Donna Huffam
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Jan 10/00) - If one of your New Year's resolutions is to gain control of your finances, there's financial software available to help you budget and track where your dollars are going.

Two of the most popular financial accounting programs are Quicken by Intuit and Money by Microsoft.

The basic Quicken program is designed for the average home user with easy-to-follow directions and user-friendly functions. It allows you to track your bill payments, print cheques, plan a budget, maintain balances, check your financial history, and use charts to see exactly where your money goes each month.

The more advanced version of Quicken is called Quicken Deluxe 2000 and has several features for the more advanced home investor.

It allows you to track your investments, import balances from your online banking program and perform more complex charting.

This program also has a debt-reduction planning feature and you can use the information in it to transfer into QuickTax, Quicken's tax preparation software.

For those anxious to start planning for a comfortable retirement, Tony Smith, manager of Tamarack Computers, recommends Quicken Suite 2000. This bundle package includes the Quicken Deluxe 2000 program along with a version of Quick Tax and a Quick Wealth Planner.

The planner takes you through the process of analyzing your financial future, step-by-step and then setting up an investment plan to allow you to reach your goals.

Smith admits that of the two popular systems, Intuit has definitely garnered a larger percentage of the sales.

"There's not much difference between the features of the two systems but for ease of use, Quicken is probably the better of the two. I used Quicken last year and I'm using Money now and I like them both. Quicken does, however, manage to get its product out on the shelves much sooner than Microsoft does which allows them to sell more."

Microsoft's latest version of financial software is Money 2000. Several different versions exist, so make sure you pick up the Canadian program.

This deluxe program allows for financial planning, integrated long-term planning, tax planning, retirement planning, exports to all the major tax programs, and easily converts Quicken files.

Money also downloads account balances directly from participating online banking institutions, offers free Canadian and U.S. stock quotes and mutual fund quotes.

Duane Mackie, owner of One Stop Computer Shop in Hay River, hasn't sold either software program yet, but says Quickbooks -- also by Intuit -- is very popular for people running a home-based business.

"Quickbooks is much easier to use than other business accounting systems, such as Simply Accounting by ACCPAC. I have sold it to people to use to manage both their home finances and their business accounting.

"Home accounting software isn't as necessary now because so much of that is available on the Internet for free, with online banking."

The new technology offers a wide range of options for financial planning, but it remains to be seen whether the average household will save more than they spend on the latest software investments.