As I mentioned in my last article, iBank - Your Quicken Alternative, I've entered my last transaction into Quicken 2007 for Mac. I haven't deleted it off of my system yet, but I will shortly. This is my review of Quicken Essentials for Mac (QEM as as my fellow bloggers seem to have dubbed it, I don't think that rolls of the tongue, so I'll just use Quicken Essentials). This article will be the culmination of my adventure into Macintosh personal finance software. I didn't set out to be a spokesperson for the legacy Quicken for Mac users, but it seems to have worked out that way, at least a little, and I'm awed at the passion people have for this space and the wonderful comments everyone has left on my blog. Thank you.

When I setup this site, it was to communicate a security flaw I discovered in the Pogoplug home NAS device. I was upset, disgruntled, and needed an outlet. As soon as I published that article, I happened to get my Quicken Essentials pre-order email from Inuit. I immediately became livid at what I perceived to be a complete and total betrayal of the loyalty, patience, and trust I had provided to Intuit. Not only was the new product missing key features, that were present in my 4 year-old version of Quicken, but there was no upgrade pricing, and only a moderate discount for pre-ordering ($10). That prompted me to write my second ever blog post, Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac. Why Bother? The rest was history and led me to talking with multiple people at Intuit, including a discussion with Aaron Patzer, VP/GM of Personal Finance at Intuit, and having discussions with folks at IGG Software, the developers of iBank.

I hope that after you've read this review, you can truly make an informed decision on your next Personal Finance software purchase for the Macintosh. It's not an easy place to be right now if you rely on this type of software. No matter what you choose, you're going to be faced with data conversions, data irregularities, new interfaces, different problems from the ones you've already discovered work-arounds for, and learning curves. Hopefully I've helped you along that path.

Installation

Once you've acquired your Quicken Essentials disk image (or CD-ROM) and opened it, you'll find three items of importance: Quicken Essentials, the Getting Started guide, and the Converting? folder. If you are new to Personal Finance software you can just drag the Quicken Essentials program icon into the provided Applications folder link (hint, hint, iBank) and it will copy itself into the Applications folder on your hard drive. The Getting Started guide, a PDF, is well worth the time it takes to read through, it is very well written, thorough, and gives you a great starting point for Quicken Essentials. I highly recommend both new and old Quicken users read it.

Yay! Intel native! Boo, not 64-bit. I know, I'm never happy. Bye bye Rosetta.

Initial Configuration

The Demo

Alas Intuit does not provide demos of its products. It would be great if existing Quicken for Mac users could pull this version down and try it out. I know the Beta tests were, for the most part, open and lots of people got to use it, but this is the finished, polished, product. A timed demo or even transactional limit demo (like iBank) would probably waylay the concerns of many existing Quicken customers as they moved to this product. It would have also given folks a chance to test out the data conversion and see what, if any, issues they'd have when moving, before they purchased. Unfortunately, most "mainstream" software does not provide a demo period, so I'm not going to fault them for it.

Quicken File Exchange Utility

Yea, you actually have to do some work BEFORE you can import your data into Quicken Essentials. You'll have to convert your existing data file into something more modern that Quicken Essentials can read. You didn't expect Intuit to natively support a four year-old application data format did you? What I don't understand though is why not do this from within Quicken Essentials? I really don't get the thought process behind this. As a programmer, I can certainly respect that this is a one-time action you're going to perform on your data, so why bloat the application with all the code necessary to perform those conversions? Well, because it's not necessarily a one-time thing, that's why. The issue here is that if you misplace, damage, or lose your original installation media, then you've lost the Utility and cannot convert older Quicken files to the new format anymore and hence cannot import them into Quicken Essentials. This could have been handled better. Worst case, keep this application separate, but bundle it inside the main application and have it launched from within Quicken Essentials itself. This is clunky. I don't like it.

Regardless of its clunkiness, you should back up your Quicken Data file. I'm going to say it again, BACK UP YOUR ORIGINAL QUICKEN DATA FILE. The easiest way is to highlight it, press CMD-D to make a copy, and then perform all of the conversion operations on the copy. After you've got a backup, run the Quicken File Exchange Utility that is found in the Converting? folder on your installation media.

Yep Intuit told you to make a copy too, I was just prepping you. Tap the Continue button and the utility will ask you to find your Quicken Data file. Go ahead and Open the COPY that you created above. This process is quick, took about 2 minutes on my 13MB Quicken Data file. When it's complete, you can delete the copy you made of your original data file. You'll now have a new file in the same directory as your Quicken Data file, but this one will have "export.qdfx" appended to its name. This is your new-fangled Quicken Essentials format data file, which you can now import into Quicken.

Using Quicken Essentials

Initial Launch

You can finally fire up the Quicken Essentials application. You've converted your data to a more modern format and now you won't have to bounce in and out of Quicken to get your data imported.

Main Screen

I've got to hand it to Intuit here, its pretty. This is nothing like Quicken Financial Life's Beta Screens. That's a clean initial screen, looks very Mac-like, and the colors there draw you in and make you want to jump in with both feet and start using it (I want a chart like that!). You have Overviews, Transactions, Scheduled Transactions, Downloads, Summaries, and Spending Cloud reports. What else could you possibly want? Oh yea, your Accounts. So, pull yourself away from clicking all the buttons, reports, and immediately exploring the new application. Let's get your Accounts loaded up.

Migrating Data

This is where the rubber meets the road. We've been promised by Intuit, and Aaron Patzer, that this is one of the areas that Quicken Essentials will shine. This is where you experience "The Mother of All Converters". This bad boy is supposed to take any legacy Quicken data file, and other application data files, and perform magic on it, importing all of your supported (yes, I said supported, not all) data into your new Quicken Essentials application. So let's get started.

