Intuit intros long-awaited Quicken overhaul for Mac - Page 2

Ummm, I can do same thing with Mint.com... FOR FREE! And the User Interface is much easier to use on Mint.

Don't bother wasting your money - like I did..

"Earned" the name Quicken Essentials? More likely it's to prevent false advertising complaints if they just called it Quicken.

Their attitude on the Intuit blogs over the past year seems to be that most Mac users aren't sophisticated investors so they don't need the detailed investment tracking that Quicken Windows provides. Almost every response on the Intuit blogs asked for full parity with the Windows version, but they plowed ahead with this limited version anyway. They don't get this isn't the 90's anymore, and that Macs aren't just used by students and artists. VMWare and Parallels are probably happy though-- people will have to keep using their software to run a "real" Quicken on their Mac.

Don't bother wasting your money - like I did...

There are definitely some nice improvements with QE, like a really nice interface (that's actually really no better than iBank, or Money) and the ability to connect to a huge number of financial institutions (which I could never get iBank to do at all with my bank), and the import of old data was flawless.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of issues and oversights that make it not worth the cost, and I now regret having spent the money for QE (the irony is killing me).

Updating of my accounts online to bring my imported data current did not go smoothly. Although there was a very nice dialog box to let me link my on-line accounts to my accounts in QE, it didn't list all of my accounts in QE, so the only option I had to pull down my on-line data was to create new accounts. I did so thinking it would be a trivial workaround to then do an export/import of my data and my accounts would be current.

Simple workaround, right?

The only problem is QE has no export capability...

Who does that?

There are a number of other issues that another user on the QE forums posted.

- Budgets not being flexible, cumulative and annual
- The upcoming bill view not allowing you to display scheduled transfers or credit card payments
- The inability to create new reports
- I still can't find the calendar view (it may be in here somewhere, but I'm starting to doubt it).

As well as this limitation, confirmed by a Quicken employee:

"Quicken Essentials supports only a monthly budget."

Cruise the forum and you'll find other issues as well, some of which were well publicized (like the inability to make on-line payments via QE), but a number of which just make one incredulous that Intuit (or Aaron Pantzer) didn't consider and "essential" capability.

After three plus years, Intuit really laid an egg on this one, and it sure isn't a golden one. Save your money and either wait for them to fix these problems, or go with another application.

This horrible new version of Quicken is clearly modeled after mint.com, yet I can't understand why anybody would even use mint.com to begin with -- it doesn't even let you enter transactions into your checkbook or your credit card register. It's a "view-only", "read-only" service that only lets you LOOK at your current balances & transactions for your accounts. You can't even enter in a single transaction into mint.com! A truly UN-useful service for people who actually really care about their finances. Unless you're entering your own transactions and then comparing them to your bank statements at the end of the month, then you have no idea which transactions are correct or incorrect. Mint.com is ridiculous, and so is this new Quicken product.

No thank you, Intuit -- I'll stick with Quicken 2007.

The 6% could be. I pay bills online, but I don't do it through Quicken, I use my bank's online account. If the bank screws up I have fewer steps between me and a fix, and no he-said-she-said going back and forth on who should fix the screw up. Well all that and I never trusted Intuit enough to give them access to my bank accounts.

this will set some torrent download records

karma for being one of the worst apps for Mac.

I could do without bill pay in Quicken Essentials for Mac even though I am using this feature in Quicken 2008 Home and Business for Windows. I can do without having detailed investment accounts. I use Fidelity for all of my Investments, and Fidelity posts transactions (hiding certain portions of these transactions until you expand those entires on their web site), which leads to Quicken not being able to download those hidden transactions and thus not showing the correct transaction history. So, having the totals of each of my investment accounts would be just fine for me; I could always go to Fidelity.com to see the details.

What I cannot live without is custom reports. I use this feature once a year when preparing my tax information for the CPA. I need custom reports in which I can pull up certain transactions (business, personal, etc) for certain dates, from certain accounts, etc. I cannot believe Quicken Essentials misses this feature!

