Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a beta tester for Quicken 2011 I've had a couple months to really dive into the features of Quicken Deluxe 2011 and have been using it as my primary Personal Finance Software. The last version of Quicken I used was Quicken Deluxe 2008 after upgrading yearly since 2005. Prior to that I was a MS Money users since Money 97, upgrading every other version. When I switched from Money to Quicken I felt that I gave up some nice user experiences and fluidity of the application. Money was getting a little too friendly with butterflies and cartoony icons. Quicken on the other hand felt very old school, pretty rigid and sorta ugly. But I felt it was more robust and learned to work in the clunkier UI. Quicken 2011 has gone a long way toward improving the user experience while maintaining the robust feature set. The influence of the Mint team is immediate obvious on the default home page with a drill-down spending pie chart that is taken directly form the Mint site. This is a good feature for quickly seeing where your money has gone. The ability to click down into sub-categories and then payees is very nice. It's also helpful to catch if you've miscategorized a transaction. Below that on the home screen is the upcoming bills/reminders so you have a clear view (after entering the reminders) of where your money is going to go. You can enter/skip this bills from that home page without going to another screen or register. At the bottom of the home page is a customizable spending tracker. I took advantage of the customization and removed this completely. These home page features and their logical, easy links to Spending and Bills tabs lay out a good workflow for managing your day-to-day finances. Unfortunately, as you move further across the tabs you get to the Planning tab with the Spending Planner, Lifetime Planner and Tax Center. The latter two don't appear to have been touched since the 2008 versions but the Spending Planner is promoted from the My Savings Plan to front and center for planning purposes. I cannot figure out how this is supposed to work and be better than the budget tool in Quicken. And many beta testers had this same experience. The Spending Planner really falls short of being useful and I ignore it completely. Intuit could really benefit its users by including some video tutorials about how this feature is supposed to work and the philosophy behind it (the Help files are as cryptic as the feature). Ultimately, I would prefer that Quicken have it's budget feature better integrated to the Planning tab and not contained in a separate modal box. The budget tool appears to not have been updated since I started using Quicken in 2005 - and it is really one of the key tools I use consistently. Overall, the at-a-glance and easy drill down of the home page, Spending and Bills tab make for a good upgrade from downlevel versions. If you are using Quicken 2010 you may not see real compelling need to upgrade, but for 2008 and earlier users, this is an upgrade you should really consider.