At this point, it's important to note what's not going to import, you're not going to be pleased, from the Converting Your Data file included in the Converting? folder, these items will not be imported:

• Transactions in your Investment accounts
• Custom Reports
• Passwords to any online accounts you've setup
• Business data, rental property data, budget data, spending plan data, debt reduction data, emergency tax records data, tax planner data, home inventory manager data (These aren't Essential)

If you haven't already stopped reading at this point, then it's time to move forward and perform the import. Head to the File menu and select the Import menu item. Again, seriously Intuit, this process couldn't have included converting the Mac file to the proper format first? I mean there is a Convert menu with a Quicken Mac File... submenu, but it apparently doesn't do anything, as the instructions ignore it, and if you try to use it, all your Quicken Data files on the disk (both old and new) will be grayed out, not sure why this menu is there. Okay, go find your modern Quicken Data file that you created above, and Open it. Now go to bed. Or go to a movie. Have a date night. I'm serious. This process takes eons. I thought the iBank import process took a long time, it's NOTHING compared to the time Quicken Essentials takes to import your data. The battery on my MacBook Pro died, this is the one with the 8-hour battery (okay I'm joking here). My data file took 28 minutes to completely import. That's three times the length it took iBank to import the same file. However, the best thing about the conversion process, if you're patient enough to watch it, is that there is extremely good feedback on what it's doing, what account is being imported, and you'll immediately start seeing the on-screen charts updating as transactions are brought "live" into the application. You'll even see what appears to be EVERY transaction flying into the new Quicken. It was entertaining. Something else that Intuit does for the import process, that I wish iBank had done, was provide an extremely detailed log of the entire process. You can see everything it did, and that file will be placed on your Desktop. If you have questions about the import process for your accounts, check this file first.

After the import process completes you can toss the previously converted data file (the one you just imported). When my import process completed, Quicken Essentials had imported all 75 of my accounts, including the two that iBank skipped because there weren't any transactions in them. When I was done verifying my accounts and account balances between Quicken 2007 for Mac and Quicken Essentials, there was only one account that did not have a correct balance. A checking account of mine, which after investigating had 3 different problems:

• An ATM Withdrawal, which I had built as a Split since it had a Bank Charge, was missing the Bank Charge
• A payment of $80 was duplicated, but Quicken had put a note both of them: Imported Orphan Transaction - So be sure to check for that phrase in the Memos when importing (see below)
• One entire transaction had been skipped

After correcting these items, the account balanced again. This was a much better result than iBank had delivered on my data. But that better performance comes at a price.

My eight Brokerage accounts came across without any transactions and as having a zero balance. If I want to see how much money I had/have in these accounts, I have to set them up for online access. Just one problem with that, 5 of those accounts were closed, so all that history is gone. Was I using that history? Not really, but it still stings to lose it all. Additionally, something I wasn't expecting happened. Both of my active 401-K accounts were wiped of history as none of the transactions came across. I use these accounts to track my contributions to my 401-K (and my wife's), using a Split transaction on our Paychecks that puts money into those accounts. This probably isn't the traditional way people used the 401-K account type in Quicken for Mac, but it's how I was using it, and it worked. What is really throwing me is that I can use the 401-K account I have setup as the destination of a transfer, but it doesn't show up in the account, it seems to just disappear. Very disconcerting.

Other items of note on the import process:

• Your custom categories will be created, provided they don't match one that exists (but then why create it?)
• Your scheduled transactions will be pulled over, good time to review them to make sure they're all still valid
• Any Classes you have will be converted to Tags, and the transactions will be assigned those Tags following the Import - this is good news because the old way of using "/" to denote a Class was awkward and caused import issues elsewhere (like on iBank)
• Any errors in the import process *should* be logged in the Import Log that's created on your Desktop, after checking my log I found the following note (see above): "1 transfer transactions in the account 'AT&T Universal' have been marked with the note '[IMPORTED ORPHAN TRANSFER]' because they could not be matched. These transactions may appear twice in the imported data." I also found another note: "Data Validation Error - The amount specified for the transaction is not equal to the sum of the amounts specified for the detail lines." I think that was my missing transaction, because when I reviewed it, there was an amount that hadn't been assigned any kind of Category and required me to enter it manually.

Conclusion: Quicken Essential's "Mother of All Converters" delivered. Everything came across, that was supposed to, and the errors for those accounts were minimal. All of the errors I experienced were logged in the Import Log, which is the good news. The bad news was that Intuit should have provided a Transaction Date for the items logged in the Import Log, that would have made it MUCH easier to locate and correct following the import.

Quicken Essentials Features

The Overview

This is a Macintosh application.

There's no doubt about it. It just feels like the application was written by Apple and that says a lot for the effort that Intuit put into this application. Everything lines up on the left, the different view panes are adjustable, and you perform various filtering capabilities at the top of each window. Additionally, the interface is responsive. I didn't see a beach ball the entire time I was moving around the application.

The Register

In a departure for Quicken, the familiar two-row transaction is gone.

All transactions are presented in a single line (more below). As an improvement over previous Quicken for Mac products, the columns are completely adjustable. Don't like the Notes column at the end, just drag it to where you want it to be (I moved mine next to Category). However, these settings appear to be per account, so you have to keep doing it on every Register. There are many, many, columns you can add to the Register view, just right-click on a blank column and select the data elements you'd like to see (or you'd like to remove) from view.

One gripe I have with entering transactions in the register is choosing Categories. I got very used to using Quicken for Mac with a keyboard and typing out the first few characters of my Category, Quicken 2007 for Mac would autofill these for me while I was typing (so does Quicken Essentials), but where this application is different is sub-categories. Quicken 2007 for Mac would let me hit a colon (:) at anytime during entry, and it would autofill what it recognized and then immediately start autofilling the sub-category. Quicken Essentials doesn't understand this mode of operation, puts the colon into the Category field, which immediately unmatches your category. It's annoying. However, there is a new Category picker (which for some reason is called a Register List Picker) that is on by default (and can be disabled from the View menu).

Overall, Quicken Essentials does a nice job with the Register. It has a similar feel to the Quicken 2007 for Mac Register, with some very welcome improvements. The small learning curves getting used to the new features are just those, learning curves, after a few transactions have been entered, you'll like the overall interface.

Adding Transactions

This is where you're going to spend the bulk of your time with Quicken, adding Transactions. You'll either be typing them in manually or using the Online features to have Quicken download and insert them. The manual entering of transactions has been changed from what you're probably used to, which has both good and bad points. Like in iBank, our familiar empty transaction is gone, you now have to click the New Transaction button, or use CMD-N. This isn't as convenient as just having a blank transaction you fill out, but it works fine. I also noted that the entering of transactions isn't as crisp as it was in Quicken 2007 for Mac, there are delays, especially noticable with the date picker, which I never use, but which pops up all the time, but these delays are very tolerable and shouldn't detract from using Quicken.

I spent about an hour and entered around 50+ transactions into various accounts. It worked well, other than the slight delay I experienced while moving between fields. I entered a transaction into the wrong account, and went to find my Move Transaction menu item, it was gone, which sucked. However, I then had a stroke of insight and tried the "Mac Thing" to do, just pick it up and drag it to the right account. Guess what? It worked exactly like it should! Now that's a Mac app!

