Intuit Quicken XG Suite

As Financial Suite is to Money basic, so Suite is to XG Startup, though as we've said, working out exactly what you're getting for how much money is harder than it should be, thanks to the Byzantine pricing.

In this case, the added extra comes in the shape of Taxcalc. This is a pretty good deal - as a standalone package it will cost you around £20; it's also one of the slicker tax return compilers.

Improvements to the core Quicken personal finance features include bank account and credit card tracking, chequebook balancing, cashflow reporting, foreign exchange rates, stocks, investment and unit trust price updates.

As ever with these packages, Quicken hammers the online content, inviting you to 'make better financial decisions with over 50 links to UK investment content'. But, as ever, we feel it's a hollow boast. There are any number of excellent financial websites dispensing free advice.

If you bank with HSBC, Natwest or the Royal Bank of Scotland, Quicken XG will let you download transactions directly from your bank into a Quicken account (you need to have signed up for online banking first). That's great, but at the risk of sounding churlish, many of us don't use these banks. In fact we'd hazard that anyone IT savvy enough to be using Quicken is likely to be with one of the online banks which offers better deals than the high-street equivalents.

After tax and household accounts, the third part of the Quicken trio is the Home Business Centre. It's simple to set up accounts payable and receivable, so you can easily track customer invoices and bills, as well as email invoices to customers. You can generate more than a dozen business reports, and track VAT.

Contact: Intuit 0845 606 2161
www.quicken.co.uk

System Requirements:

• Windows 95 or above
• 133MHz or faster processor
• 32MB of Ram (64MB recommended, 128MB for XP)
• 110MB of free hard disk space
• Internet Explorer 5.5 or above
• Double-speed CD-Rom drive

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