After posting my blog article, and at the direction of several of my readers, I sent an email to my contacts at Intuit pointing out my blog and asking them for feedback. My post eventually found it’s way to Martha Shaughnessy at Intuit’s PR agency for Quicken. She reached out to me asking if I would be interested in talking with Aaron Patzer, the new GM/VP of Personal Finance for Intuit. Aaron is responsible for Quicken Windows, Quicken Mac, and Mint.com. He was the CEO and Founder of Mint.com and came to Intuit through their acquisition of Mint.com in November, 2009. Martha’s message to me:
Your Name: Martha Shaughnessy
Your Email: [Mail Withheld]
Subject: Not Chelsea, but would love to chat Essentials for Mac
Message: Hi Rob -Thanks for such a thorough blog post, and I hope we’ll be able to connect. Since Intuit’s November 2009 acquisition of Mint.com, I’ve been working with the new Personal Finance Group (Quicken – for Windows and Mac, and Mint.com). I would love to set up a time for you to speak with Aaron Patzer, the new GM/VP of Personal Finance for Inuit, to hear what the product team has done for Essentials (Mac native, mother-of-all-converters, upgraded ease-of-use, etc.), and what he and the team are already working on for future releases.
The team’s only been merged for 3 mos., but I assure you bringing parity among products is a huge goal for them and we’d be happy to discuss what that would mean.
Please let me know if you have time in the coming days. My cell is: [phone withheld], or you can email me at: [email withheld].
Thanks – and I’m sorry for your frustration,
Martha
So, I contacted Martha back stating I would love the opportunity to speak with Aaron:
Martha,
I would welcome the opportunity to discuss the future of Quicken for Mac. Obviously, people are very passionate about the product and when you combine that with the passion people have for the Macintosh, you get one volatile combination.
Let me know under what restrictions, if any, you’d be open to having this discussion. I would of course love the opportunity to not be tied to NDAs and be able to report honestly about the situation going forward on my Blog.
Let me know how you’d prefer to proceed.
-Rob
Martha got back to me, offered me a Beta copy of Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac for me to review, and setup a time to speak with Aaron:
I can send you a beta copy of the new release on Tuesday, and totally get the passion. I actually made a collage to illustrate that exact point (attached) when we realized what stage we were stepping into with this product’s story.
Re: NDA, no holds barred. The official launch date is 2/25 2/22, but if you have musings, would like to write about your conversation with Aaron Patzer or others on the Mac team, we welcome it. Definitely want you and your peers to know this is a priority.
Do you have time Monday 11 – 11:30 a.m. PT to chat with Aaron?
The Meeting
So, now we know. Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac will be released on February 25th 22nd. I also had a date and time when I was going to get to speak with Aaron. I spent the weekend thinking about the questions I wanted to ask and the answers I wanted to receive.
Aaron and I spoke on Monday at 2:00 p.m. EST. We fired up a screen sharing session and he immediately started into a demo of the new Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac. I wasn’t able to drive, but I did get a screen capture.
I’m not going to go into a deep review of the product until I can see it first hand and play with it, but I did want to give you this sneak peak. Some of the highlights regarding the product that Aaron pointed out:
- Release Date: February 25 22, 2010
- At launch, it will connect to over 8,000 banks/financial institutions
- As an update, after launch, it will be upgraded to support 16,000+ banks/financial institutions (he actually went back and forth between 12,000 and 16,000)
- Quicken Essentials will auto-categorize transactions that you download, with a 70% accuracy rate. It will also “cloud source” categories to improve accuracy (you can override of course, and it will remember for your accounts). These categorizations are being driven from Mint.com which already has this feature.
- Will have the “Mother of all Converters”. At first, this really didn’t seem interesting to me, my data is in Quicken already. However, when I pointed that out to Aaron he took the time to explain that the exporting and importing process of Quicken, today, is cumbersome. Which it is, I can attest. If you’re switching from Windows Quicken to Mac Quicken, or Mac to Windows, you often have to do it an account at a time, via QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) files. This causes all kinds of havoc with multi-account splits, categories, etc. I’ve done it before (both ways) and it’s not pretty. I’m also doing it right now to move data into iBank for that product review. The new Quicken Converters will read the native binary data formats, for a bunch of different Personal Finance software, and bring it into Quicken. That’s actually really nice.