Transaction entry works at least as well as it did under Quicken 2007 for Mac, the biggest issue I have is that Intuit changed how Transfers work (actually creating a Transfer action) which means you don't use Categories that represent your accounts any longer, that means on those transfers, the Category is blank, and I found I constantly added Categories to the Transfer, which is inaccurate now. It'll take some time to retrain myself.

Online Access

This is the other way you'll be entering transactions into Quicken Essentials. Since my brokerage accounts all had zero balances, I decided to try setting them up first, to get a feel for this aspect of Quicken. I successfully setup E*Trade and Merrill Lynch accounts without incident. However, ING Direct cannot be setup, you must download the transactions and import them manually into Quicken, iBank had the same issue. I've read this as a complaint of iBank, but it appears the issue is ING Direct, as both applications have the same issue. Shame on ING.

I then setup several of my other accounts for online access, this process included setting up accounts that I've never had online access to before, like PayPal. The process worked well, but wasn't perfect. For example, when setting up my USAA Checking account, it wouldn't take my information, claiming it wasn't correct. I verified it by accessing the USAA website directly, Intuit kindly provided me a direct link to the website and asked me to verify my information. I'm convinced that the issue was the symbol characters I use in my passwords (I make use of them frequently). If that's the case, it's a bug, as Quicken needs to support whatever characters my online access supports.

I'm a HUGE fan of 1Password on the Macintosh (if you haven't tried it out, you need to, it will probably be my next software review) and all of my online accounts use extremely strong passwords, that are all different from each other, hence the heavy reliance on symbol characters.

After changing my password at USAA to something less secure than it was, I was able to access my account, proving this is a bug in Quicken Essentials, which needs to be addressed by Intuit. Additionally, I found some of the accounts that are listed in the Financial Institutions list, really aren't available. Just like in iBank, you'll have to manually download a file from the Financial Institution and then import it into Quicken. ING Direct, as mentioned above, was one of these.

I'm pleased with the Online Access. Based on experience with Mint.com I was expecting Quicken Essentials to shine in this area, and it does, supporting a truly huge number of Financial Institutions. You can one-click update all of your online accounts, or do them individually. The only shortcoming (besides the bug I found) is that you cannot setup a schedule. It would be really great if you could set it up to automatically update every time you opened Quicken, every time you closed it, or in some type of a background process that could be scheduled outside of the application. However, one-click updating is probably sufficient for most people, including me.

Categories

This is another strong area for Quicken Essentials and one of the primary reasons we take the time to use personal finance software. Categories are essentially unchanged in this version, with the Register List Picker being the only new item. All of your custom categories will be imported into Quicken during your data import process. This is a great time to clean up those categories, I've had several misspelled or duplicate categories for a long time. I spent a bit of time going through them all and renaming the bad ones to existing ones. Quicken Essentials will prompt you that a category already exists by that name and ask if you'd like to merge them. That rocked.

Tags

Intuit has taken the previous concept of Classes and Web 2.0ized them into Tags. Why do you care? Because Tags rule! Seriously though, through the use of Tags you can essentially create a bunch of "sub-categories" for your transactions. When you eat out, you probably always categorize them as Dining. But what if that dinner was with a client? Isn't that tax deductible? But all your Dining isn't, right? So you use a Tag: Business Expense. Now you can run a report on all transactions marked "Business Expense". These can include transactions from a bunch of Categories. I never used Classes under Quicken 2007 for Mac, I never really understood what they were for! They were always Tags. I'm loving them! Pulling them out of the Category means your data will export and import more efficiently to other applications.

Synch Devices

This is the single biggest weakness for Quicken Essentials, for me. I so miss using PocketQuicken. I was thrilled with iBank's iPhone (iTunes Link) application and really wish Intuit would also put out a Quicken iPhone application. Yea, they have a free Quicken Online iPhone application (iTunes Link), but it won't link to your data in Quicken Essentials at this time. Perhaps, if Aaron Patzer gets his wish, you'll be able to link your Quicken Essentials data to a Quicken Online account and then use this application to make changes and updates to it. Maybe not. I hope they do.

Reporting

Why do you spend all your time Categorizing transactions? Adding Tags to transactions? So you can write and view reports of course! This, also, is an area where Quicken Essentials should shine.

Quicken comes with 4 standard reports:

• Spending Cloud: This one is cool, as it shows you your categories, based on spend levels, in different sizes
• Category Summary: Standard Category Summary report
• This Month: Income and Expense report, by Account, Month to Date
• Last Month: Income and Expense report, by Account, Last Month

It took me a bit to figure out how to create custom reports. The Help System doesn't even have a match on the word "Report". If you look carefully in the upper-right corner of either the Spending Cloud or the Category Summary report, you'll find a small Settings button.

That button will bring up the above screen (if you clicked the Category Summary report). Here you can customize the settings of that report, then save your customizations as a new report that will show up under the Reports section in the sidebar. I wish I could tell you I was impressed, I wasn't. This area of Quicken Essentials needs a LOT of work. You really cannot setup anywhere near the reporting environment that Quicken 2007 for Mac provided. The reports here are pretty, but they're redundant, they're all Category summaries, just different ways of looking at them. Something I used *constantly* under Quicken 2007 for Mac was searching ALL of my Registers for a specific transaction, usually based on Memo fields. I'm still looking for how to do this in Quicken Essentials, I can't find it. This is probably the single largest failing of Quicken Essentials in my opinion.

Didn't Try Features

Here are what I believe to be noteworthy features in Quicken Essentials, that I didn't fully explore:

• Backup to MobileMe (or Disk) - This is the same feature that Quicken 2007 for Mac has, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to work, as it constantly timed out copying the data file to MobileMe. Also, there's no where to set it up to backup on a schedule like you can do with Quicken 2007 for Mac
• Mass Update - Quicken Essentials lets you select multiple transactions, then make changes to all of them, at once
• Budgets - A rudimentary budgeting capability is available in Quicken Essentials, it will automatically analyze the last 3 months of transactions and give you a budget on your main Categories, you can tweak it a bit, but it's not extensive

Additional Missing Features

It's like a broken record, but I found additional items that no longer exist, not including the ones listed at the top of the article (you can basically tell that if it wouldn't import something, it's not going to work anymore):

• No password protection of data file
• No entering of transactions into iCal
• No Emergency Records Organizer
• No Planning Calculators...well, no calculators at all

The Good

Quicken Essentials has a lot going for it.

