Pocket Quicken 2.01 review: Pocket Quicken 2.01

Day-to-day expenditures really add up: the business lunch, the Father's Day gift, the ATM withdrawal, and so on. Intuit Quicken helps keep tabs on credit cards and checking accounts, but who wants to sit down with a pile of receipts and type in all those purchases? Enter Pocket Quicken, a Palm OS-based Quicken 2002 companion that lets you quickly and easily record your transactions as they happen. When you pop your Palm into its cradle at the end of the day, all of your charges, payments, and even balance transfers synchronize straight to your desktop version of Quicken. Day-to-day expenditures really add up: the business lunch, the Father's Day gift, the ATM withdrawal, and so on. Intuit Quicken helps keep tabs on credit cards and checking accounts, but who wants to sit down with a pile of receipts and type in all those purchases? Enter Pocket Quicken, a Palm OS-based Quicken 2002 companion that lets you quickly and easily record your transactions as they happen. When you pop your Palm into its cradle at the end of the day, all of your charges, payments, and even balance transfers synchronize straight to your desktop version of Quicken.

Helpful support; Quicken classics
After you install the $39.95 Pocket Quicken--a simple download and double-click--just HotSync twice: once to load the software on your Palm and once more to sync it with your desktop Quicken accounts, assuming that you have them set up.

In addition to capturing transactions, Pocket Quicken lets you view lists of your accounts, investments, assets, and balances. It supports foreign currencies; categories and classes; and, perhaps most importantly, Quicken's venerable QuickFill and Memorized Transaction features. As a result, you can record, say, a gas station fill-up in about the time it takes to read this sentence. The software takes only mild advantage of color screens, using red text to show negative balances, but the overall interface is clean and easy to navigate.

Budgets on the go, but not on your desktop
Pocket Quicken sports the impressive ability to create and maintain budgets, but this feature works independently of any budgets you've created on your desktop. That is, you have to create a new budget in Pocket Quicken, and the results don't synchronize with Quicken on the PC. Bummer. LandWare is working with Intuit to address this issue, so a patch may fix it in the future.

Smooth support; easy performance
We found that Pocket Quicken ran well in almost every instance, though we encountered one glitch during setup. When we attempted to sync Quicken desktop accounts, we received a HotSync error message informing us of an invalid password even though we hadn't entered one. A quick search of LandWare's thorough FAQ provided an easy solution to the problem. (LandWare also supplies an excellent instruction manual in both print and PDF forms.)

Security as tight as a drum
As it should, Pocket Quicken offers crackerjack security via a simplistic PIN tool. To access your data, you must tap the right code using the onscreen number pad. This method protects lost or stolen Palms, as would-be hackers must know the exact names of your accounts in order to view them.

While we'd like Pocket Quicken to provide more investment detail, such as a portfolio overview, the software offers every other tool and amenity a Quicken user could want. It even allows multiple Palm users, such as a husband and wife, to synchronize with the same set of data for true household expense tracking. In short, if you use Quicken to manage your finances, get your handheld in order with Pocket Quicken.

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