brand new to quicken

rdn55

Other than the quick few minute tutorials on youtube, is there a learning guide that is best to learn quicken?

DSperber

I honestly don't know. I started using Quicken back in 1994, in its very old incarnation at that time (we still used dial-up modems to connect to ISP's of our choosing). Eventually my bank began offering "online banking through Quicken" and I've never looked back.

Can't live without Quicken, for my everyday personal financial activities. But It would take at least a week to "teach a class" on how to make use of Quicken in your everyday life. It also varies by the particular financial institutions you make use of, and the particular form of connection they support with Quicken, as Quicken's behavior varies based on the financial institution's system.

Best way to "get started" is to pick one financial institution that you use (say your checking account bank), and begin with that one. That will allow you to explore and experiment with Register (1-line or 2-line), customization of appearance and options (columns, font, size, etc.) and how fields display (number of decimals, fields you want to see or suppress), views, tabs, presentations, etc.

This will also allow you to activate online banking with your bank (either using Direct Connect, EWC, or EWC+ as the basic technology of connecting Quicken to the Bank and all of its online banking capabilities). You will learn about establishing the online connection in the first place, doing nightly automatic downloades (via one-step update ideally, which is the most convenient if you have multiple financial institutions eventually that you are connected to through Quicken), etc.

In other words, just start off with only your checking account in Quicken. And play and practice with it for at least a month or two, in order to learn how to generally use Quicken and understand what is really going on and what capabilities you yourself have for controlling the product.

Then you can take the next step which might be to add a brokerage account. Or a credit card account. Or a bank or other loan account. Etc., etc. One at a time you can dabble into a whole new type of everyday financial institution or asset/liability, all of which have their own unique user interface and functionality inside of Quicken.

Honestly... I cannot live without it any longer. 28 years of use and it's installed on all of my computers, sharing a single common "Quicken data file" hosted by one master PC and accessible by all the others.

I'm confident you too will eventually feel the same way about the product.

mshiggins

@rdn55, you can always ask questions here on the forum, there are quite a few knowledgeable users here willing to advise on how to make the most of your Quicken usage. 

It would help target advice knowing the goals you want to accomplish using Quicken. For example:

- track and reduce spending
- pay down your debt
- track investments
- plan for retirement
- manage your business or rental property

Boatnmaniac

Quicken has Quick Start guides and offers free 1:1 tutorials to assist new users in getting acquainted with the program that you might find this helpful.:  https://www.quicken.com/support/help-getting-started-quicken.