Quicken Home Inventory Manager Review

Quicken Home Inventory Manager tracks assets for your estate and documents items insured under your home owners insurance policy.

If you want to upgrade from Quicken Home Inventory Manager version 1 to version 2, you will have to re-enter all of your data. To address quality issues in the first release from 2006, Quicken adopted a new data file format which is incompatible with the first version, so data cannot be transferred to the new version.

Intuit has improved on Quicken Home Inventory Classic, a feature in Quicken personal finance software, with Quicken Home Inventory Manager stand alone software. Run Quicken Home Inventory Manager on its own or, if you use Quicken, Quicken Home Inventory manager integrates with Quicken to take the place of Quicken Home Inventory Classic.

Quicken Home Inventory Manager helps with entering items you want to document with a contemporary interface that is easy to understand and navigate.

Photo Documentation: Attach up to five digital images to each item record. Images can be a combination of photos of the item at different angles, or scanned images of price tags, receipts, warranties and appraisals (PDF not supported at the time this was written). You can scan images into Quicken Home Inventory Manager, or you can drag and drop images you already have stored. But, you can only print one image in reports.

Insurance Coverage and Claims: Quicken Home Inventory Manager includes a tool to record insurance coverage for each home owners or renters insurance, auto insurance, or other insurance policy you own. Record insurance policy details and replacement values for belongings then assign them to the appropriate policy. With two mouse clicks, you get an on-screen report that tells you if your insurance coverage is adequate.

Quicken Home Inventory Manager also provides an insurance claim tracking tool to make following up on insurance claims easier.

Import to Quicken: To reflect a more accurate net worth in Quicken, Quicken Home Inventory Manager values can be imported into support versions of Quicken Deluxe, Premier and Home & Business (Quicken supports a version for three years).

If you own multiple homes or other structures you need to document for insurance purposes, you can and should use multiple data files with Quicken Home Inventory Manager. Back up data with a copy kept outside of your home or other documented locations using the back up utility, which has an option to add the back up date to the file name.

Data files can be backed up to a CD, DVD, USB drive, or to an online back up service like Mosy or Quicken Online Backup.

Quicken Home Inventory Manager is easy to use, and I recommend running it on Windows XP SP2 or Vista and 1 GB of RAM to avoid slow performance..

It is most unfortunate that those who want to upgrade from the first version to version 2 will have to re-enter all data. While I do not expect this major inconvenience to happen again, I did not expect it in the first place from software produced by Intuit.

The current version of Quicken Home Inventory Manager is more stable than the first version, but there have been reports of problems Quicken Home Inventory Manager. The Quicken Home Inventory Manager Community Forums reveals problems people have had with an absence of responses from QHIM staff. Those who want to upgrade from the first version of Quicken Home Inventory Manager have to re-enter all home inventory data, which is a huge over-site on the development end. Quicken Home Inventory benefits Quicken users, who can import QHIM data into Quicken. The $29.99 retail price is fair, but there are alternatives in that price range with better features. Quicken Home Inventory Manager has a 60-day money-back guarantee, there is no free trial period.

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