How do I set up financial alerts?

It's important to remember that you control alerts. For most of the alerts, you control the conditions that determine when they appear; for example, "Is my checking account balance getting too low?" Or "Tell me when a certain security has reached a certain price".

Some important alerts appear automatically (for example, the tax alert that April 15 is approaching), but you can decide whether or not you want to see it or, when it appears, to turn it off.

Alerts are meant to be memory aids, not nuisances. If you spend a little time up front determining which alerts would be most useful to you and setting them up, you can be saved from embarrassment or worse—fees and penalties.

Choose Tools menu > Alerts Center > Setup.
In the Setup tab, review available alerts by clicking an alert category.
If necessary, click the plus (+) sign to expand the alert category list to the desired level of detail.
- Banking alerts
  Banking Alerts notify you of significant changes to your accounts. You can set alerts to notify you when your checking (Chequing in Canada) account is getting too low, when your credit card bill is getting too high, or when you're simply spending too much money in one area.
- Investing alerts
  Investment alerts can notify you of significant changes in price, analyst's ratings, and trading volume for a particular security. They can track important events such as maturity dates and changes in holding periods. Capital Gains/Losses alerts can help you manage the tax impact of your investment activities.
  For many investment alerts, Quicken now works with Quicken.com to ensure that you have the most up to date investing information available, as well as updated information from anywhere that you have Internet access. However, to set up Quicken.com alerts, you need to register with Quicken.com and export a portfolio or Watch List.
  Note that investment alerts don't appear if the information that they are based on contains placeholder entries. To view the alert, you first need to resolve the placeholder entry.
- Taxes alerts
  Tax alerts notify you of important tax dates, such as filing dates. They can also use tax-related Quicken data as stored in the Tax Planner. For example, if you've used Paycheck Setup to schedule your paycheck, information about paycheck deductions is included in each paycheck transaction and stored in the Tax Planner. This information is used to determine if you're withholding enough in taxes. If you're not, a tax alert is triggered. If an alert seems wrong, review your tax information in the Tax Planner.
  Tax alerts are turned on by default whenever you create a new Quicken data file or convert data from a previous version of Quicken.
- General alerts
  General alerts can notify you of a variety of opportunities, such as when your insurance bill is due so you can shop around for a better policy, or if your mortgage is about to convert from fixed to variable so you can think about refinancing. If you use Quicken Business & Personal you can set up an alert that notifies you when an invoice is past due.
- Other alerts
  Other alerts may be displayed depending on options offered by your financial institutions.
Click the alert you want to set up (a check mark appears in this box when the alert is turned on).
Where applicable, set alert thresholds (such as a minimum account balance amount).
Enter the method you want Quicken to use to alert you (text alert in a list or a pop-up dialog).
Click OK when you've finished setting alerts.

Notes

Quicken relies on accurate and complete data to derive reliable performance measures. To view certain performance measures, it may be necessary first to replace placeholder entries with complete historical data.
Financial alerts can't be printed.

Note for our Canadian Customers

The following terms will be different in the Canadian releases of Quicken.

Canada: "Cheque" / United States: "Check"
Canada: "Colour" / United States: "Color"
Canada: "Centre" / United States: "Center"
Canada: "Realise" / United States: "Realize"
Canada: "Behaviour" / United States: "Behavior"
Canada: "Analyse" / United States: "Analyze"