- Ad-Hoc Reporting much better, more on this below.
- Tagging of transactions, more on this below.
- Portfolio updates to online Brokerages (like E*Trade), don’t get too excited. Basically, just like at Mint.com, you can connect your existing online Brokerage account into Quicken. It will then pull current balances and Portfolio values down into Quicken. If your brokerage is supported, that’s great. If it’s not, then you basically can’t use this feature as manually entering buys and sells of equities isn’t something Quicken Essentials is going to do.
The Features
So, those are the key features. I want to focus on two of them:
Reporting
The reporting environment in Quicken 2007 for Mac blows. It’s horrible. It’s barely usable. It was okay when it was first released in 2006, but four years later we just have much higher expectations for what our software can and should do, and it’s not doing it. Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac shines in this area. It’s extremely visual (you can see that from the screenshot) and Aaron zipped around the screen getting all kinds of information about his finances and transactions. Because of this rich data, the budgeting was actually something I might use. I mentioned to Aaron that all of the reporting felt “very Mint-like” and I could hear him grin on the other side of the phone. He agreed. If you’ve used Mint.com, then you’ll already know what to expect and probably know how to use it. It’s clear that Mint.com is already having strategic impacts on the direction Intuit is taking Quicken.
Tagging
If you haven’t used Tags in your applications, then you’re missing out. Tagging is something that started in social networking on the Internet and is now finding it’s way into mainstream applications on our Desktop. A Tag is basically another category. They’re lightweight and made to be used more as a filter than as a true categorization. The simplest example I can make is that if you eat at 5 restaurants a week, you’d want all of those categorized as Dining. However, 2 of those meals were lunches, three were dinners, and 1 of them was reimbursable by my employer. I’d categorize all of them as Dining, but I’d Tag the first two as Lunch, Tag the last three as Dinner, and Tag the last one as Expense Report. So the first two would only have 1 Tag, the next two would have 2 Tags, and the third would have three Tags on it. The power now comes from the fact that I can have Quicken report on certain Tags and pull those transactions together based on different criteria than just Category. Now I can find out what percentage of my Dining are Lunches (something my wife thinks we should cut down dramatically). I can also easily pull a report together for my business Expense Report. It’s powerful and I’m glad to see it in this type of product (thanks Mint.com).
The Future
I asked Aaron about the future of Quicken. I bluntly told him we want a product that is in parity with the Windows version of Quicken. He understood. He also explained to me that he’s only been in the job since November, 2009. When he took the reigns of the Personal Finance division at Intuit, he was shocked that there hadn’t been a Quicken product for the Mac for four years. He was immediately indoctrinated into the saga that is Quicken for Mac. His first priority was getting a product out the door. A quality product. Even if that meant sacrificing features at first. Four months later, we’re getting the first new Quicken product for the Mac in four years! That part of this story is a success. Yes, I’m clearly displeased with the fact that major features were left out. Features that you’d think they already had code and support to enable in the new product. But, it’s a new product nonetheless.
Aaron then shared with me that his goal for the Personal Finance group is to in fact bring parity to all of the Quicken products. But, Intuit is doing this differently than you’d expect. Instead of the Windows Quicken being the milestone and bringing the Mac product up to spec, they’re instead working towards a seamless integration of all the Quicken products. Intuit wants you to be able to get your personal finances, transactions, categories, and reporting, from any device you choose to use. That could be a Macintosh client, a Windows client, your web browser, or your PDA/SmartPhone/iPad, etc. They want the experience in all of those mediums to be the same. That’s a lofty goal and not necessarily one that the consumer is going to be comfortable with. I for one used to be a Mint.com user, but after getting all of my information loaded into Mint.com and playing with the reporting, categorization, and data visualizations, I quickly realized that this company now had complete and total access over everything I was doing. I deleted my account (which they completely support, knowing that people can get nervous about it). When I mentioned this to Aaron, he was quick to point out that the seamless integration is for folks who want it, you won’t be forced into it.
