Mac Quicken Set for 2010 Release
Via the Quicken Blog, Intuit has announced a February release for the oft-delayed Mac financial software.
Intuit spokesperson Scott Gulbransen sought to “clear the air” regarding the rumored demise of Quicken for Mac. In recent days, Intuit had removed information about the formerly named Quicken Financial Life for Mac from its web site. This action, shortly after Microsoft’s cancellation of Money, may have led some to believe Intuit was giving up on a client-based application for the Mac in lieu of its online service. According to Gulbransen, the truth is much simpler: Intuit screwed up.
Feedback from Mac customers led us to rethink our approach to developing Quicken for Mac. We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks.
After being shown at Macworld Expos two years running, QFLM was finally released as a beta earlier this year. Reception was cold. As Gulbransen notes, “We learned the product was not doing what we – nor customers – wanted it to do.” Accordingly, development was reset, with changes including a new register, better reconciliation model, and a “robust” migration function for current Quicken users, including Quicken for Windows. They also dumped that idiotic name.
Intuit will be taking pre-orders for Quicken for Mac starting in October. Considering the troubled development history of the product, waiting until release would seem like a good idea. After all, what’s another seven months after three years?
Tweet This (4)
Dave Greenbaum on July 10th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Really kinda sad that they don’t have an Intel based solution after all this time.
Jeff Barlow on July 10th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I’ve got ten years of financial history in Quicken and use it almost daily. It’s the last remaining one I still use that only operates under Rosetta.
Kenetic on July 10th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Why wait? Use Mint.com, it has changed how I manage my finances in so many ways that I have not looked back at Quicken in over 18 months…
Julius Lopez on July 10th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Mint is great for basic finances, just as Quicken Online is. But really, do you want all your financial data sitting on a cluster of servers you have no control over? Not me.
Kevin Arth on July 10th, 2009 at 10:24 am
mint.com is OK, but it has some problems. First of all, you can’t enter any data or pay any bills. You can only view information (unless they’ve changed in the last month). Also if you have two credit cards with the same company, you can’t enter them both.
I’ve been playing on and off with Quicken Online and I like the fact that you can enter transactions, but as far as I know, you still can’t pay bills there. I’m also using Quicken Mac 2007. The import of transactions (syncing with bank) is clunky. It will be nice if this software streamlined the process of syncing data with financial institutions. I also think the reconciliation function of Quicken 2007 is clunky.
I look forward to the new version, but I hope there’s some option to preview before purchase. I’m looking for resolution of specific problems and if they don’t fix those, I have no need for a new version.
Bradley Davidson on July 10th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Mint.com has no provisions for manually managing accounts that might not have online access it supports. More than 50% of my invenstments I can not show on mint.com for this very reason. On top of that, they still have problems reliably connecting to the two largest military service banks.
Jim Robinson on July 10th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Quicken has awful customer service – I have sent them messages asking them whats going on with this product – its really a shame I need to look elsewhere for an explanation of the demise of this MAC product. I am hopeful they will be ready in October – I have been waiting for this product for 1.5 years. I have used Quicken on Windows for years and can’t wait to exit Windows. Quicken is the holdup. Thank-you for your helpful information!!!
Kevin Arth on July 10th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I used MS Money on Windows. I only switched to Quicken so I could sell my Windows machine. Hard decision. Wish there was a better solution. I don’t like Quicken, but I’m reluctant to trust my finances with some of the open source products on the market and I don’t know what else is out there.
Staff Comment Charles Jade, TheAppleBlog on July 10th, 2009 at 11:59 am
I gave up on Quicken at Macworld Expo this year, switched to iBank, and imported nearly ten years of data without much trouble. Quicken’s “Smart Payees,” the automatic assignment of characteristics to transactions on download, didn’t transfer payee names, but that was a small thing. I’ve been happy with iBank, and I look forward to iBank Mobile for the iPhone, which will sync with the desktop, unlike Quicken’s mobile app.
Bob Smith on July 10th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
The persistent refusal of Intuit to upgrade Mac Quicken to the same specs as Windows Quicken even though Intuit’s CEO is on Apple’s board, and their lackluster response (if any) to reported bugs, pissed me off so much I switched to MoneyWell.
Xairbusdriver on July 10th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I don’t like having to depend on any proprietary software. OTOH, how do we know that any of the alternative apps will be supported (even reluctantly and badly!) for the next 10+ years? All the alternatives I’ve tried have left me singularly unimpressed. They are either too non-financial-like (MoneyWell), too simplistic (no split transactions!) or too small a market share to be trusted to be around for very long.
