Fresh, Clean and Redesigned: Quicken Online Trends
See High-Level Spending Trends
A few weeks ago we asked Inner Circle members to beta test a newly designed Quicken Online Trends feature. Aside from a redesigned look and feel and more dynamic interface, the Quicken Online team redesigned Trends to help you quickly learn more about your money at a glance.
The Trends feature received more than a makeover. In usability testing and through Inner Circle feedback, the Quicken Online team learned what would help you make better money choices.
With the newly redesigned Trends you can:
- See income versus expenses (view both side-by-side in a bar chart)
- Know right away whether you’re spending more than you make
- Drill-down on income, savings or spending in colorful, interactive pie charts
- Quickly access your average spending for any given category
- See how you’re spending month-to-month in a given that category
Along with a redesigned look and feel, the Trends now features savings suggestions. We’ve started making suggestions about how much you’ll save if you cut back on spending in a given category. So if you’re looking at how much you’ve spent on groceries for example, Quicken Online Trends will show you what you spent for the month last month on groceries, what percentage of your total spending went to groceries for the month, and how much you’d save if you cut back. Example: You spent about 3% of your money last month on groceries. If you cut 10% on grocery spending in the future per month, you could save $59 per year.
Get Automatic Savings Suggestions
Let us know what you think of the newly redesigned Trends. If you’re not already an Inner Circle member, join us today so we can get your feedback on how we should improve Quicken Online in the future. Sign in to Quicken Online and check out the newly designed Trends feature. Take a look at some more images on our Flickr page. Let us know what you think in the comments!
Tags: charts, redesign | Categories: Product Update, Quicken Online |
Really do like the new trends setup. It’s very clear and very adjustable so that I can see quickly what my restaurant costs are or how much I spent over a period for doctors, etc.
One question not about trends but about my regular bank account. It seems that often there are two of the same paychecks entered when there should only be one. So I just go and manually get rid of one of them. How can I handle this so that only one appears every month instead of two? Thanks.
Matthew,
Thanks for pointing that out – it’s something we are definitely planning to fix soon. However, for now, if you re-categorize those credit card expenses as transfer out, they won’t show on the pie chart any longer. That should fix the double counting problems you’re talking about.
Thanks,
Barron Ernst
Quicken Online Product Manager
Unless I am not understanding how to categorize items, there is a nasty flaw to the way trends keeps track of income and expenses if you use a credit card. The problem is that it treat’s each month’s “Credit Pay” payment, i.e. $2000 from my checking account, as a distinct expense on top of adding up all of the individual transactions that make up that credit card account. A simple way to fix this would be a way for me to mark a certain category like “Credit Card” as excluded from trends so it doesn’t essentially duplicate the total credit card spending I do. Not having this ability severely limits the usefulness of trends. Thanks!!
Tyler,
So nice to hear your feedback. Thanks for taking the time to give it to us.
Chelsea, Quicken Blog Team
Hi Gary,
You can export your transactions from the Transactions tab: http://twitpic.com/6j7hz
Thanks!
Chelsea, Quicken Blog Team
Any chance future enhancements will allow exporting of transaction data? Seems like pretty basic functionality and would keep you guys from having to develop a different report for every numbers geek on the planet!
awesome. well done.
Hi KennyO,
Thanks for those great suggestions. Are you a member of our Inner Circle? If not, you should join us so we can get your feedback on new product developments and features (through surveys, usability testing, betas, etc.). Right now you can sort by pre-set or specific date ranges within Trends, then sort by account. Also, never forget you can export all of your transactions in any given range into a spreadsheet program like Excel, if that’s the functionality you’re seeking.
Thanks again fro the great feedback,
Chelsea, Quicken Blog Team
Kenny,
Apologies that you don’t like the page. I’m not sure what type of functionality you’re referencing. Do you just want to be able to see the pie chart for a single account? I don’t recall functionality on the old page that enabled you to see line item totals for each account. Let me know, and hopefully we can help you out.
