Quicken / Quickbooks - what's the difference?

Quicken and Quickbooks are both produced by Intuit. Quicken is aimed at tracking personal (home) finances while Quickbooks is aimed at the small business owner.

From the site you posted (on the quickbooks page):

QuickBooks Pro - 'Best Small Business Accounting Package' QuickBooks is one of the most popular accounting solutions for small-to-medium businesses in Australia. Apart from GST compliance and all the other standard functionality you'd expect from accounting packages these days, QuickBooks Pro also features enhanced inventory management, a payroll module, integration tools for Microsoft Office and multiple currency options. Quicken Personal - 'Best Personal Finance Program' Simply balancing your bank account is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this program - what lies beneath is an amazing range of tools to help manage your finances. Quicken Personal has set the bar for the depth and breadth of features, offering everything from loan optimising tools to integration with banks and listed share data.

You will probably get more detailed answers, but in general, my understanding is that QuickBooks uses a double-entry bookkeeping system. When you "debit" one account (generally add money to it) in the same transaction, you must "credit" another account. The definition of account is extended to include expense and income, so those kinds of transactions can follow the scheme. From what I gather, QuickBooks has much the same look and feel as Quicken.

You'll note that debit and credit are reversed from the way we normally think of them, e.g., on our bank statements. That's because our bank statements are done from the BANK'S POINT OF VIEW. To them, a "credit" (like a deposit) generates a liability from them to the customer. A "debit" is money you owe (or have paid) to them.

Quicken is a single entry system. I didn't like it at first but got it so that other family members could more easily understand it. No one else ever learned to use it. :-(

A single entry system has the advantage that it's much easier to make money "drop out of the sky" or "evaporate." In a household system, where you don't need a drop-dead audit trail, this is often an advantage (as long as the user understands why it was done).

Jim, You're confusing data-entry with accounting entries.

Quicken IS (and always has been) a double-entry accounting system ... when you create a single data-entry transaction in a Quicken account the offsetting (i.e., double entry) transaction is created by way of assigning the Category (or transfer account).

That's ALL that double-entry requires, 1 entry and an offsetting entry. Two separate data-entry activities is NOT required.

Granted, Quicken will let the user cheat, by assigning a transaction back to the same category ... but that doesn't negate the basic concept that Quicken is a double-entry accounting system.

Not really. Full double-entry software lets you do both sides in one "data entry." However, read on.

Quicken also lets the user cheat by having "uncategorized" transactions. It's true that you can print a report of these, but you can't think of the account named "uncategorized" as income, expense, asset, or liability --- it could be any of these.

That being said, and having thought about it, I have to agree with you. Despite what it's own manual says (or at least used to say), Quicken is not a single entry system. Used properly, it allows sources and uses to be identified, and so Quicken is a double-entry system. I'm not sure I would know how to "balance the books," or would ever dare to try, though.

The "feel" of quicken is different though. Instead of recording transactions in a journal and picking your debit and credit from available accounts, you open a register, which implicitly picks one side, and then assign a "category" or "transfer account" to pick the other.

I don't know how QuickBooks works. Does it use a journal or a set of registers?