intuit

Mint now lets you write in expenses ahead of time

One good thing about Web-based financial tool Mint is that it can be used without ever having to type in any purchases or money transfers; instead, its system simply does all the work for you. That's just changed though, as Intuit now lets you write in your own transactions--even before they happen.

According to Mint, manually entering transactions was the top-most requested item by its users. The feature is mainly for those who write or receive a lot of checks, as Mint's system lets you jot in the amount that you're paying or getting paid by another … Read more

Best of the bunch

Every year, Intuit adds something new to its online and desktop TurboTax tax prep software from the previous year. Since the online and desktop versions of TurboTax Deluxe 2009 are so similar, we're reviewing them together. We'll make a note when referring to just the online or just the desktop product.

Installation and setup

As with most desktop DIY tax software, TurboTax can take from 10 to 15 minutes to install, scan for updates, and download those updates before you can get started. If you're filling out your taxes online, you'll need to only wait for … Read more

Quicken for the Mac: Finally!

A year ago at the Intuit booth at MacWorld, Quicken founder Scott Cook pressed a CD into my hand. It contained a beta version of the company's long-overdue update of the Mac version of Quicken, called Quicken Financial Life. Eagerly awaiting its release were Mac users who needed a personal finance app with some meat on its bones. They were getting frustrated with Quicken's maker, Intuit. The ancient Quicken 2007, which was the last new version of Quicken for the Mac, was so unloved that you didn't have to look far to find people running Windows (inside … Read more

Best of the bunch

Installation and setup

Mint founder on branding: Keep it simple

MIAMI--Walk around the Future of Web Apps event in South Beach this week, and you'll see loads of eager young entrepreneurs and developers proudly displaying the names of their fledgling companies on their conference badges.

Aaron Patzer, who founded personal-finance site Mint.com and sold it to Intuit for $170 million last year, might tell them that the company name might be the first place to make changes.

"Choose something with meaning, even if it's expensive and difficult to acquire, rather based on domain name availability, because otherwise, you're going to kill word-of-mouth," he told … Read more

Microsoft and Intuit partner up in the cloud

Intuit and Microsoft announced Wednesday that the two companies plan to integrate the capabilities of their cloud services platforms, the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) and Windows Azure platform, to build solutions for small businesses. Azure will become a "preferred platform" for small-business application development as part of the relationship.

According to Kim Akers, general manager of Partner Evangelism at Microsoft, there are three constituencies that benefit from this partnership:

Developers working on Azure apps can take advantage of the IPP--gaining access to the features and promotion in the marketplace. Channel partners have a way to offer broader applications … Read more

Mint.com's founder hopes to refresh Intuit

As CES settled down in Las Vegas, I spoke with Mint.com founder and former CEO Aaron Patzer, now vice president and general manager of personal finance at Intuit following its $170 million acquisition of Mint last fall.

Patzer, who is 29, is tasked with uniting two distinctly different personal-finance software brands--the downloadable, established, desktop-oriented Quicken and the cloud-based, two-year-old Mint.com.

What's on your plate with regard to Quicken and Mint? Patzer: Quicken Online will be going away, and we'll be migrating to Mint. There are 8,000 banks on Mint today, and another three or four … Read more

Going rate for acquisitions at Intuit: $170 million

Tuesday night, I asked Justin Kitch, who sold his company, Homestead.com, to Intuit in 2007, how much Intuit paid for the company. "$170 million," he said. "No," I said, "That was Mint. How much was Homestead?"

"It's funny, isn't it?" he said. Both Mint and Homestead went for the same price.

Coincidence? Intuit also bought another company, Paycycle, in June of this year. Guess for how much. That's right. $170 million.

What the heck is going on at Inuit? Do they have a stack of pre-printed $170 million … Read more

Mint makes Twitter an investor hub

Mint launched a new tool on Thursday that gives users real-time updates on the latest personal-finance topics hitting Twitter.

Dubbed Money Tweets, the personal-finance service's new feature tracks tweets about everything from investing and saving to the most popular finance-related topics at any given time. It also has a "question of the day" option where Mint poses a question and displays all the tweets that answer it.

Mint was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million.

To ensure Money Tweets doesn't list any tweets that might be offensive or contain links to potentially malicious sites, the … Read more

Cheap financial officer

Most business accounting software is designed for accountants, which isn't much help to small business owners, who are usually not only chief accountant but also chief cook and bottle washer, among other titles. Business owners who keep their own books need accounting software that doesn't require CPA certification to use. OWL Software's Simple Business Accounting (OWL SBA) is designed from the ground up for the business owner who wears a lot of hats, starting with a user-definable interface refined in more than 20 years of developing business software. Most accounting software is based on the traditional double-entry … Read more