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In the early 1990s, Intuit introduced Quicken, personal finance software that would grow to be the market leader. In fact, it's the only desktop app that thoroughly supports every aspect of personal finance. Its current owners introduced a new web-based personal finance solution, Simplifi by Quicken, two years ago. This service was designed for a different market, targeting a younger demographic and any other people who wanted to track their financial accounts, keep an eye on day-to-day spending, and work toward savings goals. It's not "Quicken lite," but rather an entirely different approach.

Being relatively new, Simplifi hasn't had the years to mature like Mint, its closest competitor and our Editors' Choice pick for free personal finance websites. The ad-supported Mint is free, and it offers numerous tools, such as bills, budgets, and credit scores, that Simplifi lacks. On the other hand, Simplifi ($3.99 per month or $39.99 annually) offers a fresher user experience, a more effective dashboard, and innovative views of your data (watchlists, spending plans, and reports) that keep you in constant sync with your finances.

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Simplifi by Quicken transaction activity

Simplifi by Quicken's transaction management is very good, as you can see from the options displayed here.

Simplifi came out of the gate strong, and has gained many useful, new features since our last review two years ago. It now offers notifications, a refund tracker, and richer customization options for reports and categorization rules. The site's core Spending Plan and Savings Goals are enhanced, too, due to the company's emphasis on controlling spending.

Why a Personal Finance App?

If you've never used one, you may be curious about a personal finance app's benefits. Most obviously, they provide one site where you can consolidate all of your financial accounts, including checking and savings, credit card, and brokerage. Once you've made an online connection to your accounts, you'll be able to view their nearly real-time activity and balances, both individually and in one consolidated register. This means you can sign in anytime and see the transactions that have recently cleared your accounts.

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This ability can alert you to two kinds of trouble. You may learn that someone has gained access to your account or that one or more of your balances are in dangerous territory. Personal finance apps also remind you of transactions you've forgotten.

There are other benefits, too. You may want to create budgets for individual spending areas or at least compare money coming in to money going out for a given month. Are you saving toward a specific goal, such as a new car, house or vacation? You'll be able to track your progress—maybe even link a goal to a savings account. Depending on the app you use, you might be able to view your credit score (Credit Karma comes to mind) and manage bills.

Personal finance apps have robust security. Their developers use technology similar to what the big banks use. You still need to be vigilant about keeping such sensitive data safe by, for example, never using an Android or iPhone app on a public Wi-Fi network. Of course, this is a double-edged sword. Banks have increased their security, so in some cases, you may have to go through multifactor authentication (MFA) every time you refresh an account.

Setting Up Simplifi

Simplifi has a simple setup process. Once you create an account, you provide your name and ZIP code. That's it. In order to provide feedback, Simplifi asks that you give it access to your financial accounts—all of them, for the best results. That involves searching for the institutions that provide your online checking and savings accounts, credit cards, investments, loans, and other financial instruments. Once you enter your username and password for each, the site imports your most recent transactions and continues to update itself.

Overall, the site is not difficult to use, but you may have questions about some of its elements. Fortunately, there are generous support options. You can initiate a live chat, request a call back, or search for possible answers in the site's article database. A 30-day trial is available if you want to try before you subscribe.

Simplifi by Quicken recurring income module

W-2 workers can set up their paychecks as recurring income, so it figures into their Spending Plan.

Critical Categorization

The first thing you'll want to do once you're all connected is to go through each account register. Set aside some time for this, as you'll be dealing with anywhere from one to three months' worth of transactions. This might be enlightening. You may notice, for example, that you're still paying for a subscription that you thought you'd cancelled.

The most important thing you'll do here is assign categories to transactions, so you know where your money is coming from and where it's going. Simplifi comes with a default set of categories, including Auto & Transport, Dining & Drinks, Entertainment, Groceries, and Utilities. You can add, edit, and delete categories on the master list, and you can change the categories that the site has already assigned to transactions.

Simplifi, like other financial applications, makes educated guesses about your expenses. You can modify these, and when you do, matching entries can "learn" from this and be correctly categorized in the future. You can also set up two kinds of rules. One automatically categorizes transactions that come in with a specific payee's name. The other looks for keywords you specify, and assigns the transactions to the correct payee.

You'll also be categorizing and tracking your income, of course. If you're a W-2 employee and get regular paychecks for the same amount, Simplifi works great. You just find one of those deposits, make it recurring, and then click the "Is Recurring Income" link to open a window where you can designate the frequency. Your paycheck deposits would, of course, come in from your bank anyway, but by making them recurring, they'll be a part of your Spending Plan (more on that later).