I was one of the beta testers of Quicken Financial Life for Mac last year. They changed the data format twice (I had to redo my entire data file both times because they did not have the migration tool from the older format to the newer format). Then, they pushed another update, which had an expiration date (which they did not announce). One day I opened the Financial Life and saw that the program had expired. There was no option to download a newer version. There was no way to import your data to Quicken for Windows. After having spent months trying to do my finances in Financial Life, hoping that Intuit would release the final version in 2009 and I would be able to continue using my data file, I found myself locked out of Financial Life altogether. By that time, I had not used my Quicken for Windows for about 5 months. The only option I had was to restore the missing 5 months of data (manually) in the Quicken for Windows version and continue using Windows in VMWare just to be able to run Quicken. Then, I heard that Intuit decided to completely re-do everything they had in Financial Life. I was so angry at them that I did not want to have anything to do with Financial Life testing anymore. I was still hoping that they would release a decent final version of it - especially because they have been working on it for several years now. Well, from what I have read so far, they did not add one extra feature into Quicken Essentials compared to the features available in Financial Life. From the published pictures, the interface looks exactly like it did in Financial Life. Sorry, Intuit, but you have really disappointed me with your so called "effort". I guess I am stuck with Windows for years to come.

Quicken 2007 wasn't/isn't so bad. Certainly I'll stick with it as this new release has no compelling features I can see. For the same mindset of 'only 6% used online bill pay', you can see why they look at the marketshare of the Mac and consider us hardly worth the effort.

Wow. $70 for that? I thought that Bank of America's site was good, now I think it's awesome. The My Portfolio section does all of this for ALL my assets, loans, investments, etc. - free. Oh yeah, and bill pay with email reminders, eBill capability, and lots of other fun things.

Wow, Wow, Intuit just Wow
Years waiting for an "Upgraded" App and this is what you come up with?
$70.00 and it loses core features of an earlier version!?
NO Full feature Investment module
NO integration with Turbo Tax (errr who makes that again?)
NO Bill Pay

But hey the colored windows look pretty.
Just put in all your password and codes so we can nicely collate your data, and market it to 3rd parties..

Why oh why does the CEO of Intuit sit on Apple's Board.......

From Intuits Web Site:

If you need more more advanced investment features, try Quicken Mac 2007.

Quicken Essentials for Mac does not support that capability. If you’d like that functionality, we recommend trying Quicken Mac 2007.

While you cannot pay bills within the product itself ("direct bill pay"), you can track your bills and make sure you have enough cash to pay them when they’re due. A few alternatives available include using Quicken Mac 2007

Its Back to the Future time.....

I'm using Quicken 2005 now, including the bill pay feature. Are there any alternatives that can do bill pay, i.e. directly in the register?

If it is true that only 6% of users use bill pay, and they use this to justify not including it, I think they have erred. Those of us who do use it also decide what software others in the family use, even if they don't use bill pay.

Q2004 does all that I need to do...entering expenses so that I can use categories. I can check my spending during the year and know what is tax deductible for the year. I can search for past expenses to compare. I don't need to connect to any bank or integrate it with my checkbook. It actually make life simpler this way. It works fine on my MacBook intel.

No actually Quicken is the only program I can think of that I prefer on Windows. Every other app that comes to mind I prefer, or even strongly prefer on the mac.

wow. what a poorly written advertisement.

and is the number of banks really major selling point? i suppose it is, when there's nothing else in the product about which to glow.

i've been using quicken since 1991. and i still have most of the product disks to prove it. where's the loyalty program, intuit? oh wait, i don't need another piece of crap software.

Agreed.

Maybe I'm being shallow too but ... could they have picked an uglier box?



No one with any art or design training would argue that this is an attractive choice. I can't imagine this even being stocked on the shelf in an Apple store it's so tacky.

But there never seems to be parity on features or price vs. the Windoze version.

Are there any reliable references for how securely maintained passwords entered into these programs and on-line systems are?
It is very difficult/impossible to recover lost or stolen funds from a bank account. I don't know what basis any of us has for entrusting their life savings to any of these systems. I can only imagine the risk might be acceptable for true credit card accounts, where federal protections apply, but not for debit cards or any other form of savings or money market account.

Quite the contrary. The CEO of mint.com is now running the Quicken division of Intuit, and has gone on record as saying that Quicken desktop products will be phased out in 5 years.

See my message above. There's a link to the interview.

I was a beta tester for the original QFL... and you need to realize they totally scrapped that project and threw this thing together in about 3 months... so you know it isn't going to be all that fancy. I've been using Investoscope, which other than having an odd name, is a great Mac app for stock/investment tracking.