Apparently, what would seem to be a basic function, keeping up with one’s financial status and forecasting same, is not as common a task as many of us thought. The alternatives out there run from not much more than a printing calculator to only slightly modified GAO programs! ;-) Much as I dislike Quicken, it looks like I may be stuck with it.
Marco on July 11th, 2009 at 2:11 am
What is Intuit’s problem…I used a Mac version of Quicken in the early to mid 90’s that worked great. It was clean and easy to use. The only thing Microsoft Money did better was more advanced trading like options, which is why I switched to that. Then Microsoft got greedy and made it so Money expires such that you can’t get stock price updates anymore unless you upgrade to the latest version. That along with horrible reviews for the forced upgrade version killed my interest in that product. Now we’re left with nothing. It’s so sad, considering these products worked just fine ten years ago when computers were literally a hundred times slower.
It’s truly amazing that the open source community hasn’t made a good Quicken alternative yet.
Patricia Wood on July 11th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Just changed to an iMac and I’m disappointed with Quicken in that I can”t use the same commands I did on my pc. It’s bad enough to adjust to Word and Excel and learn new command. Once the new commands are learned it is great. Guess you can’t teach and old dog new tricks.
Dee on July 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
It feels like I have been using Quicken forever, well, I remember the upgrade to Quicken ‘97, At graduate school, I really liked using the Macs but I was afraid to switch to a Mac because of Quicken. About 2 years ago, I switched to a Mac desktop, and happily bought Quicken for Mac expecting at least some parity- it felt worse than going back to Quicken ‘97.
I can’t remember all the specifics, but I have been keeping my old laptop alive and only use it for Quicken. It is not at all convenient, but it is the only option that I have figured out so far. I did try Quicken online, but didn’t find that to be very good either. I am totally hoping that the new one will be an improvement.
MySho2 on July 30th, 2009 at 11:08 am
I, too, am a long user of Quicken/PC and when I got my MAC was very disappointed with Quicken-Mac (downloading data, data not matching, manually having to sync information). So I tried Moneywell and iBank. Hated Moneywell; however, I liked iBank but the sync was not as smooth as Quicken/PC. I did not like that offline sync was only with .MAC. Mint could not get all financial data, multiple accounts with dashes (xxxxxxx-40, xxxxxx-38); not able to input data which caused me to log separately to see real time information, and cannot sync with desktop. So, I have been waiting for the Quicken Mac upgrade. I do like the Quicken Online and hope I can sync with my desktop smoothly. With my iPhone, 1Password, Quicken Online reminders, I am a little closer to managing our finances real time.
Steve on August 22nd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I switched from Quicken to Moneydance in January 2009. I generally like MD but two things I really miss from Quicken: 1) it helps solve errors from previous statements during reconcile, and 2) there are total number of shares columns in the registers for securities. I haven’t seen these features in Moneydance, iBank, MyMoney, or iFinance.
Likeable-Larry on August 25th, 2009 at 11:18 am
I to am a former PC’er who went to Mac and found that Quicken was not nearly as good as it was on a PC. Besides a lot of the same items that are already listed by several other people on here, I truly miss the little box I could click on and it would tell me when was the last time I wrote a check to a person or company, and give a list and grand total of the amounts. As we all know, we have to scroll forever to find that info.
Xairbusdriver on August 25th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Command-F will bring up a little “Find” window hat will let you search for many different parts of an entry, in any one or all accounts, in either the forward or backwards direction. That should make finding the last payment to someone easier for you. But you probably already knew that function…and it may not do all that you want, anyway.
As for totaling the payments to someone, why not use one of the “Report” options, they seem super fast and you can specify many options. I think you can even save a report format. Of course, this is certainly not as easy as checking a box. And I think we know many of the ‘pains’ of which you speak!
Promises-Promises on August 31st, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I am using Quicken 2007 for Windows on my Mac. CrossOver from Codeweavers allows me to run it along with MS Office for Windows. And, Crossover costs about $40 US. It’s not perfect, but this costs less than buying Windows. Everything in Quicken seems to work except help.
Bruce on October 14th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Hi. I dont mind the $40 if this works well. When you say, “it’s not perfect” is that a comment about buying new software or is there conversion in data that must occur. Thanks very much for any guidance, Bruce
John on September 4th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I’m not going to hold my breath for this release.
