I know about Quicken, etc., but was wondering if that's the most user friendly, easiest for tax professionals, etc., or if there's something better.
Are the online things like mint.com safe?
Thanks!
I use Quickbooks for my business and my personel finances. It is so easy to use. I just email an accountants copy to my cpa and she does my taxes no problem.
We happily used mint for several years, only stopping because we got too lazy to manage it. I think it's particularly great if you use credit or debit cards frequently as it automatically links to your account and can categorize spending. It also can send alerts when you're at or over budget in a category, and it keeps track of incoming money too. I suppose if you do most of your bill paying and spending through cash or check, it wouldn't be much different than most other financial software because you'd have to manually input every transaction. You do have to provide your banking and credit card info, so only you can decide if that is worth the risk for you personally. This article is a little old, but it does include some good info about Mint's security procedures:
http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/should-you-trus...
I use Quickbooks for our business, but find that it's a little unwieldy for personal use (we have the Contractor Pro edition, which has more "modules" than I care to deal with... ugh). I went back to using Quicken. Honestly, that's the most user-friendly software there is, in my opinion. I've tried Mint, iBank, and a few others, but I keep going back to Quicken.