Conclusion
I’m sticking to my guns on this one. I appreciate the time Aaron took and I hope the above article puts some people at ease. I was told Intuit was going to send me a beta of Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac on Tuesday, no one contacted me about it, and I didn’t get a response to my follow-up email to Martha (by the time of this post). I plan on reviewing the final product when it’s released as a comparison to the article I’m working on for iBank. As a Quicken user, I’m going to have to look hard at what I actively use within Quicken to see if Quicken Essentials is a fit. Aaron did share that Intuit will be having additional “SKUs” for Quicken Mac that will include “Advanced Features”. He didn’t allude to when those would be released, or what features would be included. If you as a user of Quicken actively use Portfolio management (not at a support brokerage), actively push your data into TurboTax, or currently use Quicken Bill Pay through the application (not your bank), then this product is a pass. If however, you don’t use those features, then you might like it. I’m thinking hard, but I’m not pre-ordering Quicken Essentials either.
{ 22 comments }
Very well done, Rob! Thanks for taking on the ad-hoc role of spokesperson for the Inner Circel Beta Forum crowd. I feel well represented and informed. Please continue to share your observations with us as this saga rolls out. One way or another, this is all contributing to a process that, I hope, will result in a significant advancement in Personal Finance software, especially for Mac users!
Thanks Rob for taking the step of approaching Intuit. I have to say a tip of the hat to them for letting you speak with Patzer. If he’s really going to pull Quicken out of the ditch on the Mac and give us something that has parity, then I suppose supporting him is the right way to go, assuming he’s sincere, His earlier, rather derogatory remarks about the average Mac/Quicken user don’t leave me entirely comfortable on this point. The one thing I am stuck on now is price. The beta, though pretty, is feature sparse as we all know. $59.00 is just too high in my book. How they charge for "additional functionality" is going to be key. Looking forward to your review of the final code when you get it, and a comparison to iBank.
Rob, thanks for sharing your interview with Aaron. However, I’m very disappointed that Aaron did not reveal when the key features we’ve all been waiting for (investment tracking, bill pay, and Turbo Tax export) will be available on the Mac product. For me, the critical missing feature is investment tracking. As a current user of Quicken 2007 for Windows (which I run via Parallels), I’m facing a very tough decision. What do I do when Intuit stops supporting Q2007 in April? Quicken is the only reason I run Parallels, so I would prefer to move to a native Mac product. I cannot move to QE for Mac, because I need investment tracking. If I upgrade to Quicken 2010 for Windows, on the other hand, then I am stuck on Windows and would have to pay for yet another version of Quicken if and when investment becomes available on the Mac product!
I’ve already been waiting 3 years for a decent Mac version of Quicken, and now I am forced to upgrade my Windows version before a full-featured Mac product is available. This is really unfair. I feel that Intuit should provide me with a free copy of Quicken 2007 for Mac, which although a horrible product, would at least hold me over until Quicken for Mac has the investment features I need. I would love to move to a competing product, but the sad truth is that no one has produced anything comparable to Quicken. iBank is a non-starter for me, because it does not download from ING Direct, where I have both my checking and savings. Are any other Q2007 users in the same boat as me? What do you plan to do when Intuit cuts off support in April?
I think Aaron Patzer just might be the silver lining in the Intuit cloud of what has been Mac gloom! Feature parity seems to be his goal…at least I hope he’s sincere about that! It’s unbelievable that Apple hasn’t created a financial software package in all these years since Mac use has increased! I mean iBank, Moneydance, Splashmoney, etc etc etc are not Intuit!!! We NEED Intuit to produce a quality Mac version of Quicken…plain & simple! These guys are the masters of financial management for Windows PC’s! I’ve pre-ordered QE for Mac, and I hope the updates come fast & on a regular basis until the crippled product becomes strong! And hopefully QE 2011 incorporates all the features missing from QE 2010! My .02 cents!
@Simmias: Quicken Eddy and others have stated, categorically, that Intuit currently has NO plans to discontinue support for Quicken 2007 for Mac. This was posted several times to the Quicken Inner Circle forums. They wouldn’t go so far as to commit to keeping support alive until these "Additional SKUs" are available, but they did state they have not set a date for discontinuing support at this time.