Here are all of my pros for Quicken:

• Outstanding data import with the "Mother of all Converters"
• Stellar user interface
• Great performance
• Huge array of supported online institutions
• Tags

The Bad

Quicken Essentials has taken a beating from all over the blog-o-sphere and the Internet, especially from the Quicken User Community. That beating is deserved, but I'm not going to cover those specific issues. Putting everything that Quicken Essentials doesn't support aside, here are the issues I have with the application as presented:

• Terrible reporting support
• No mobile application
• Bug with online account password (though this should get fixed)

The Recommendation

As I was writing my two review articles, I stopped entering any transactions into Quicken 2007 for Mac. I was serious when I wrote that I had entered my last transaction into that application. Because of my hiatus, I had accumulated a backlog of transactions to enter into...something. As my wife will attest, going several weeks without entering transactions...somewhere, is a long time for me. I even worked out a system where she can take a photo of a receipt, drop it in our Dropbox, and then it will automatically import into Yojimbo so I know to enter it into...something. I resisted entering all of those transactions into iBank, because if I ended up going with Quicken Essentials, I didn't want to duplicate that work. I entered enough into iBank during the review to get a feel for how well it worked, but I never entered the full backlog. Then while working with Quicken Essentials I found myself entering not only the transactions I needed to enter for the review, but my entire backlog.

Here's the thing about Quicken Essentials: it just feels familiar. I've been entering transactions into Quicken for over a decade. It just feels right to be putting them into Quicken. I really enjoyed using iBank, but it never gave me that same sense of familiarity. Also, it was slow. But, ultimately, it was this issue of doing what I've always done: enter the transactions into Quicken.

Here's my honest recommendation concerning iBank: if you are a current user of Quicken 2007 for Mac AND any of the following features are CRITICAL to your use of a personal finance application:

• Tracking of Buys and Sells in your Investment Accounts
• Exporting your data into TurboTax
• An iPhone application to synch data to and enter transactions from
• Check printing

Then you need to purchase iBank.

At this point, you need to be very honest with yourself. You need to take a hard look at how you're using Quicken 2007 for Mac. What are the things you're doing every day? What can you live without? I'm upset that Intuit released a product for Macintosh users that didn't provide, at a minimum, the same features that were present in the previous version. However, it's very, very usable. In fact, it's good. The software is far from perfect, but I believe throughout this article I've pointed out the failings I've found. Some will be fixed in future updates, I'm sure. Others will take new versions to correct, and Aaron Patzer mentioned "additional SKUs". Yes, that probably means "Deluxe" and "Premier" and "Home and Business" versions for additional fees, but that's how software publishing works.

If any of the above features are NOT CRITICAL to your use of a Personal Finance application:

Then you need to purchase Quicken Essentials.

I wish I could have given a straightforward recommendation, but it's a complex set of criteria when recommending a software application with such a wide variety of features and needs. I'm personally going to be using Quicken Essentials; though if iBank performed better I may have gone the other way, for me, the speed issues made it a clear decision.

I want to take a moment to congratulate Intuit. As I did my review of Quicken Essentials, everywhere I looked, Intuit was telling us what Quicken Essentials didn't include. It's in all of the documentation, it's on their website, it's in the instructions for importing data, Aaron Patzer mentioned them to me on the phone, and their PR people even took time to point them out to me, rather than pointing out features. That's an amazingly transparent way to handle this type of transition and I wanted to personally applaud Intuit for taking this stance with Quicken Essentials. They could have opted to hide or downplay these issues, but they chose to embrace them. They deserve credit for that, if nothing else.

Note: During the writing of this review, Intuit released a Quicken Essentials for Mac upgrade. The current version is now 1.1f4438, the patch contained multiple bug fixes, though my bug was not fixed.

Other Coverage

Walt Mossberg did a review of Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac on the All Things Digital: It was pretty high level. He didn't seem fond of it.

TUAW has also done a review of Quicken Essentials for Mac and they also interviewed Aaron Patzer at Intuit. Both are worthy of a read.

Update #1: 20100302

Someone posted in the comments, and I have confirmed, a serious issue. I'm pretty big on security and I took the time to point out that Quicken Essentials would not allow you to password protect your data file. Well, there's another, pretty big, security issue with the application that I felt I should point out to my readers. Quicken Essentials DOES NOT STORE PASSWORDS LOCALLY. This is just about a deal-breaker for me. In order to use any of the online account features, you must enter your username and password. No problem if you're using Quicken 2007 for Mac, which had something called a "PIN Vault". Under that application, your usernames and passwords were stored locally and protected by a PIN that would allow you to just remember it. However, Quicken Essentials takes it a step further, a step too far in my opinion. Your usernames and passwords are stored on the Quicken Online servers and accessed whenever you update your online accounts. Worse, you don't have an alternative to storing them on their servers. Quicken Essentials does not provide the ability to force the application to prompt you for them, it's all or nothing.

I don't trust storing my passwords in my browsers, I use 1Password for that, I certainly don't trust storing every online financial system username and password I have online with a company FOR WHOM I HAVE NO TERMS OF SERVICE OR PRIVACY POLICY. That's right Quicken Online can do whatever they want with your private security information, they've made no agreements with you, whatsoever. They tell you, "Your sign-in information is encrypted and stored on our firewall-protected servers". Really? Seriously? Encrypted? And who provided the encryption key? I wasn't prompted for one. So that means Intuit has the encryption key, they can freely decrypt them and read them. It would have been child's play to prompt for an encryption key, then prompt for it every time the transactions are updated, giving Intuit access to decrypt passwords and use them to update the accounts. It's very sad they chose not to do this, because it makes the entire process suspect.

My suggestion: If you trust storing your website usernames and passwords in your browsers, then this method Intuit has chosen to use is probably just as secure. If however, like me, you do not, then you should write-off all of Quicken Essential's online access capabilities, as they are completely and totally worthless.

I've entered my last transaction into Quicken 2007 for Mac. I'm tired of the interface, it's the last PowerPC application I have on my Macintosh (I want to uninstall Rosetta), and it's clear to me that while no alternative solution is perfect, I have to move forward. The two leading candidates for me to move to are Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac and iBank. This will be my review of iBank. Both products will be reviewed from the perspective of a Quicken 2007 for Mac user, so bear that in mind as you read them. The Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac review will be published after the February 25th launch of Quicken Essentials, at Intuit's request.

Writing software reviews is hard work. It's terribly time consuming and once you're finished you have inevitably missed discussing things that are important to many people and covered in detail things that few people care about. At least that's how it feels. To that end, I'm very happy to answer questions, either publicly in the comments, or directly via the Contact Me form on my site. I'll endeavor to provide a broad review of both products, be fair and objective in my delivery but, ultimately, I'm going to pick one and use it and that will be the product I stand behind personally.

