Is that Quicken in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Written: Apr 29 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stay in sync with desktop Quicken, easy to use
Cons: Sync is mostly Palm to Desktop, not so much in other direction
The Bottom Line: An extremely useful tool for entering Quicken transactions when you're away from your computer.
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| marcman's Full Review: Pocket Quicken |
First, the URL: http://www.landware.com/pocketquicken/index.html
Pocket Quicken is a simple program from Landware that lets you enter transactions "on the road" and makes it easier for you to keep your Quicken data up to date. It's important to realize that Pocket Quicken is basically meant for data entry and doesn't have even 5% of the features that desktop Quicken has. For example, you won't be able to see graphs, analyze spending, look at investment accounts at all, or do tax planning. However, if you've wanted to enter transactions when you're away from your computer, this might be just what you need.
Why I wanted something like this
I started using desktop Quicken over three years ago. I've always found it to be a very powerful, albeit sometimes complex, program. It's a very useful tool for analyzing your finances and tracking your expenses. My problem has always been that I forget to enter transactions when I'm not at my computer. Eventually, I'm a month or two behind and then I procrastinate more and 5 or 6 months later, I finally sit myself down for a marathon Quicken session where I enter 100's of transactions. Pocket Quicken helps me avoid this situation by making it convenient for me to enter transactions immediately and then I can sync them right to Quicken. This new flexibility allows me to do one thing that I was never successful at before -- keeping track of a cash account. If you are an experienced Quicken user, you probably know that there are basically two approaches to tracking cash expenses in Quicken. The easy way is to record every ATM withdrawal as a cash expense. This is very easy, but the problem is that when you analyze your spending, you see a huge expense called "cash" and you don't really know where your cash is going. The more difficult alternative is to actually create an account for the cash in your wallet and track each individual purpose. I tried this in the past and it lasted all of about 3 days. It quickly fell apart, because I only use Quicken about once a week and could not remember where all my cash went. Eventually, I'd find huge discrepancies and I'd just give up on the cash account. With Pocket Quicken, I can record my purchases immediately into my Palm. The result is I always know how much cash I have and I can sync those transactions into desktop Quicken and see where my cash is really going. So you can see why I was very excited when I learned about Pocket Quicken. Finally, a piece of software that could speak to my anal financial tendencies while also satisfying (at least temporarily) my gadget lust.
Beware - features are fairly limited
So first, a caveat. When I first heard about this software, I began to dream of what it might be like. While I never expected it to have all the graphs and tax planning features of desktop Quicken, I did imagine that syncing would transfer the last 50 or so transactions from my Desktop Quicken to Pocket Quicken so I could look at them anywhere. It turned out that this is not the case. When syncing, the data is mostly transferred from Palm to desktop. In the Palm to desktop direction, Pocket Quicken transfers all of the transactions you've entered into Quicken. This is the most important feature of the software. In the desktop to Palm direction, Pocket Quicken gets the account name for each of your accounts and the latest balance for each of your accounts, but not the transactions. Also transferred from the desktop to Pocket Quicken (but not the other way) are your category and class lists. Pocket Quicken supports memorized transactions, but only within its own internal database -- i.e.: it does not transfer memorized transactions from desktop Quicken. A few other bummers here. Pocket Quicken only supports cash, checking, savings, credit card, asset, and liability accounts (also, there is a maximum of 15 accounts although I doubt this will be a problem for most people). You cannot track investment accounts, such as mutual funds, 401ks, stocks, bonds, etc... Also, you can add categories and classes to desktop Quicken and sync them to Pocket Quicken, but you cannot create new categories and classes in Pocket Quicken. At first, some of these things (no investment accounts in particular) were a disappointment, but I'm so happy with the ability to enter transactions remotely that I've forgotten these minor limitations. The upside of this is that Pocket Quicken uses very little memory -- only 80K on my Palm Vx.
Data entry is easy
Data entry is very easy with Pocket Quicken. Graffitti makes data entry a little slower than desktop Quicken, but Landware has done a nice job of making data entry pretty painless. First, Pocket Quicken supports memorized transactions -- much like desktop Quicken but miniaturized. As I mentioned before, your memorized transactions from desktop Quicken will NOT be transferred to your handheld. Pocket Quicken will remember transactions that you enter in Pocket Quicken though. You choose categories pretty easily through a pop-up menu -- in this case, your categories are transferred from desktop Quicken (but not every time -- you have to explicitly enable this option in the Pocket Quicken conduit every time you want to use it). And in case you were wondering, splits ARE supported.
Syncing
Syncing is easy. Pocket Quicken transactions are transferred to desktop Quicken, but they don't immediately go into your register. Quicken displays the list of remote transactions and allows you to accept, edit, or delete each transaction individually so you can verify and correct mistakes. How this is done exactly depends on the particular version of desktop Quicken that you have.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I think Pocket Quicken is an extremely useful tool for entering transactions when you're away from your computer. You can download a 15 day full-featured demo at http://www.landware.com/download/step2/pocketquicken/index.html. When the demo expires, you can purchase a registration code to unlock the full version for $39.95. Worth the price in my opinion.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
marcman
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Location: Santa Clara, CA, USA
Reviews written: 42
Trusted by: 33 members
About Me:
If I was writing for my dinner, I'd be a heck of a lot thinner.
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