@Simmias: Also, I checked the iBank support for ING Direct. It’s true that direct downloads using OFX files are not supported (that’s actually an ING Direct issue, not iBank, as ING Direct (Canada) is supported). Have you tried the integrated browser support which allows for downloading transactions in a variety of ways from within the application? You can find out more here.
Intuit did provide me with a review copy of the release version of Quicken Essentials and I’m currently writing my review. I’m also writing a review of iBank. The iBank review will be available this week, Quicken Essentials will follow. In the Quicken Essentials review I plan on incorporating comparisons to iBank and coming to a recommendation. That review/comparison will all be available the day Quicken Essentials is released, or very shortly after, so my readers, and the Quicken Inner Circle folks I’m in communication with, will be able to make a final decision on moving forward.
Hi Rob, thanks for your reply. As I stated in my post, I am running Quicken 2007 for Windows (on my Macbook Pro via Parallels), not Q2007 for Mac. Support for Q2007 for Windows WILL be discontinued in April. Since I need investment tracking, my only options are to upgrade to Q2010 for Windows or pay for a new copy of Q2007 for Mac. Either way, I end up shelling out AGAIN if I want to move to the new Quicken Essentials product once another "SKU" with investment tracking is released. Does this sound customer friendly to you? For all those in my situation (and I know there are many others), it would be nice if Intuit continued supporting Q2007 for Windows until a Mac product with basic investment tracking is released. As is, I will probably just abandon Quicken altogether when my copy of 2007 for Win loses downloading support. After waiting patiently for years, I refuse to upgrade now and then again once the new Mac product regains the critical missing features I need.
As far as iBank, the integrated browser method of downloading transactions does not appeal to me. I am currently able to update ALL my acconts in Q2007 for Win with one click. Why would I want to manually log into my bank’s website and download a file every time I want to update my ING accounts? This is a significant loss of convience. To be honest, I don’t really care if this is ING or iBank’s fault – it just does not work as it does in Quicken, so I cannot consider iBank as a viable alternative for my needs.
Thanks Rob for your time and research on this. I too have been waiting a long time for a Quicken for PC look alike for the Mac. I currently run my old PC JUST for Quicken. Would love to be able to ditch it, but I shall await your review when you get your first copy of the proper Quicken for Mac 2010. I did not like icash or Ibank, or personal accountz (which the apple shop recommended). Roll on Feb 25th.
@Simmias: My apologies, missed that it was Windows Quicken you were running, I’m so focused on Mac Quicken when I see "Quicken 2007" I just jump to that conclusion (that should be a game). Anyhow, I understand the frustration, but in the eyes of Intuit you’re a Windows customer. It’s not unreasonable for Intuit to upgrade the Windows product and discontinue support for the old product. It won’t stop working, they just won’t assist with issues, and trust me, like in Quicken 2007 for Mac, you’ll eventually have issues. I really can’t see Inuit extending support for a Windows product, because there isn’t a feature-compatible product for Mac. My suggestion would be to continue operating under Parallels, upgrade to the Windows 2010 product, and be content. You’ll have all the features you currently have access to, plus some, and can rest assured that your accounts and transactions will be safe.
Moving from Windows Quicken to Macintosh is non-trivial. I’ve done it.
In fact, moving from Quicken 2007 for Mac, to either Quicken Essentials 2010 -or- iBank is non-trivial. I spent all weekend doing it (on and off). Neither product moved all of my accounts and transactions without issue (I have over 20,000 transactions and 75 different accounts, including 3 Brokerage accounts). It’s not pretty. I’m still not stable on either product. I’m doing this for my reviews of both products. iBank this week and Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac next week.
Stay tuned.
Did you happen to ask them why they felt justified in charging $10 more for mac essentials than their feature-rich windows counterpart during your meeting? And how they felt the mac user community would view/react to that?