If you're self-employed, or have a side gig that makes your income vary from month to month, the site will not be as useful. This isn't to say you shouldn't use it. In fact, the ability to categorize expenses is critical for self-employed individuals. You'll need that information when it comes time to pay estimated taxes and prepare your annual return. You just won't have as complete a picture of your projected balances at the beginning of the month.

Simplifi may be too limited if you're self-employed or have a complex business. You might want to consider a small business accounting solution.

Simplifi's bill-tracking capabilities are not as advanced as Mint's, but you can include them in your monthly expenses. For example, you can add notes and attachments, and split transactions. Simplifi also lets you toggle a button to exclude an entry from Reports and/or your Spending Plan.

Do you have to deal with all of the historical data that came in during your first import? No. You can start your checking and categorizing from the day you first sign in. But if there has been a recent problem, you can clear it up quickly by going back at least a month. You may also have annual fees that won't come around again for another year. I found one of those, a $100+ yearly charge for a service I'd forgotten I'd signed up for and didn't need anymore. I also found a credit card withdrawal for $593.15, a charge that a company was not authorized to initiate. This is one of the most compelling reasons to use a personal finance application. It can save you money by alerting you to problem transactions.

I missed these charges when I individually checked my online accounts, perhaps because I've so rarely encountered problems with online accounts and wasn't looking carefully enough. The two times my accounts were actually hacked were due to offline exposure of bank cards. Admittedly, I don't check every day because it takes a while with multiple accounts. Simplifi only requires one login for all of them, so I'm far less likely to miss something since I can scan transactions from all of my accounts quickly. Plus, I can view my register in several ways, such as by date, account, payee, or category.

Simplifi by Quicken spending watchlist module

You can set up monthly or one-time Watchlists to automatically keep an eye on your spending.

Fast Feedback

Simplifi displays its intelligence in other ways, too. If you carefully document every transaction that came in during your first imports (and this is another reason to do so), you get instant feedback on your finances by way of your Spending Plan. This tool uses simple addition and subtraction to calculate how much money you have left to spend for the current month. It adds up all of your scheduled income and subtracts from that the bills and subscriptions it's identified, as well as any other money you've spent. You can see all of these transactions listed by date.

Simplifi offers additional targeted feedback in another way. You can create Spending Watchlists to track money you've spent in areas where you tend to overspend. The site lets you set these up by category, payee, or tag, and to specify a maximum if you'd like. Your Watchlists are displayed in boxes on one screen. Each shows your monthly average and year-to-date totals, as well as the current month's amount spent so far and your projected total. There's also a 12-month comparative chart. You can create both ongoing Watchlists and one-time tallies, such as for holiday spending.

These tools are Simplifi's answer to budgets, which it doesn't offer because its developers and early users found that people spend discretionary money differently each month, making it difficult to come up with the perfect plan. This seems like an effective compromise to me. You're still watching your money closely, but you don't get locked into absolutes that might make you give up on the whole concept because you're not meeting overly strict goals.

Mint, on the other hand, offers more traditional budgeting tools, but they're flexible. You create individual budgets for each category that can be easily adjusted. Mint subtracts your budgeting spending from your budgeted income on the Budgets page so you can always see what will—theoretically—be left over. It also tracks your actual numbers as they increase, and lets you schedule email and push notifications for budget overruns and numerous other situations. Simplifi now offers alerts, too. Mint also provides easy access to your current credit score, which Simplifi doesn't do.

Simplifi by Quicken has improved its report customization over the last two years.

Saving, Investing, and Reports

Simplifi does a commendable job of showing you where you are and where you've been financially. Still, you can't have a personal finance website without including some tools to help plan for the future. So, Simplifi offers its Savings Goals feature. With it, you can create tracking records for goals, such as a vacation, an emergency fund, or a new car. You simply name it and set a target amount, then make an entry when you either add to it or remove some funds for another purpose.

The site keeps track of how much you've saved and where you've saved it. It displays your current monthly contribution, as well as the total you've saved so far and how much more you must save. You can set a target date if you'd like, and Simplifi will tell you how much you must save each month to meet your goal. Your goals aren't linked to actual accounts like they are in Mint. Rather, the tool is simply meant to keep you accountable and encourage you to keep working toward your goals.

Simplifi's investment tracking hasn't changed much. You can connect to your online brokerage accounts and view the value of your holdings. Quicken Deluxe, our Editors' Choice pick for paid personal financial apps, offers more portfolio-tracking tools of any personal finance service we've tested. That's not a major deficit for Simplifi, since there are so many free and paid services that provide investment tools. Personal finance sites are more concerned with awareness of your day-to-day income and expenses. Still, I'd like to see more data, since the site enables connections to brokerage accounts.