Thanks,
Barron Ernst
Quicken Online Product Manager
Hey guys -
I’m a bit disappointed by the new Trends page. I *really* like being able to select a date range, and get a complete list of all of my accounts, total date range spend for each account, and monthly average spend for each account. I can’t do that now. Downgrade. Do you plan on re-implementing that on the new Trends page?
It seems to me that one very basic feature of using Quicken Online is to be able to run that “spreadsheet” style summary.
Thanks!
Thanks, that was very helpful. FM
Hi Fred,
Great questions and I’m glad you are asking us before spending time setting up Quicken Online. Quicken Online is really geared those with basic personal finance needs (tracking account balances, transactions, getting a forward-looking view of your money to avoid overdrawing accounts and incurring fees, etc.). If your finance needs are more in-depth, for example if you track investments or have a mortgage, you might continue to be better-served by a desktop product.
The mobile piece you speak of could be a helpful compliment to your current Quicken product. With Quicken Online you can set up mobile alerts to any SMS enabled phone. Available alerts include balance notifications, bill reminders, and more. I’d urge you to give it a shot since it’s free, but keep in mind, it isn’t a replacement for a Quicken desktop product in terms of features, etc.
Hope this helps!
Chelsea, Quicken Blog Team
I use Quicken at home, have done so for more than 10 years. Is there any benefit to me to use Quicken Online? Would it not be just a duplication of the information I have at home? The reviews and marketing blurbs indicate its a good product, but I need to know if its useful to me particularly. Also, not sure the mobile access is so important to me so if that’s the only special benefit, not sure it will be so in my case. thanks for the help.
FM
Thanks for the feedback everyone – we’re really happy you like the new trends tab. As you use it, please continue posting here or in the forums to help us improve it.
Thanks!
Barron Ernst
Quicken Online Product Manager
Fantastic. This is great. Thanks QO team.
Well done guys… this looks great!
Gorgeous…love it
Thanks Chris, glad you figured it out.
I’m going to pass your finding along to the product team. Thanks for the suggestion and investigative work.
Chelsea, Quicken Blog Team
I figured out the problem–it was an Adobe Flash issue. I was still running Flash 9 on this computer. Updated to Flash 10 and it works fine. It may be worth noting this as a requirement somewhere. Ideally, you’d actually want to set it up such that the website does a check for Flash version while loading and prompts users to upgrade Flash if an older version is found.
Love the new changes! The charts are quite impressive. It would be ideal to get some of this functionality available off-line.
lebkin,
We have removed the categorize multiple feature for now because we want to re-design it for the new trends page. Apologies for this.
Thanks,
Barron Ernst
Quicken Online Product Manager
On the old Trends page, I used to be able to sort the list of transactions by payee. This allowed for easy renaming of a group of transactions all at once. As far as I can see, that feature is gone. Am I missing something?
Chris,
Can you send the link where you’re seeing the discussion in the community? I’d like to help folks out if possible.
Thanks,
Barron Ernst
Quicken Online Product Manager
Hey Chris…Scott from Quicken here. Myself and Jim (he builds the product) both accessed it on three different browsers 35,000 feet in the air on Virgin America wi-fi. Let me know if you continue to have an issue. We’re not seeing a ton of contact from folks unable to use it. Sorry for the inconvenience…stay in touch.
I’ve tried it on both Firefox and Safari (on a Mac, OS X). I just tried it on a different Mac, and it seems to work, so it may be something specific to this computer, but I’ve now seen a few comments on the Community page from people having similar issues.
Hi Chris,
Are you using IE, Firefox or Safari? I haven’t heard any other reports of Trends not working so far. Did you also try just logging out, closing your browser, and logging back in? Sounds simple, but sometimes that’ll fix small problems.
Chelsea, Quicken Blog Team
I’m trying to use the new trends page, and nothing is showing up. Is there some sort of new plug-in that’s needed for the updated Trends page? The new features sound nice, but are pretty useless if it won’t load on my computer.