Rob, what you’re doing is extremely helpful, thank you. I just spent a little time looking at iBank and I could find no equivalent to the "class" in Quicken, which is a deal-killer for me, unless you discover something equivalent. It sounds like the "tags" in the new Quicken will serve that function with increased flexibility; I wonder if the new Quicken will retain the old Quicken’s "classes" as well, and import them properly, or not. I’m very much looking forward to your in-depth review of both the new Quicken and iBank later this month. Thank you again.
@Trevor: Classes in Quicken Essentials are gone. They were merged into Tags. While you’re correct that iBank does not currently support either "Classes" or Tags. It does have the ability to build Criteria Driven Smart Accounts. Essentially, you can put your "Tags" or "Classes" on the transactions in the Memo field, then build a Smart Account based on those Tags. It’s a little awkward, but it does work. You can read more about it on pages 53 and 164 of the iBank user manual. You can also automate the creation of those memos using Smart Import Rules and Scheduled Transactions. See the manual. Not perfect, but workable.
As to your question about importing of Classes and converting them to Tags, I cannot speak to it. My 20,000+ transactions don’t utilize any Classes, so I don’t have an easy way to test the conversion. I could put some Classes on a few transactions and just see what happens. Watch for my article next week and I’ll see if I can add that as a topic to the review.
@Bryan: That topic was artfully dodged. Ultimately, all companies will charge whatever they believe they can get for a product. Whether you agree with the final product, Intuit certainly has invested an enormous amount of money in the development of this product, not including the fact that they scrapped a lot of the Quicken Financial Life code and started again with Quicken Essentials. I’m sure a lot of the core code is the same, but as a programmer I can tell you it’s also not the same application.
I think Intuit is being very straightforward with their product this time around. They’re providing a quality product (missing features we’d all like to see) and they’re not making apologies for it. They’re being up front with what it can and cannot do and asking the consumer to make an informed decision about it. They’re actively engaging the user community on the issues and they’re not trying to deceive or mislead anyone. That’s more than I can say for a lot of other software publishers who post lists of features and conveniently leave off the ones you care about allowing you to draw your own conclusions of whether or not they’re actually in the product. For that I have to applaud Intuit on their transparency (whether I like the results or not) with this product.
Rob, thanks so much for the detailed response, glad to know about the possibility with iBank of using memos and Smart Accounts, I’ll look into it. And thanks so much for offering to include a mention of classes, their importation, and analogous functions in the forthcoming review, I’d be extremely interested if it’s possible to include. As a sole proprietor, I’ve been using classes extensively to assign a variety of different business expenses, which I have to keep in certain categories for tax purposes, to different clients/projects.
@Trevor: My pleasure. Based on your usage, I think both Quicken Essential’s Tags and iBanks Smart Accounts may do the trick for you.
Finally a few answers on the basic questions. If someone at Intuit would realize what a release date is, a lot of the "bad customer service" or
"they do not care about Mac users" would not be what you read about.
I for one, will not believe anything until it is actually in my hands. This "release" has been promised too many times to be believed anymore.
The fact that they encourage you to pre-order the software, and then make it available to you last is just another example of what Intuit thinks of anyone who might even consider being a loyal customer. Whoever dreamed up this release schedule should be shown the door.
Time will tell, but I believe Intuit has firmly established how it feels about Mac customers. 2nd rate, and not worthy of thier consideration, time or investment. I hope they prove me wrong.
Rob, thanks for all of your time and effort on behalf off all of us.
I’ve been waiting to switch from Q2009 windows via WMware to Quicken Mac. It looks like I can ditch VMware, but I’ll have to give up a lot of features. I think NOT!!! Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t consider using Quicken Bill Pay through Quicken, pushing data into Turbo Tax and tracking investments advanced (or bloated) features. In fact, they are features I would expect to find in a $60 program from Intuit. So, I’ll keep looking because I’m determined to get this VMware off my precious iMac.
I know there are a lot of disappointed Mac users out there. Surely there is a smart company that will remedy the situation.
Rob, thanks so much for all your work here. I’m one of those stranded MS Money users trying to figure out where to point myself. I tired Mint, Yodlee, several other "cloud" solutions, and was hoping Quicken Essentials for the Mac would be the answer to my needs. Alas, none of them support direct bill pay (which I think is really really basic need) or detailed tracking of brokerage transactions. Jeez, am I crazy, or isn’t this stuff important to most people who have multiple accounts? What am I missing here.
