Adding Accounts
Overview
Accounts are the foundation of your financial workspace in Quicken. They represent the places where your money lives and moves — such as checking, savings, credit cards, loans, investments, and business accounts (Quicken Business and Personal only).
Adding your accounts helps you see your finances in one place so you can:
Track spending and balances
Monitor cash flow
Stay organized for budgeting and taxes
View business and personal finances separately (Quicken Business and Personal only)
Generate more accurate insights and reports
Quicken can securely connect to many financial institutions to automatically download transactions and balances. You can also create manual accounts for cash, offline accounts, or institutions that do not support connections.
Why Connecting Your Accounts Matters
Connecting your accounts helps Quicken automatically keep your financial information organized and up to date.
When you connect an account, Quicken can:
Download transactions and balances automatically
Categorize many transactions for you
Keep your financial data current across institutions
Identify recurring income and expenses
Reduce manual data entry
Improve budgeting, reporting, cash flow tracking, and financial insights
Connected accounts are especially helpful when you:
Want a complete view of your finances in one place
Need current balances and recent transaction history
Manage both business and personal finances
Track spending, income, cash flow, or tax-related activity regularly
Automatic Transaction Categorization
As transactions download from connected accounts, Quicken can automatically assign categories based on the merchant, transaction type, and your previous categorization activity.
Automatic categorization helps you:
Save time on manual organization
Keep budgets and reports more accurate
Better understand where your money is going
Improve business and personal expense tracking
To maintain accurate records, it’s a good idea to review downloaded transactions regularly. You can:
Confirm categories are correct
Categorize uncategorized transactions
Update categories for unusual or one-time purchases
Improve the accuracy of reports and tax-related tracking
Over time, Quicken can learn from your updates and improve future transaction categorization.
When to Add or Link Accounts
You should add or connect accounts when:
You first set up Quicken
You open a new bank, credit card, investment, or loan account
You want to track business finances separately from personal finances
You need more accurate reports, spending plans, or cash flow visibility
You want transactions to update automatically instead of entering them manually
Manual accounts are useful when:
Your financial institution is not supported
You want to track cash or offline assets
You prefer not to connect certain accounts online
To Add a Connected Account
From the Dashboard, click + New in the Accounts area.
Search for your financial institution.
If your institution appears in the suggested list, select it.
Review the consent information, then click Continue.
Enter the same User ID and Password you use on your financial institution’s website.
Click Connect.
Review the accounts Quicken finds.
Uncheck any accounts you do not want to add.
You can rename accounts or update account types during setup or later in Settings.
Click Add.
Once connected, Quicken may review your transactions to identify recurring income and expenses. Your accounts will then appear in your Accounts List.
To Add a Manual Account
From the Dashboard, click + New in the Accounts area.
Select Add Manual Account.
Choose the account type.
Enter the account details, such as:
Business or Personal usage type (if applicable)
Account name
Opening balance and date
Click Continue.
The account will be added to your Accounts List.
To Add an Additional Account from an Existing Financial Institution
If you already connected a financial institution, you can add additional accounts from that institution at any time.
Click the Settings icon.
Select Accounts.
Locate the financial institution.
Click the three-dot menu next to the institution.
Select Add a New Account.
Enter your financial institution credentials and click Connect.
Review the accounts found.
Uncheck any accounts you do not want to add.
You can rename accounts or adjust account types during setup.
Click Add.
Keeping Your Accounts Updated
Connected accounts refresh automatically when you sign in to Quicken and can also be refreshed manually.
To protect your financial institution from excessive requests, Quicken typically retrieves updated balances and transactions every few hours.