With the amount of info available in on-line banking, is anyone really doing line-by-line tracking of every $2 debit purchase anymore? Seems like a lot of work...

Yes and no. I lump together many of the smaller cash transactions. But some I do want to track and categorize.

Couldn't Agree More!
They seem to all about wanting to get there hands on your Data. but then when there is a data Breech and all data is compromised, they wait months before saying anything and then offer you free Credit Monitoring services HA!

Who Monitors the Monitors?

from Enemy of The State.

Too little too late to fall in love again.

Intuit, bite me!

Really? so you can enter transactions before they clear your bank? Not on Mint you don't.

Well, let's see.

I use my bank's online bill pay system. I suspect most others do, too. Trouble is, I then enter all of my transactions by hand in to Quicken because I do not like the download feature. So, no loss of bill pay, for me.

Direct integration with TurboTax? Well, I suspect that it will let us Export a tax file as it does now. Then, we could import that into TurboTax. Could anyone say if this is correct?

What about stocks, though? The article says that the new version is "a view only version that doesn't have tax lot accounting." What does that mean? Can we enter stock trades, or not? Does it track stock trades correctly? It sounds like it doesn't.

I have bet a couple of college-age kids who tell me they don't use accounting software; they just rely on their bank's online information. Is this a trend among the young? Am I too old?

From what I understand you can view your Portfolio but not enter individual trades etc....

It is a sad state of affairs, at least re Intuit/Quicken.

Missing rather core features of tax software integration (Yes - Intuit is the vendor of TurboTax), and investment, etc (as noted by others) - leaving that stuff out just seems kind of dumb.

... Announcing: Two + years in the making and now you get ... LESS ...

FYI, I just looked at the iBank page, since people here mentioned it (I don't use that) and it lists TurboTax integration, and SRP is 60, $10 less than new Quicken.

What are those folks thinking at intuit.

Guess this is going to keep the need for Win virtualization software for many folks.

Try Yodlee- They are the back end of the bank of America online banking. They also are the back end for MINT.

It is free and works well.

I strongly disagree with the pricing of the product, but I'm actually tempted to get it for a couple of reasons. 1) If nobody buys it, then there's no incentive for them to improve it. 2) it's becoming apparent that over the next 5 years Quicken will unify their backends into a cloud-based solution, and this seems like the first design phase of that move. I think it's worth it to have Mint's features in an offline format with the last 9 years of my financial data in tact, especially if that's my gateway to a universal experience in a few years where I can access my data on Linux and everywhere else.

Honestly, I replaced Quicken 2006 with MoneyDance a few years ago and, while the experience isn't as frustrating as Quicken, I also find that I haven't been as productive. With another baby on the way, being productive rather than stressing with a Java app is becoming increasingly important to me.

One question though, for those that have tried it, does it even support split transactions? I mean, I want to track my paycheck taxes and so on...

Not having pocket quicken for the iphone is silly. how many palm OS users were there compared to the iphone users today?

I can see how everyone is upset with quicken desktop being a neutered app. Fortunately I don't use the missing feature, although I do keep my personal records separate from my business.

Thanks for the app recommendations though. I'll check them out and I won't check out splash money desktop. LOL

For anyone looking into invoicing I've grown fond of Billings. Not the same thing at all, but the mobil app is nice and synchs to the desktop version very much like pocket quicken would.

A great companion to payware mobil which connects to a credit card reader from verifone for the iphone. it'll save you a few points on the rates because you actually scan the card just like a fixed terminal.

.

Suggestion: buy Quicken 2007. That will send the message that Mac users are buying, but that 2010QE is worthless.

My Quicken 2004 runs fine on PB G4, 10.4.11. I Download my Bank and Credit Cards as QIF Files, and Import them from within Quicken. Works fine!


Exactly same with me. Please someone confirm that all I have to do is insert my Quicken 2004 CD into MacBook Pro, when I buy one, Install it there, under Snow Leopard, or whatever OS it'll be this coming Summer 2010, and my Quicken 2004 file will run OK on it?

Keeping my fingers crossed that the answer is YES, cause someone already did just that!

