Quicken online – thumbs up. Quickbooks online – thumbs require Internet Explorer.

It’s tax time.  And it’s also “economy-in-the-toilet” time.  So it would only make sense that people are looking for ways to track their income and expenses, and perhaps even some ways to save.  Traditionally, software such as Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money dominated the market for budgeting software.  They were traditional in that they were local apps: they had to be installed (via a floppy/CD or with a downloadable package).  With today’s growing popularity of web apps, however, the space for personal finance software is quickly heating up.  As with all web apps, the benefits of having one’s financial software live in the cloud is (mostly) two-fold:

• It eliminates the need for backups
• It allows for anywhere, anytime access

Yet web-based financial apps have one other major upside over their local counterparts, one that really jives in this space: the ability to seamlessly communicate with the various financial institutions the user is involved with and keep the user’s financial status always up-to-date.  This is something that was a hassle to do with desktop software, no matter how much Quicken and Microsoft tried.  It was always a monotonous process that required steps like these: logging into the financial institution, downloading the right format of statements that the Quicken/Money understand, and importing the file into the software.  Personally, I thank web apps every day for relieving me of this uneventful (and often stress-inducing) task.

Today’s arena for web-dwelling budgeting apps is comprised of (in no particular order) Mint, Buxfer, Quicken online, Wesabe, Geezeo, Yodlee, Expensr, and Green Sherpa (please let me know if I missed your budgeting web app of choice).

Quicken on the desktop has been one of the most popular choices for dedicated budgeting software (the “undedicated version” is an good-ol spreadsheet).  Early in 2008, Quicken released the first hosted version of Quicken and dubbed it QuickenOnline.  It was a paid service initially ($2.99/month), but a few months later was changed to a free service (business model still unclear, thankyouverymuch).  Personally, I have been a loyal user of Mint, but after finding out about QuickenOnline and its non-existent price tag, I signed up for a free account to see how the two web apps compare.  Don’t fear, I am not going to turn this post into a review.

Rather, I would like to point out that I signed up for an account with Quicken Online and began using the app all from the comfort of my favorite browser: Firefox.  What’s the big deal, you may ask.  Well, I find it ironic that Quicken Online works perfectly in Firefox and other non-IE browsers, but the company’s business-oriented QuickBooks Online is an Internet Explorer-only solution (or rather, lack thereof).  In other words, Intuit (the maker of Quicken and QuickBooks) designed Quicken online – the consumer budgeting tool – to be compatible across all browsers, but built QuickBooks online – the bookkeeping app for businesses – using technologies available only in IE (Active-X, anyone?).

That I find… ironic.  And I won’t even go into detail about how ridiculous it is to require IE in this day and age, with things such as Web Standards and AJAX, among other cross-platform/cross-browser technologies.

Here’s to hoping that Intuit has enough brain power to make some staffing changes and shuffle those guys at the Quicken Online department over to the QuickBooks online office, which hopefully will result in a version of QuickBooks Online that works across all browsers.

One more thing: as for the developers who decided to write QuickBooks for IE only… throw them out.  Even Microsoft understands that IE is not the only browser in town anymore.

Posted in Cloud Computing, Decisions, Financial, Intuit, Web standards