Nanomug on October 4th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I have used Quicken for nearly 20 years. I’ve had a Mac for over 10 years and Quicken for Mac doesn’t function well. I’m still using the Windoz version. I’d switch in a heartbeat if it was anything close to the Windoz version and imported my data correctly. Data just doesn’t go back and forth well.
Jack on October 7th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I use Quicken for Windows under Parallels. Now that Picasa works great on Mac OS, there’s almost nothing else left I need Windows for. Rhapsody is one… If the new Quicken for Mac really works, I’ll switch, but otherwise live with having the 2 OS’s on my Mac.
Dave Gnotta on October 12th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Like so many here I have used Quicken for close to two decades. I have tried several of the alternatives but they all seemed to have at least one “deal breaker” feature lacking.
About 3 months ago I discovered a finance program I had never heard of called “Prospects”. WOW! This was exactly what I had been looking for. It was easily reconcilable, has dynamic reporting, great transaction import matching, the ability to sort accounts (and recons) by ANY column and on and on.
There are a couple of very minor things to get used to, but once you do this program is great. It doesn’t yet import transactions directly from my banks. You download and then import. But it works flawlessly and the developer is VERY responsive and continues to improve this software.
I wish these guys were getting more press. I have FINALLY dumped Quicken and have never been happier.
William on October 20th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I am still using Quicken for the Mac 2006! Everything seems to work find except it is unable to correctly download the investments portion.
I do not use Quicken to pay bills, but rather do that online via my bank.
I look forward to the new Quicken, but I would like to try it out before purchasing. If it cannot handle my investments I will stay with 2006.
kwells on October 21st, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I converted to a Mac about 2 years ago and have never looked back. Unfortunately, because I can’t get all the Quicken functionality in any other product, I have to run VMWare — just so I can use Quicken! Please Intuit….. Please, Please, Please…… PLEASE give us a MAC version of Quicken that has ALL the functionality of the Windows version!
I am begging……
Jeff on October 23rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I am also a long time (20 yrs +) quicken user on a pc. Finally decided to try a new Imac with the intel chip that runs xp using VMware. I tried to bring over the program but had difficulty. I talked quicken help and they said that “Quicken is not supported on virtual system as it may damage your data file or the program installation. Since, it is not designed to work this way, it may or may not work, we do not suggest our customers to use it on Virtual systems.”
How did you get it working with VMware? It’s hard to believe that a program this popular doesn’t have a good Mac version.
Help!
Andy on October 31st, 2009 at 1:38 am
I share the frustration of having to run 2 OS – Win XP 64 and Snow Leopard just to get to Quicken Personal Plus! VMWare works seamlessly and supports all my other windows stuff such as Office etc. The file sharing is particularly nice as you can open a windows file directly from Finder. Lots of other great features too.
Paige on November 1st, 2009 at 5:06 am
If there is not a book available for the new Quicken for Mac, I will not buy the new program.
Clara on November 1st, 2009 at 10:23 am
Did anyone try using Windows on Mac, and run Quicken??
I’ve been using Quicken w/ PC in Canada for years, works great!But I want to
switch to Mac now as PC has so much trouble; so I have been reading all the
apps from Mac and see if that will work for me; but I need to use Quicken a lot
and I don’t want to keep both PC and Mac! Need advise!
Xairbusdriver on November 1st, 2009 at 3:48 pm
When you get your new Mac, you could use Boot Camp, if you can grab a copy of it. I think Apple stopped including it with Snow Leopard. If you can’t do that, you can get one of the two main Windows emulators, Fusion and Parallels. That would be an extra cost, but their advantage is that you can have Windows and Snow Leopard running at the same time. Some say Windows (not sure which version) actually ran faster on a Mac than on a PC! By having both OSs running at the same time you can easily do cut/copy/paste between documents on each system. That’s just what I’ve been told/read. I don’t use either emulator nor do I have any Windows programs. ;-)
Xairbusdriver on November 1st, 2009 at 3:51 pm
I’ve been playing with Prospect for a few days. It is easy to use, can do split transactions and appears to be stable. However, it is woefully lacking in reporting and, worst of all, it appears the developer is no longer supporting it for an unknown reason. Hopefully not because of illness! But that is always the biggest concern for any kind of long term use of an application and it’s hard to make a living with a ‘one-man-shop!’
eheffa on November 5th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
I have Quicken on my PC & it is a love-hate relationship (more hate than love). It gets the job done but the crummy software breaks so many rules & conventions that it drives me crazy. Surely there is someone out there who could write a better program with the same power as quicken but without all the quirks. I would dump Intuit in a nanosecond if there were some comparable options.
-evan