At the end of this article (and probably also the Quicken Essentials article), I will present a list of further alternatives to Quicken 2007 for Mac. These have been provided to me through personal communications as well as posted in comments here and on the Quicken Inner Circle forums. I won't be reviewing any other Personal Finance products for the Mac at this time. I have lots of other topics I wish to write about and share so I'm going to move past this space after delivering my Quicken Essentials article. I hope you keep reading with me. And now...iBank - Your Quicken Alternative:

Installation

You can download iBank from the IGG Software website. iBank installs like any other Macintosh program. I always like developers who provide a link to your Applications folder, so that after mounting the disk image you don't have to go searching for it to drag and drop the Application there. iBank doesn't, but it isn't that big of a deal. Included on the disk image is the application, iBank itself, a sample data file, a Read Me, and a shortcut to download the iBank widgets for Macintosh. The link to the widgets will download a second disk image that includes the iBank Transactions widget and the iBank Budgets widget. After dragging and dropping the application into your Applications folder, fire it up!

Configuration

The Demo

Fortunately for those of you trying it out, iBank provides a full featured demo. You can setup as many accounts, play with all of the features, and check out every part of the application as thoroughly as you'd like. The demo will continue to operate until you've entered 75 transactions into iBank. Unfortunately, if you're importing data from another Personal Finance application, you'll most likely expire the demo immediately, I know I did. Thank goodness the folks at IGG Software helped me out so I could finish my review. Thanks guys! So, make sure you try out the application before doing any data imports, or else use an account from your source application that only has a few transactions so you can get a feel for the data import process.

Initial Launch

When you first launch iBank, you'll be greeted by the iBank Setup Assistant. This screen highlights some of the new features in iBank:

• Direct Downloads
• Stock Performance Graph
• Smart Portfolios
• Tax Support
• Check Your Stocks on the Road
• Standard Reports
• Interactive Graphs
• Category Images
• Sync with your iPhone
• Cover Flow for Transactions
• Loan Management
• More Drag and Drop

We'll go over many of these features throughout the review. The Setup screen will let you create a New datafile, Upgrade an existing data file, read the Quick Start Guide, get iBank Help, access the iBank User Forums, and access the IGG Website. Check the box in the lower left of the screen if you don't want this to pop-up every time.

Main Screen

The main screen of iBank is made up of 5 components:

• Toolbar: The toolbar should be quite familiar to you if you've used any Macintosh applications before. From here you'll add Accounts, Charts, Forecasts, and Budgets. You can also pull up your Budget Monitor, access the OSX Calculator, Get Quotes for your Portfolio, access your Account's website, Download transactions, and Sync Devices.
• Source list: Here you'll find all of your accounts, portfolios, charts, forecasts, categories, and assorted other information.
• Mini-graph: A very nice feature in iBank is that you can setup a mini-graph that is always being displayed.
• Transaction view: (Okay, yellow was a bad choice) The Transaction View should be familiar to you from Quicken. However, in iBank there are three views available and the default is called Thumbnail. The Thumbnail view shows a small picture for each of the transactions based on its category. This view also provides the advantage of providing more details about the transaction on one line. If you want a more traditional Quicken-like view, then head to the View menu and select List (or you can use the View control on the Toolbar).
• Transaction editor: This is just what it sounds like. You will be creating new transactions here (start by pressing the + button), or editing existing ones.

Migrating Data

If you're new to Personal Finance software, or you've decided to make a clean break when moving to iBank, then just skip this section. However, if you've been following my articles about Quicken Essentials, then this is where the Application is going to shine, or not. iBank shines here. iBank supports importing of data in QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), OFX (Open Financial Exchange, sometimes referred to as QFX as well), and CSV (Comma-Separated Value) formats. Additionally, you can connect iBank to your financial institution and download transactions directly. If your financial institution isn't directly supported, then you may still be able to use the built-in web browser to pull down a supported data file and then import it.

My Quicken Data file is 13MB in size, contains 75 accounts (only 15 are active, but keep reading), and is made up of over 20,000 transactions. I've been using Quicken for a LONG time. To prepare for this transition I initially thought I'd have to leave things behind. However, I found this video done by IGG Software on importing your Quicken data. It's well worth the 2 minutes it takes to view it.

Here's the main issue with exporting and re-importing all of your transactions. It's very complex. If you're anything like me, then you have Checking accounts which make payments to Credit Cards, Loans, Portfolios, Brokerages, 401-K accounts, IRAs, and other investments. Some of those transactions even utilize splits, in which case a single transaction in your Checking account may touch several other accounts. Now, if there is any issue in importing an account, or worse if the account isn't supported (hint, hint, Intuit), then a ripple effect starts happening. Those transactions may not get imported. They may get imported, but with parts of them missing categorization. The worst case is that they either fail to import entirely, or they import with a different amount. That tosses your entire account out of balance.

iBank imported my Quicken Data file, using the instructions in the video, in about 10 minutes. Patience is the word here, if you have a large data file, it's going to take a while to complete the import. Be patient. If you think the application has crashed, it hasn't, be patient. If the application beach balls, be patient. I'm not sure whether or not it was a good export because Quicken 2007 for Mac gave me a mysterious error when the progress bar was only about 20% completed. Additionally, the QIF file that was created by Quicken was only 2.3MB in size, when the original data file was 13MB. However, iBank imported 73 of my 75 accounts. The missing two accounts were a Credit Card account and a Brokerage account. I then spent some time going through each account and verifying the balances. I did this by opening up the Account Manager and checking off accounts to be hidden, if their balance matched what I had in Quicken. Unfortunately, it took 8 seconds for the check to appear on each account. After verifying the balances for each of the 73 accounts, I found 11 accounts that had incorrect balances following the import.

I decided I wanted to figure out why the two accounts didn't import. So, I opened them up under Quicken. Imagine my surprise when I found out that iBank was now batting 1000 (that's 100%) on account imports! The two accounts were both empty. Zero transactions. So, since there were no transactions, either Quicken had failed to export them, or iBank had skipped importing them. Hard to tell which, but it didn't matter.

