"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.
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.
Inuit says that only 6% pay bills through Quicken, but that sounds fishy. It can't be. I've been paying bills electronically with financial software, first Managing Your Money and then Quicken, for almost 20 years. To me that's a core feature, not a bell or whistle that people don't really use.
As you said, without bill pay, investment management and tax integration, the application is worth very little.
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.
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.
Looks like I'll be sticking with Quicken 2004 - at least until the G5 iMac holds out anyway.
Agree that this software is way too expensive for the features. Plus it only took them forever to come up with this. Been promising a Mac version forever.
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.
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
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.
Looks like I'll be sticking with Quicken 2004 - at least until the G5 iMac holds out anyway.
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.
Quit whining. You knew that there was little software available when you bought a Mac!
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.
Quicken Essentials for Mac is a brand new product developed in Cocoa to optimize the Mac look and feel. It connects twice the number of banks available in the previous offering, Quicken Mac 2007, increasing from 4,000 to 8,000. The company expects to have access to 16,000 banks in the coming months.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that Intuit owns Mint.com now is probably a good indicator that Mint.com is on its way out too. I have Mint.com, but it's just no replacement for my desktop Quicken.
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...
Comments
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.
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.
No thank you, Intuit -- I'll stick with Quicken 2007.
Inuit says that only 6% pay bills through Quicken, but that sounds fishy. It can't be. I've been paying bills electronically with financial software, first Managing Your Money and then Quicken, for almost 20 years. To me that's a core feature, not a bell or whistle that people don't really use.
As you said, without bill pay, investment management and tax integration, the application is worth very little.
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.
karma for being one of the worst apps for Mac.
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.
Looks like I'll be sticking with Quicken 2004 - at least until the G5 iMac holds out anyway.
Agree that this software is way too expensive for the features. Plus it only took them forever to come up with this. Been promising a Mac version forever.
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.
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.....
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.
Looks like I'll be sticking with Quicken 2004 - at least until the G5 iMac holds out anyway.
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.
Quit whining. You knew that there was little software available when you bought a Mac!
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.
Quicken Essentials for Mac is a brand new product developed in Cocoa to optimize the Mac look and feel. It connects twice the number of banks available in the previous offering, Quicken Mac 2007, increasing from 4,000 to 8,000. The company expects to have access to 16,000 banks in the coming months.
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.
I was intrigued until I reached the $70 part. ...
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.
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.
The fact that Intuit owns Mint.com now is probably a good indicator that Mint.com is on its way out too. I have Mint.com, but it's just no replacement for my desktop Quicken.
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.
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...
With the amount of info available in on-line banking, is anyone really doing line-by-line tracking of every $2 debit purchase anymore?
Yes and no. I lump together many of the smaller cash transactions. But some I do want to track and categorize.