![]() This is handy for creating reports that categorize your spending habits. For instance, you can select a Macy's purchase in the transactions list and rename the cryptic "Pos0808 Macy's West" to "Macy's," and all future Macy's transactions will follow your naming scheme. One upgrade lets you rename transactions downloaded from your bank to give payees more common names. Though plentiful, however, the changes are subtle. Intuit says there are 100 or so improvements in Quicken 2005. If you use Money 2004, you're better off upgrading to Money 2005 than making the switch. Switching from Money 2004, however, is cumbersome and requires a separate utility available for free download on the Quicken site. Our budget and investment data remained intact, too. Good news for upgraders: Importing Quicken 2004 data to Quicken 2005 proved fast and painless in our tests. Money, by comparison, kept our Desktop clean. For example, it automatically dumped five new icons on our Windows Desktop, four of which were advertisements for premium or third-party services. We were less thrilled with Quicken's sloppy installation habits. A minor difference, true, but this is exactly the kind of attention to detail that makes Quicken better. Quicken, however, also posts instructions in an adjacent browser window on how to initiate the data download. ![]() ![]() Both Quicken and Money launch your browser, go to your bank's site, and instruct you to log in. Let's say you're configuring a new checking account. Microsoft Money also offers an automatic setup feature, but it's not as intuitive as Quicken's. Nevertheless, it's still the best around. Quicken 2005's setup guide is unchanged from last year's. After a no-brainer software installation that takes less than five minutes, Quicken offers you the option of downloading checking, savings, and investment data directly from your financial institutions' sites. Overall, Intuit Quicken 2005 has the easiest setup procedure in personal finance software. We heartily recommend Quicken to personal finance beginners, but unless you're really into categorizing expenditures and you enjoy fiddling with the account register, Quicken 2004 users can skip the upgrade. Nonetheless, Quicken 2005 retains its slight edge over its key rival, the much-improved yet still-lacking Microsoft Money 2005 (our review of Microsoft Money 2005 will be posted soon). The new Quicken, devoid of whiz-bang enhancements, has all the sparkle of a midyear bug patch. Intuit Quicken Premier 2005 fixes a number of the nits we picked in version 2004, mostly in important yet humdrum modules such as Account Register and Category Manager.
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