Now that the account issues were solved, it was time to dig into the 11 accounts that had balances that weren't correct. I selected one of my Checking accounts that was off by $20. Start simple I always say. Unfortunately, this account had 3 years of transactional history. I checked the balance on the first day, it was right. I then skipped forward a year and checked on the 1st of the year. It was right too. Eventually I figured out which year the issue was in, I then repeated those steps by month until I found the month the issue occurred. Here's where the interesting stuff happens. On 8/20/1998, I had two ATM Withdrawals for $20.00. Those withdrawals had associated ATM Fees of $1.00. I put them both in as splits with $20.00 into my Wallet account, and $1.00 into Bank Charge (my category for all the money the bank charges me for having my money with them). However, in iBank there were 3 transactions. The two $21.00 withdrawals from my Checking account AND a single $20.00 withdrawal as well, without an associated $1.00 Bank Charge. It wasn't a split transaction. This is what I mean by complex. Little tiny things can throw accounts out of balance. In this case, the account was fixed. I just deleted the extra transaction. 10 more bad accounts to go. Now, I have to tell you, most users won't have these issues. Also, it's impossible to tell where the issue was, in Quicken's export? Or in iBank's import?

Whew! That was a long section, but I think it's important, because if you're moving a decade worth of transactions, you want to know if you'll be successful.

Conclusion: iBank did a fantastic job moving my accounts around. It also pulled in all of my custom categories and layered them on top of its default categories.

iBank Features

Adding Transactions

Adding transactions to your accounts is how you'll interface with iBank most often. In Quicken, this is an extremely straightforward process: there is always an "empty" transaction at the bottom of each Register, you fill it out, hit return. iBank isn't as straightforward, but it isn't bad. Transactions you enter are automatically "memorized" so that you do less typing the next time you enter the transaction, having to enter only a few characters, then the amount, and Return will save it. Another great aspect of iBank is the Mini-graph. It will automatically start updating based on the transactions you're entering, showing you how your spending is broken down amongst your categories. Unfortunately, it only updated based on transactions I entered after completing my import and didn't include transactions from the import itself. Over time this won't be an issue. Additionally, I found that you can hide the Transaction Editor from the View menu and just Toggle Transaction Editor. It gets rid of a control on the screen you're only going to need when editing or changing a transaction. An added benefit of doing this for Quicken users is that you'll end up with something very similar to your old Quicken method of transaction entry, but you still have to hit the + button to start a new transaction.

Categories

Quicken 2007 for Mac comes with a bunch of categories. You've probably then created many, many additional categories to, well, categorize your transactions. iBank also comes with many categories by default, and they all have colors:

I have to admit, at first I thought this was just eye candy. You open an account register and see all of your transactions are color coded by the category they've been assigned. When you're using the Thumbnail view, it's not bad. When you use the List view, it can get very overwhelming. However, after a while, and many, many adjustments of the colors, I found I started to like this aspect of iBank. I changed my Salary categories to be dark green, that's money into my account. I then worked on making my budget busters (Dining, Auto, Travel) into colors that stood out in the Transaction view so I can quickly see how often we're putting money into those areas. Unfortunately, if most of your categories were not already present in iBank, then you'll have to manually assign them appropriate colors, as all imported categories have no color by default.

Online Access

At the time of writing this article, iBank supported over 450 different online financial institutions. For my active accounts all but my local credit union was supported, while National City Bank, E*Trade, PNC Bank, Fifth Third Bank, American Express, Citibank, Discover, and Merrill Lynch were all supported. However, 450 institutions isn't many, so if online access is important to you, check out their list of supported institutions first.

I setup a couple of accounts to be downloaded and it worked as expected.

Synch Devices

This is a feature that isn't unique to iBank, but is certainly unique when comparing it to Quicken. I used to use PocketQuicken on the Palm PDA and Windows Mobile platforms. I loved it and one of the features I lost when moving to the iPhone was being able to check balances and, most importantly, create transactions. iBank allows you to synch your accounts, transactions, and balances in three ways: via Bonjour over WiFi, MobileMe, and with a WebDAV Server. I chose to sync my iBank via MobileMe, since I didn't want to have to rely on having WiFi access. MobileMe is just a WebDAV server, so if you don't subscribe, you may be able to setup your own WebDAV server to do the synchronization, or else just stick with Bonjour.

While this isn't a review of the iBank for iPhone app (iTunes Link). I loved what I saw and spent about 20 minutes playing with it, adding transactions, synching them back into my iBank Desktop, and doing some local charting. It's a great addition to a great product and provides something that the other Personal Finance applications are lacking.

Smart Accounts

I wish I had more time to play with this feature. This is iBank's answer to tagging. What you can do is create special accounts that are built off of various criteria from your transactions. These Smart Accounts can be dynamically created from data according to account, payee, memo, amount and/or category. If you've ever played with Smart Playlists in iTunes, you'll know immediately how these work. The easiest example I can come up with is to create a Smart Account called "Expense Report", tying it to your Memo field and looking for special categories (like Travel:Business) and special keywords in your memo field (like "Expense Report"). Then you can just bring up that account and immediately see all transactions you should submit for reimbursement. It can be quite powerful as you start using it.

Didn't Try Features

iBank isn't short on features. However, I ended up short on time. This is already a long article, the longest I've written, so here are what I believe to be noteworthy features in iBank, that I didn't try out:

• iSight Integration: You can take pictures and attach them to your transactions, as additional reference for your purchases. Nice for insurance too!
• iCal Integration: Setup your scheduled transactions to appear in iCal as a reminder you can carry around (or have emailed to you).
• Smart Import Rules: Hate how your Financial Institution puts all kinds of garbage in your downloaded transactions? These will let you clean them up.
• Multiple Currency Support
• Investment Tracking: Smart Portfolios, Online Portfolios at MobileMe, Expert Trading like short and long puts and calls, options, and others.
• Budgets
• Forecasts
• MobileMe Backups
• Dashboard Widgets for Transactions and Budgets
• Password Protection for Data File

The Good

My initial article on the failings of Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac highlighted several missing features from the new product:

• Investment Tracking: No buys and sells, no advanced investment performance reports.
• No export of data to TurboTax
• No online bill pay

Additionally, Check Writing has also gone the way of the Dodo Bird in Quicken Essentials. Well, I'm happy to report that some of these issues are resolved by going to iBank. You can definitely do Check Writing and export data to TurboTax. So that's 50% better. iBank also supports Brokerage accounts and stock performance graphing, which Quicken Essentials does not. That's 75% better. Unfortunately, iBank doesn't provide Online Bill Pay, but neither does Quicken Essentials, so that's not a deal breaker.

Here are all of my pros for iBank:

• More features than Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac
• Excellent data import from Quicken 2007 for Mac
• Very "Mac-like" user interface
• Mobile iBank application for iPhone ($4.99 on iTunes)

The Bad

The most annoying aspect of iBank is that it's slow. It's not so slow that the application is unusable, far from it. However, iBank is annoyingly sluggish. I first noted this behavior after I completed importing my transactions and was using the Account Manager to hide inactive accounts. It literally took 8 seconds for the checkmark to appear after I clicked in the check box. I then noted sluggishness when switching accounts, it took 4 seconds for the Transaction view to update with the transactions for the new account. I played around with the settings a bit, and noticed that below the Transaction editor you'll find buttons for setting what transactions are being shown: All, This Year, or Recent. Setting the Transaction view to only showing Recent transactions solved the delay in switching accounts (this is a global setting). Setting it to This Year was also sufficient.

