Intuit Quicken XG

Another financial year, another version of personal finance giant Quicken - this time cryptically named Quicken XG.

It must be dispiriting for manufacturers of personal finance software which aren't Intuit or Microsoft. You proudly launch your new package, then along comes a new cut of Quicken or Money to blow you out of the water.

Not that Quicken XG is a revolutionary step forward, but the plus of having developed a reliable, simple and user-friendly piece of software, refined over many years and versions, is that it works, and you have hundreds of thousands of happy customers.

The minus is that you have to tinker around with perfection each year in order to be new and improved and garner further sales.

But first the good stuff. It's a subjective call, but many people would rather die than swap their Quicken for any other personal finance package, and the reasons for that are still present in XG.

The setup process is largely a doddle. You are interrogated for information about your personal financial health, and the process continues logically through setting goals, adding your various accounts. It then produces a rather tidy home page with all your information at a glimpse.

Quicken's ace is its graphics, producing pie, flow and myriad other charts to help you quickly grasp why you are in the red each month, how to get into the black and where you are headed. Planning is high on the agenda, as you project your savings and retirement plans.

You can also print out cheques and set up the calendar to ensure you don't miss payments of regular and ad hoc bills. Best of all, you can account for each penny, as you marshall your affairs from personal and business accounts.

So far so good, but what's new? The At-a-Glance feature groups your accounts into 'key areas' called Centres: you click on a Centre for a quick summary of your data; My Data Tab gives an overview of tasks for today; and you can minimise reports or features - Windows style - at the bottom of Quicken.

Long time users might find the radical overhaul of the interface disconcerting, but we found it created a tidy and usable screen. Intuit makes quite a play of its having beefed up the online support this time round.

The only problem is that it comes at a price, courtesy of a service called Quicken Advantage. You can sign up to this for product support and product updates, as well as stock and unit trust prices and news.

But there are so many excellent websites, of the calibre of www.ft.com and www.moneyextra.com, offering financial news free of charge that we doubt you'd choose to pay for it.

In fact, the obsession with 'online' started to get us down a bit with this version of Quicken. It started on installation when we had to disable Zone Alarm, in order to allow the product to register. And in use, the constant pleas of XG to go and get information/log-in/have a nice chat with www.quicken.com quickly became irritating.

We've got other minor quibbles with XG. The setup process, while thorough, is irritatingly inflexible. When it comes to setting up regular bill payments, XG obligingly gives you a list of standard expense types - mortgage, gas, electricity and so forth - but these are all based around the US tax system - we don't pay 'auto insurance' and there's no mention of council tax anywhere.

You can type in your own accounts later of course, but the presets show every sign of a US product adapted to the UK market with a carefree attention to detail.

However, as an all-in-one financial minder it is hard to knock. There is an increasing legion of freelance/small business Brits; people who have to combine a business invoicing and cost control system with a way of balancing the weekly groceries shopping, and a mortgage all the while peering toward an uncertain pension. Quicken XG will help users do that job simply, tidily and at a fair price.

Contact: Intuit 01628 590800
www.quicken.co.uk

System requirements:

• 133MHz Pentium or above
• 32MB of Ram (64MB recommended)
• 54MB to 97MB of free hard disk space
• Windows 95 or above
• Two-speed CD-ROM drive (four-speed recommended)
• video card and monitor capable of running 256-colour SVGA
• Internet Explorer 5.5 or above