Quicken? I need a 12 step program and is it worth it?

[hillview]

I feel like I'd really like to get onto quicken but our bill paying is such a disaster I feel like I need a 12 step program to get there. Is it worth it? Any ideas for how to get started?
TIA!
/hillary

[maestramommy]

We use Quicken for our whole finances. It's great, but it took a long time to set up. Dh did it all. What we like is that we can download our cc statement each month and clear off each line item off the hard copy, AFTER we've reconciled them with our receipts. We also keep track of our checking account. It's a bit of work each month, depending on how many cc you have and how many checks your write. Also, we can look at how much of our money goes to groceries, car (with sub categories of gas, maintanence, registration, etc), clothing, medical. You can have as many categories and subcategories as you like. And once you've entered a certain category the program remembers. For instance, if you entered "groceries" for Trader Joes, everytime Trader Joes pops up on the cc statement, "groceries" will be in the category unless you manually change it. So it does speed things up after the initial setup. You can also split the line item. So if out of $50 only $32.50 was for groceries, and the rest was for household, you can put that in too, and it will automatically put the money in the correct categories. So you can track with a lot of precision where you money is going. But I will say it's a lot easier if you use cc for almost everything. There is a certain amount of slop in our system because we do use cash sometimes, and I'm not as good as Dh about writing that down. So if you tend to use cash a lot you have to be diligent about writing the amounts and categories for them so you can reconcile them each months with the the record.