As to iPhone. It'd be great to have Quicken companion app on it, so that, if I am on a go, and just bought something with cash, I can enter that transaction, and it would sync with my Desktop via Mobile Me, WiFi, USB, all of the above, and vs., so that both apps are always in sync! If such sync doesn't or won't exist with Quicken on Mac, which app should I be migrating to, when I upgrade from my PB G4, 10.4.11 to Macbook Pro?


I hope Intuit/Quicken is reading this Forum... I recently saw NY Times' David Pogue criticize it too... So, it's not like we here on this Forum are the only one's who are concerned!

If the result, as described, is their long-delayed "overhaul," then I wouldn't put much stock in future "improvements." This product should have never taken so long to develop, and it sure as heck shouldn't cost $70. With a little brain grease, you can easily ape everything it does. I mean, no integration with TurboTax?!!? What the heck are they smoking???

(Apparently, Adobe's Mac porters -- I mean, "developers" -- are smoking the same stuff, which seems to make people apathetic to actual work and accomplishment.)

Worst of all, Bill Campbell (CEO of Intuit) was just re-elected to Apple's Board of Directors:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...directors.html

I was a beta tester for financial life and I told them the same thing I'm saying now: you shouldn't have to pay a premium for Quicken on the Mac and then settle for a product so anemic in features as compared to the Windows version as to make it unusable and certainly not worth the price. I just don't understand the Quicken software model: yes they have a product that seems to work pretty well on the Windows platform but when you look at it closely, there is no consistency in the menus, the dialog boxes, the core "logical focus" of the code; it just seems to ramble from one task to the other, as inelegantly as one might expect from a product that has more "post-it note" subroutines than a Morman family refrigerator. I agree that it would be fun to see how Apple would do it, but I don't think it would be any better than Mint, and Mint is now owned by Intuit, so I suppose we can expect that product to be dumbed-down over the next few years.

And don't get me started on how schizophrenic Quickbooks Pro is.

There's an elegant software solution for finance out there somewhere, but Mint is right now as close as it gets and Quicken's new Mac product is on the other side of the galaxy: a cold and desolate space.

And it's as if identity theft is the big concern. Theft of one's life savings with no hope of recovery is a far bigger concern... unless of course one has no savings.

You might be interested in the following

In the on-air discussion, Patzer [mint.com CEO, now in charge of all Quicken products] said Intuit plans to keep selling desktop versions of Quicken for Windows PCs and Apple (AAPL) Macs for perhaps five years further.

Here's is how bad it was when I tried it-
it didn't even have password protection.

Unbelievable!

I've been on the Beta for well over a year... there's a story to be told, I can tell you.

It's truly awful, slow, offers no loan funtions, no mortgage tracking, no securities transactions, and not even securities balance tracking unless you can download them directly... I won't even mention the fact there are no reports (apart from listing of transaction... no graphs, customized pie charts, net worth tracking over time... nothing) or bill pay... oh I did mention it.

And all this, for MORE money than the entry level Windows version that has all of those features. Disgraceful. Aside from all that, they'll only support it for 5 years before shuffling everyone on to Mint - that isn't a guess from me, this is what they've told Quicken Inner Circle members quite openly.

I recommend iBank 3.5 (or stick with Windows) if you need serious financial software. I think Intuit have lost a lot of friends and possibly a lot of customers. If it were $29.99, then I'd buy it just to show some good faith... but $70? I'd be better off spending it on Parallels.

"Quicken Essentials for Mac is the first Quicken product to take full advantage of the Mac operating system and development platform," said Aaron Patzer, vice president and general manager of Intuits Personal Finance Group.


Given that Intuit has been producing vaguely Maccish apps for decades, I'm sure they must feel just wonderful about that. I know how proud I was when, at age 24, I finally got the hang of tying my shoes.

Guess Apple's recent freakish profit margins just have made an impression.

I just hope they've retained their insanity with regard to command+A. Quicken has always been one of perhaps 5 apps on earth that persists on doing its own very special thing with what's arguably the most common Mac keyboard shortcut of all time, and at this late date, grandma's drooling is kind of touching and I'd hate to see it stop.

I mean really, if Intuit cleans up their act, what are we going to do with all these bibs, adult diapers, and rubber sheets? I guess we could call customer service to ask, wait on hold for a total of 90 minutes, four disconnects, and 3 impenetrable language barriers, before finding out that no one in Bangalore has every heard of the product.