In challenging times, you might succumb to the thought of playing ostrich with your personal finances, burying your checkbook in the sand, so to speak. Resist the temptation — tracking where your money goes will help you weather any economic turbulence. Quicken has always helped you do the math; the Quicken 2004 adds time-saving features, additional services and a streamlined user interface.

The most painful part of managing your finances is data entry. Manual upkeep is time-consuming, and you might make mistakes. Prior versions of Quicken let you access your bank accounts, credit cards and investments online. Quicken makes it even easier. You can schedule downloads of your financial information to happen in any time frame you like, and the transactions will be ready for your approval the next time you launch the program. Plus, these transactions are now presented in a single window.

Tracking your retirement investments is even more important nowadays. Quicken adds many improvements to aid in this process, such as support for stock splits and mergers, as well as a Capital Gains Estimator to evaluate the potential tax impact of games and losses from stock and mutual fund sales. Quicken supports a growing number of brokerage firms, including Fidelity, Harrisdirect, Quicken Brokerage, RBC Dain Rauscher and TD Waterhouse.

Quicken also reduces the complexity of managing investments linked to a money market account with a fine-tuning of the investment register. Now cash-management activities such as deposits, withdrawals, ATM transactions, check writing and point of sale purchases are built in to the register. That means you don’t have to create a separate linked register to track cash activity, unlike previous versions of the software.

Quicken puts a pretty face on even the ugliest of finances with enhancements that take advantage of Mac OS X. You’ll notice a toolbar with icons that reflect the Aqua appearance. As with other Mac OS X programs, you can customize the toolbar to reflect the activities you do most. And if you’ve never used Quicken’s online features you’ll find a handy tutorial that guides you through setup.

Quicken reduces the amount of time you need to spend managing — or worrying about — your money.