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Intuit is updating Quicken, its perennial personal finance kingpin, with some noteworthy changes in the 20th anniversary edition that include a summary page, a redesigned Investing Center, and a quick start for new users.

The program is available in several configurations. The basic program is priced at $30; Quicken Deluxe, $60; and Quicken Premier, $80. The Deluxe version adds more financial-planning tools; the Premier edition provides additional tax-related and investment features.

The Quicken Premier Home and Business version is priced at $90, and adds support for some small-business needs, such as invoicing and tracking basic business expenses.

New Features

Intuit has revamped the program to make it easier for new users to get started with the money management tool quickly. It's easiest if your financial institutions provide the necessary back-end support; Intuit lists participating organizations on its Quicken site.

A new button on the home screen takes you to a Financial Overview section where charts display your net worth. The Investing Center slices and dices your portfolio information in more ways than ever, providing new visual tools so you can compare your investments' performance to that of the overall market.

In tests of a beta copy of Quicken 2004 Premier Home and Business, the interface was quite similar to that of last year's version. Intuit has added some nice tweaks, such as graying out past transactions--that is, anything conducted prior to the current day.

Also, Intuit has soft-pedaled the marketing of its financial services, which users may find a welcome relief after the visually distracting hard sell in both Quicken 2003 and in Microsoft's latest versions of rival financial management program Money. On the other hand, Money is a lot more generous with its trial offers of these services. Quicken offers only one free month of bill-paying services, for example; whereas Money's Premium version includes two years.

Rival Options

Both Intuit and Microsoft offer a range of financial tools with their money management packages. Just as Quicken 2004 is available in four editions, Money is offered in a selection of four packages.

All four Quicken packages are well-designed, full-featured finance managers. However, users of a recent edition may not find a compelling reason to upgrade. And Microsoft is aggressively courting newcomers to financial software, offering with its latest release a series of mail-in rebates to reduce its products' cost from $10 to $20 below their Quicken counterparts.

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