So, realizing there wasn’t going to be a native Mac solution anytime soon, I downloaded the trial version of Quicken 2010 and set about converting my money file. The good news is that the conversion went pretty well and I was amazed how it just sucked in my data and created all the right accounts, categories and transactions. Sure, there were some hacks, but it went fine. Then I started to try to actually use Quicken 2010. Now I’m as good a Microsoft basher as anyone, but I gotta say, Money just has it all over Quicken 2010 in terms of user interface and usability. In comparison to Money, Quicken looks and acts positively stone age. Then I discovered some really disappoint hacks. If you download transactions from your bank, then delete them accidentally and do another download, the transactions don’t come down again. I mean WTF? And for one account it only downloaded the last 9 months of transactions so I thought I’d just import the previous stuff from a QIF file. Think again – no QIF import – WFT again? So, I’ve decided to run Money and Quicken in parallel the next 3 months and see how it goes.
This relates to this blog how? Well, I’m glad to see that the new guy plans to start from scratch and build something new that works seamlessly across all platforms. Hopefully when they implement this, they’ll hire a user interface designer that didn’t come from the DOS world.
David
To say features are missing from Quicken Essentials for Mac is a gross understatement. Received the program yesterday and I am returning it today. I was aware of most of its limitations up front (through way of Intuit’s web site and other articles) but I was not aware that you can no longer write or print checks with the program. What were they thinking?
Basically the program is a glorified check register that allows you to download your accounts in one step. Pretty much worthless!
@Jeff S: Yes, Check Writing is gone. I mentioned this in my review of iBank under "The Good". It’s unfortunate, but even though Intuit states that "fewer than X% of users used Y feature", it seems that everyone used at least one of the features that they’ve removed. It should have been looked at in aggregate and perhaps those features wouldn’t have been eliminated.
Wow – talk about brain-dead product management. Let’s hope this new guy brings some actual thought to the process of what collection of features the new suite really needs. But I have my doubts since Mint (where he came from) doesn’t support bill pay.
Thanks for your great blog. I’ve read lots of stuff about current Quicken developments, and I’m hoping that things will develop in a positive manner. You know, I’ve gotten more answers to unanswered questions from your blog and from TUAW.com’s interview with Aaron Patzer than anything Intuit has put out out through normal channels! Intuit’s customer relations and publicity people are doing an appalling job of conveying vital information that at this point every Mac Quicken user wants to have.
Aaron Patzer seems like something of a force of nature, and I’m hoping that he will galvanize his Quicken developers to develop feature parity ASAP. It seems like he felt an urgent need to get a product out that, for what it does, it does well. Then we know at least some quality software if possible from these people! If he hadn’t put out a product, then Intuit’s credibility would lessen so badly that by the time a full-featured product came out, there wouldn’t be any customers left. So maybe many of the "20%" might abandon Quicken, but at least the 80% would have something they are happy with. My impression from the Patzer interview is that his staff is going flat out to catch up and eventually release a full-featured product.
I am proceeding on this assumption. I’m going to try out QEM, running it in parallel with Quicken 2007 — which I will continue to use because I want to track stock transactions. It would be nice to be able to export a QIF file of only the investments and import that into the future full-featured Quicken, but it appears QIF is not supported. But because I only have a couple of years’ worth of investments to track, I am considering entering them manually when the Deluxe version is released. (The fact that my Quicken 2007 windows do not remember their size, and that exporting to QIF and importing into a clean and empty Quicken data file results in errors and skewed balances is the other reason I want to get into Essentials. It’s a bit of an insurance policy in case my Quicken 2007 data file gets REALLY seriously damaged…)
IF Patzer follows through, then in the end we’ll all be happy. I’m hoping for and looking forward to that day.
Not sure who here has seen the review today, but Walter Mossberg of Wall Street Journal pretty much panned QEM. The title of his review is "Mac Quicken Gets Deductions for Iffy Upgrade" The article is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240004575085681830533518.html