Reports are important to the success of a personal finance website, too. You need to be able to view your data by applying a variety of filters. Simplifi offers five types of reports here: Income, Spending, Net Income, Savings, and Monthly Summary (new). There's also a report for refunds you're tracking.

Simplifi by Quicken's new Refund Tracker does just that: It tracks your refunds for you so you're sure you receive them.

The site has improved customization options. When you select one of the first four report types, you can view it in both chart form and as a transaction list. Click Spending, for example, and you can view the data by category, payee, or tag. You can also select a date range or create your own and choose from numerous filters. The Monthly Summary compares your income and expenses from the last two months, and lists the top categories and payees.

The Simplifi User Experience and Mobile Apps

Simplifi's target audience wants simplicity and a friendly, understandable, uncluttered user experience. They don't want to hunch over their PCs for hours doing the recording, planning, and reporting that Quicken users must do for the software to be effective. They also don't want to have to wade through multiple menu layers or complex features. They want to log in, quickly see their account balances, find out how much spending money they have left this month, and get a sense of whether they're on track with their finances.

In this area, Simplifi is superior to Mint. Granted, Mint has more features, so there's more information to tuck away. However, Simplifi is designed to minimize the time needed to get answers to financial questions. The site opens to its Dashboard, which displays account balances in a vertical pane on the left. The bulk of this screen consists of multiple boxes that contain the slices of personal finance information that would be most commonly sought. These data boxes are abbreviated versions of elements like the Spending Plan, upcoming transactions, top spending categories, and Spending Watchlists.

Simplifi by Quicken iOS and Android mobile app screens

Simplifi by Quicken's iPhone app (left) displays this spending chart. You can customize the view and drill down to the transaction level from it. You can display and modify individual transactions using the Android version (right) of Simplifi by Quicken.

Appealing, six-month graphs outline your income and spending. They require you to scroll a bit to see all the information. The app's other screens are similarly attractive and intuitive. Simplifi looks fresher and more modern than Mint, which requires a lot of scrolling to see its overview. Those opening screens are—arguably—the most important pages on the sites. Mint vertically stacks its data, while Simplifi runs horizontally (which lets you take in key finance details faster).

Simplifi offers top-notch mobile apps for Android and iOS. I tested both versions, and they worked great. The apps open to the Dashboard, which displays your banking and credit totals, recent spending, and upcoming transactions. Scroll down, and you'll see your Spending Plan, Portfolio Value, Watchlists, and a colorful pie chart that represents your top spending. You can drill down on this chart to get to the category and transaction level. You must do some clicking and swiping to see everything, but this is a terrific overview of your finances. You can customize the view, too.

I was able to find everything that I'd seen on the desktop version. The apps use mobile technology well, and they provide the best of both worlds: You can get a quick overview of your finances, but also take a deeper dive for details. I preferred Simplifi's mobile apps to Mint's, which contain just a subset of the features you'll find in the browser-based version.

A Terrific Financial App

Simplifi by Quicken made an impressive debut two years ago, and its numerous new features and enhancements make the service even better. The development team incorporated a smart set of tools for people who don't want to micromanage their finances, but want to quickly and easily watch their money on their desktops or smartphones.

But Simplifi costs $3.99 per month (or $39.99 annually), whereas Mint, our Editors' Choice pick for free personal finance apps, costs nothing. Is it worth four bucks a month to avoid seeing ads, especially considering Mint is a more feature-rich service? The answer may be yes—if you don't need Mint's advanced features, such as bill-tracking and traditional budgeting. Plus, you may find Mint's ads intrusive, getting in the way of data and requiring too much scrolling to bypass.

Quicken Deluxe, our Editors' Choice pick for paid personal finance apps, is the most comprehensive, feature-rich personal finance app available. That comes at a $51.99 annual price, though. It's also a desktop-based app, with the option to access a lot of your data via the web or mobile app.

Personal finance is, indeed, personal, and you probably have your own preferences for the information you need to see and how you want to see it. We recommend looking at Mint or Quicken Deluxe first, but definitely consider Simplifi's free trial. It's made a strong showing in its first two years, and it's continuing to build on that rock-solid base.

For more on personal finance, check out Get Organized: How to Take Control of Your Personal Finances and Raising Saving-Savvy Kids: How to Talk to Your Children About Money.

Simplifi by Quicken

The Bottom Line

Simplifi is a web-based, personal finance app that gives you fast, easy access to your financial accounts, including real-time expense and income balances.

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