The Conclusion

iBank is a winner. If the feature set matches up with your needs, then you can't really go wrong moving forward with a purchase of iBank and using the application as a solid replacement for Quicken 2007 for Mac. Does it have every feature? No. Does it have more than the latest release from Intuit? Yes. That's enough to give it a solid recommendation in my book. The speed issues can be worked around and I believe the benefits overcome this deficiency. It may even be possible that with some additional tweaking on my part, I can resolve the speed issues I'm seeing, much like I did on the Transaction View.

Other Coverage

Mac360 did an article on the Top 10 Money Managers to Replace Quicken: No surprise, iBank is Number 1.

Update #1 - 20100222

After writing this article, IGG Software released iBank 3.5.5. To be honest, it may have been out before I wrote my article (which was done completely on version 3.5.4), which brings me to my point.

After launching iBank, immediately go to the Preferences menu and check the box for Notify me when an update is available.

I'm not sure why this option is off by default, but it is. You need to manually enable it, or else you won't know there is a new version available. One of the fixes? Better importing of split transactions! I'm going to re-import my original Quicken Data Export file and see if my results improve over the already acceptable import process iBank did previously.

Update #2 - 20100223

Class Importing from Quicken

At the request of several readers, and to answer the question regarding Class support in iBank, I added several Classes to an account in Quicken 2007 and imported it into iBank. The results are good and bad.

The Bad: Because Quicken really didn't support Tags, Classes were just appended to the Category following a "/" character. While Quicken knew those were Classes and could do "things" with them, no one else knows what they are and they just import them. iBank is no different. It imported my transactions that had Classes as a new Category. So, I had "Auto:Fuel/Business Expense" in Quicken, but in iBank I ended up with two categories under Auto: Fuel, and Fuel/Business Expense.

The Good: iBank didn't totally ignore them. So, you still have your data intact and can report on it after you've imported your data into iBank. It may then be possible to run some updates on the Transactions and move the "Business Expense" into the Memo field. If you can do that, and that's a big "if" at this point and beyond the scope of this article, then you can change the category "Auto:Fuel/Business Expense" to just "Auto:Fuel". You'd then have properly "tagged" transactions that you could build a Smart Account off of and be back to where you were in Quicken. It's far from perfect and it relies on figuring out how to perform a mass update on all of your transactions to perform the above translation, but it may be possible.

]]>http://robpickering.com/technology/rss-comments-entry-6773080.xmlTechnologyRob PickeringFri, 12 Feb 2010 14:13:39 +0000http://robpickering.com/technology/2010/2/12/intuit-responds-quicken-essentials-2010-for-mac.html489925:5571313:6656094The Setup

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.

First and foremost, let me get this out of the way. I love Quicken on the Macintosh. I've used Quicken since at least 1995 (those are the oldest entries in my register in Quicken today, but I think I've used it longer than that) and I have over 6000 entries. That's 15 years of use and loyalty to a piece of software. You don't often find that. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only other piece of software I've been using as long on my Macintosh is BBEdit (I was a beta-tester for BBEdit back in the day). So, clearly, I find value in the software, enjoy the software, and have been a loyal user of the software for many years. But something changed 4 years ago.

In November 2006, Intuit released an update to their Quicken software for the Mac, Quicken 2007 for Mac. This was a yearly update to the prior product Quicken - for Mac 2006, which had been released the prior year in August 2005. Things were looking up, we seemed to slowly be gaining ground back with Inuit and getting more regular updates. It didn't bother Macintosh users too much that the Macintosh version and the Windows version were divergent. The development effort at Inuit was clearly on the Windows side and the feature lists of the two products showed it. The Windows version was just more feature complete and capabilities had slowly eroded away from the Macintosh version of the software. I can even remember back to Quicken Deluxe 2000 for Mac. We don't garner the "Deluxe" branding anymore, it's now just the "Essentials" (more later). Erosion of features was also true for Quicken 2007 for Mac, but we got by.

Then silence. Intuit discussed Quicken 2008 for Mac, in order to support Leopard. Leopard was going to be such a dramatic change from the previous Panther release of Mac OSX, that they should just wait for it to hit the streets before releasing an update. Then in January 2008, Intuit announced Quicken Financial Life for Mac. So after just a bit more than a year from the release of Quicken 2007, Intuit was keeping their commitment to the Macintosh platform and performing an update, which was "slated for a fall 2008 release". Then the fall came and went, but we kept hearing about Quicken Financial Life for Mac. Finally, we got to see it when MacWorld did a Preview: Quicken Financial Life for Mac in February 2009 and noted that it "remains a work in progress at this early stage". A "work in progress"? A full year after it was announced?

That's when I got involved. I was upset, because Intuit kept sending me upgrade offers for QuickBooks, so I Tweeted this in March 2009:

@QuickBooks @intuit @QuickenPRChels. Stop sending me upgrade offers. I won't upgrade until you support the Mac properly again. #Quicken  1:33 PM Mar 3rd, 2009 from TweetDeck

That got @QuickenPRChels attention. She contacted me about it and offered me a seat at the Beta table (which was an open beta at the time, anyone could join it). I downloaded the software, ran the installation, and cringed. I then wrote them a very nice email:

From: Robert A. Pickering Jr.
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 4:59 PM
To: Marti, Chelsea
Subject: Re: Quicken Financial Life for Mac beta

Chelsea,

I greatly appreciate the invite to the Beta. I've converted my data, imported it, and started working with the application.

I want you first to understand that I've been a VERY loyal Intuit and Quicken customer. Several of my accounts date back to 1995. I have over 6000 transactions in Quicken.

I also appreciate the difficulty in "starting from scratch", it's not easy.

I'm not sure where the feedback on the design, features, and capabilities of Quicken Financial Life have come from, but it's not from long-time Quicken and Macintosh users.

The new application is frankly awful. I'm not sure if you are a Quicken Macintosh user or not, but I seriously doubt you'd use it. It appears that the current Beta has had every feature that makes Quicken, well Quicken, completely gutted out of it. It's now a flashy glorified Checkbook register.

If this is the direction that Intuit believes Macintosh customers want them to move, they are sorely mistaken.

