Quicken vs QuickBooks: Deciding the Best for You

Quicken and QuickBooks are the two widely used accounting software. These accounting software were initially developed by Intuit Inc. While the former has been recently sold to H.I.G. Capital, QuickBooks is still owned by Intuit Inc.

Quicken, the 34-year old accounting software was first launched in 1983 and has around 1.5 million users. Currently, Quicken has its stable version Quicken 2018. After the massive success of Quicken, Intuit came out with QuickBooks in the year 1998.

QuickBooks, designed and developed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses, with 4.3 million users has around 74 percent market base. In comparison with Quicken, QuickBooks is loaded with almost all the accounting and bookkeeping features needed by SMBs and CPAs.

After a brief overview on Quicken and QuickBooks, any starter can get confused and have a tough time selecting the most suitable accounting software to manage their business finances.

To ease down your confusion, and help you select the best accounting software that ensures ease-of-use, high performance, and maximum ROI, in this blog post, let’s look at the key differences between Quicken and QuickBooks.

Quicken vs QuickBooks: Which is Best for You?

PARAMETERS	QUICKEN	QUICKBOOKS
Recommended for	It consists of features to manage personal finances along with few features to manage small business finances.	It is loaded with almost all the features needed to manage finances of SMBs.
Accounting Capability	Single entry	Double entry
Look and Feel	The only plus point of this software is its ease of navigation.	It has both - simple user interface and navigation.
Account Reconciliation	Account reconciliation process in Quicken is somewhat complex. You need to start from Account Register, and then, add or update changing transactions until the account reconciliation process isn’t complete.	Account reconciliation process in QuickBooks is intuitive.You just need to navigate Account Reconciliation, and then, follow few simple steps. You can update account reconciliation in QuickBooks without having much expertise.
Transaction Download	Downloading financial transaction for credit cards, bank statements, etc. in Quicken is complex.	It is much easier to download any type of financial transaction that you need with QuickBooks.
Payroll Feature	The most important accounting feature, Payroll isn’t available with Quicken.	QuickBooks provides the most advanced Payroll feature to take care all round payroll activities.
Invoice & Tax Feature	To simplify most complex accounting functions of invoice and tax feature, there is no specific feature or tool integrated with Quicken.	There are several features and tools available with QuickBooks that take care of your complex accounting functions of managing invoices and taxation.
Apps or Add-on Integration	Apps or add-ons can’t be integrated with Quicken to get customized accounting experience.	Over 500 business applications can be integrated with QuickBooks.
Multi-user Environment	This accounting software cannot be used in a multi-user mode.	QuickBooks Desktop hosted in a cloud environment can be securely accessed in a multi-user mode.
Integration with Microsoft Outlook, Excel, etc.	It can’t be integrated with Outlook or Excel to ease accounting and bookkeeping experience.	QuickBooks can be easily streamlined with MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.).
Create Purchase Orders	You cannot purchase orders with Quicken.	Purchase orders can be easily created with QuickBooks.
Track Income/Expenses by Class	There isn’t any feature to track income or expenses using the different set of classes.	You can easily track income, expenses and even other financial activities of inventory management with QuickBooks.
File Format	Quicken has *.QDF file format.	QuickBooks has three different file format: *.QBM, *.QBA and *.QBW
Inventory Management	It doesn’t have any feature or tool to manage inventories.	QuickBooks Enterprise consists of tools such as Advanced Inventory to easily manage and track inventories.
Business Forecast	Quicken doesn’t have any feature to analyze and forecast future of your business.	QuickBooks provides comprehensive business forecasting to help you know where your business is heading towards.

Bottom-line

After comparing features of these two accounting software, we can undisputedly say that QuickBooks has an absolute edge over Quicken.

QuickBooks can be in fact termed as the Swiss Army Knife that  provides the most comprehensive and customized accounting and bookkeeping experience to different business domains, while Quicken has limited features and good only if you want to manage personal finances along with business.

However, you want to have an accounting software for your own personal needs then, you can go with Quicken.

What’s Next? 

After selecting QuickBooks to re-strategize accounting for your business, you have an option to get QuickBooks hosted on a cloud server.

QuickBooks hosting ensures enriched, powerful and advanced QuickBooks experience at an even more affordable price.

There are several benefits of QuickBooks hosting, which primarily include anytime, anywhere and from any device accessibility, 24/7 support, flexibility, scalability and optimal data security.

It is, however, important to select a QuickBooks hosting provider, who have exhaustive experience and equipped with the most advanced infrastructure for QuickBooks hosting. 

Techarex Networks, US based QuickBooks hosting provider have immense experience in delivering a seamless QuickBooks hosting solutions. In case if you have any query or if you want to know about our QuickBooks hosting pricing, feel free to contact us right now.