I am trying to find out what the best/easiest bank accounting software program, preferably free. If not free, then what is consider the easiest.
I’m assuming you mean software that will help you track your personal bank accounts and expenses? If you can provide more detail, we might be able to offer better suggestions. Do you have a business? Are you tracking investments? What information or features do you want the software to provide?
Quicken and MS Money come bundled free with many people’s computers. They’re both good for most needs.
If you have any kind of small business going on, I’d recommend QuickBooks, even if you’re only using the free SimpleStart edition. Quicken has a business edition, but I’m not all that impressed by it.
Assuming you want this for purely personal use, check out mint.com. Free, pretty user friendly, and can synch with any online banking you do. I actually prefer it over quicken, which I used for years.
I’d heard that Intuit (maker of Quicken) is in the process of buying mint.com. This link suggests they’re planning on keeping them as separate online tools however.
But I agree - either mint.com or quicken.com should do fine if you’re talking about personal finance and don’t have a lot of desktop-based history (we’ve been using desktop Quicken for 10+ years so the online version would be a huge step backward). Oh yeah: I like the desktop Quicken fine, for the most part, but it’s really becoming bloatware full of features I don’t need / want, and they disable transaction downloads 3 years after a version is released, so you’re pretty much forced to “upgrade” every 3 years. And they have not addressed the issue of desktop users and on-the-go access, at all.
Since the OP really wants factual opinions, let’s move this to IMHO.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
I have only used Quicken for personal use and it’s easy. For business accounting systems, QuickBooks is the fastest to learn, especially for a non-accounting type