.
In this area, Simplifi by Quicken is superior to Mint.
Granted, Mint has more features, so there's more to tuck away.
But Simplifi by Quicken is designed to minimize the time needed to get answers to financial questions.
The site opens to its Dashboard, which displays account balances in a vertical pane on the left.
The bulk of this screen consists of multiple boxes that contain the slices of personal finance information that would be most commonly sought.
These data boxes are abbreviated versions of the Spending Plan, upcoming transactions, top spending categories, and Spending Watchlists.
There are six-month graphs outlining income and spending that you have to scroll to see completely, but you can see everything else without scrolling.
Other screens deeper in the site are similarly attractive and intuitive.
Simplifi by Quicken looks fresher and more state-of-the art than Mint, which requires much scrolling to see its overview.
Those opening screens are—arguably—the most important pages on the sites.
Mint stacks its vertically while Simplifi by Quicken runs horizontally, which allows you to take in key finance details faster.
Simplifi by Quicken offers mobile apps for both iOS and Android.
I tested both versions, which worked great.
The apps open to your account balances and upcoming transactions.
Scroll down, and you'll see your top and recent spending, portfolio value, Watchlists, and Spending Plan (you'll have to do some clicking and swiping to see everything here).
Click a link in the upper left, and a navigation pane slides out that contains links to all of the features in the browser-based version.
I was able to find almost everything that I'd seen on the desktop version, though there weren't as many report options.
The apps use mobile technology well, and they provide the best of both worlds: You can get a quick overview of your finances but also drill down deeper for details.
I preferred Simplifi by Quicken's mobile apps to Mint's, which worked fine but only contained a subset of the features found through a browser.
A Terrific Launch
Simplifi by Quicken has made an impressive first impression.
Its developers have incorporated a smart set of data access tools for consumers who don't want to micromanage their finances but do want to be able to watch over their money quickly and easily—either on their desktops or their smartphones.
Its attractive, intuitive user...