I've talked with a large number of Quicken / Macintosh users, without fail, all of them say:

Give me the exact same solution that is available for Windows, and keep them in synch with updates.

I agree. Quicken 2009 for Windows is a complete product, and a great one. Why can't that be put on the Macintosh?

Most of my friends now run the Windows version in a Virtualization environment like VMware Fusion or Parallels.

I've been a Macintosh user since 1984. I've been a Intuit/Quicken customer since 1995 (maybe earlier). I would be happen to speak to someone, though I'm guessing it's too late to have any real impact on the product direction.

Thank you very much. I was very impressed by Intuit's and your response to my Twitter message, it's amazing to have access to people in a company that can actually assist you. For that, I applaud Intuit and yourself.

Unfortunately, I'll most likely no longer be a customer if this is actually the product that is going to be released in 4 months.

-Rob

I got a very nice message back from the Product Manager, Quicken Mac, Adriel Frederick. He assured me that Intuit was committed to the platform and listening to customer feedback on the product. This was in March, 2009. I had to stop using the Beta, because I couldn't stand it.

That brings us to today readers. For on January 10th, 2010, I got my email!

"It's Official: New Quicken Mac! Upgrade & Save $10"

Woo hoo! New Quicken for Mac! Hold on though, here's the email:

Um, that says, "Quicken Essentials for Mac". What happened to "Financial Life"? This doesn't bode well for Macintosh users, as not only have we moved down the food chain from "Deluxe", but now we're only getting the "Essentials"?

It gets worse. If you go to the Pre-Order page and read up on Using a Prior Version of Quicken Mac you'll find the following page:

Let's take a look at each of those bullet points.

Can I track my investments? No. Use our four year-old product Quicken 2007 if you want to do this.

Can I export my data to TurboTax? No. Use our four year-old product Quicken 2007 if you want to do this.

Can I pay my bills within Quicken? No. Use our four year-old product Quicken 2007 if you want to do this.

Can I transfer my data from an older version of Quicken Mac? Yes. Whew! Thank goodness!

Can I convert my Quicken Windows data to Quicken Essentials for Mac? Yes. (But why would you?)

WTF?

So I guess "Essentials" no longer includes things like using other Intuit products with it, paying bills, or tracking investments? In fact, "Essentials" now seems to be equivalent to just setting up a big spreadsheet, as the bulk of the functionality has been eliminated.

Now the crux of my issue. Should I upgrade? Should *you* upgrade?

Intuit has put us in a very precarious position. I'm a firm believer that you should "vote with your wallet". My vote currently would be to completely skip this abomination of a software product. However, taking that stance has two major drawbacks:

1. By not purchasing the product, Intuit flops with this product, it justifies their belief that the Apple Macintosh isn't a viable platform for them, and they completely abandon the product. Bad.
2. The current Quicken 2007 for Mac is a PowerPC application. Yes, it's NOT Intel native. Really bad.

Yep, if you haven't been paying attention, Quicken 2007 is probably the only application you're running that is a PowerPC application. In fact, if you've loaded up Snow Leopard, you'll find out you now have to load Rosetta manually, in order to run Quicken, as PowerPC support is no longer a part of the base OSX. What a complete pain! Here is part of my Activity Monitor:

So, actually paying for this upgrade (more on that in a moment) has two distinct advantages:

1. You finally get to run Quicken as an Intel native application, and can probably uninstall Rosetta.
2. You send a signal to Intuit that we Macintosh users are a tough lot, and we demand software, even if it sucks!

But Point #2 above is sending the wrong message in my opinion. Yes, we want Quicken on our Macs, but we don't want THIS Quicken. We want a feature-compatible version of Quicken to the one running on Windows. Why is that so hard?

So, should I upgrade? Do I upgrade and help Intuit recoup their investment in rewriting the software in the hopes that they will continue to support the Mac platform, even though I hate this product offering? Or do I skip this version and "vote with my wallet", in the hopes they will flop and then give us what we want, but risk having them flop and abandon us entirely?

Oh yea, the cost of the upgrade. Well, if you Pre-Order it you get to save $10! That means it only COSTS THE SAME AS THE WINDOWS FEATURE-RICH VERSION!

Yes, you read that right. The retail price of the Macintosh version of Quicken Essentials 2010 is $10 MORE than Quicken 2010 for Windows.

I think I just made up my mind. iBank anyone?

Beware the PogoPlug.

Introduction:

If you've been living under a rock, or just don't frequent technology blogs and technology podcasts, then I suppose it's possible you've never heard of a PogoPlug.  A PogoPlug is a small device (really small in Version 1, and medium small in Version 2) that connects to your Internet network via Ethernet and then connects to stray USB drives you have laying around.  It then has the ability to make the content of those USB drives available both on your local network as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and, more importantly, available via the Internet on a web site controlled entirely by you.  I, like many others, believed this was a great way to take USB drives I have laying around doing nothing, and convert them into useful storage for my local network as well as provide a way to share files with people elsewhere on the Internet.

I was wrong.

Bad:  

The PogoPlug has open SSH access to the root account. 

Badder:  

The password is published on the Internet, by CloudEngines, and is easy to find with a Google search.  Just Google:  PogoPlug SSH linux.  It'll be your first hit.  But, to save the time, I'm posting the direct URL here:  http://www.cloudengines.com/dev/linux.html  In case they were to take the page down, here is an image of the site:

Worse:

You cannot change this password without crippling CloudEngines' ability to upgrade your device.  Now pause for a moment.  Yes, that means that in order to upgrade your device, they are most likely SSHing into your PogoPlug, as root, and running upgrade scripts.  Yay!  For what it's worth, here are the instructions, that I got from CloudEngines, to change your root password on the PogoPlug.  Bear in mind, you will no longer get updates and will not be able to upgrade it until you've set the password back to the default.

Login to the PogoPlug via SSH as root, then:

# mount / -o remount,rw 
# passwd 
-- new password at prompt 
# mount / -o remount,ro

Worst:

If you opt not to change the password, then know that your PogoPlug is potentially wide open to anyone who knows this well published username and password.  Once they SSH into your PogoPlug, they have ACCESS TO ALL OF YOUR DATA.  It doesn't matter what permissions you've set via the web interface, they have root access to your device and they can see everything that is connected to it AND COPY IT OFF.

Conclusion:

I've read lots and lots of positive comments about the PogoPlug, how easy it is to get working (despite my personal experience) and how great the overall device is for managing storage and making it available over the Internet.  However, that ease of use has a serious price, and that price is too high for me to use it.  I've sent mine back and CloudEngines was nice enough to provide me an RMA.