QuickBooks and Quicken are two of the most widely used financial management tools in the world. See my Quicken 2020 for Mac Review for the most recent review.QuickBooks vs. We stand behind our products with over 30 years of experience and a 60-day money back. The Quicken Mobile Companion App for iPhone and iPad syncs with Quicken desktop, so you can make smart decisions with your money no matter where you are. The Quicken Mobile Companion App is a free personal finance app to use with your Quicken desktop software.A little over two years ago, I switched to the Mac version of Quicken which I wrote about here.Getting Started for Mac 2007 (PDF). Though I started on a Mac, and use a Mac today, the vast majority of my use has been on Windows. Hence, a lot of people often avoid getting a MacBook as their personal computer.I have been using Quicken to manage my finances since 1989, making this my 30th anniversary with the program. But all of that comes with a heavy price tag. They have great design and have some groundbreaking features. There is no doubt that MacBooks are extremely popular all around the globe.
Is Quicken Worth Buying? Mac Review ForI’ve always tried to be disciplined when it comes to money, a natural-born planner, and I’m comfortable managing my own finances. My finances mirror those of many mid-life families: a half-dozen investment and retirement accounts, college savings accounts, a home, etc., though working for a publicly-traded company these past twenty years has also allowed me direct experience with stock options, restricted stock units, and a variety of employee benefit programs that follow that kind of employment. My BackgroundI began my career in public accounting, and while I no longer provide accounting or auditing services to clients, I am still a licensed Certified Public Accountant here in the state of Washington. In this post, I’ll share an update on how it’s gone using the latest version of Quicken, Quicken 2019 for Mac. ![]() Since I purchased a 20-month subscription to Quicken Premiere last year during an Amazon.com Black Friday sale, updates like the 2019 edition have been provided at no additional charge. Quicken 2019 for MacQuicken 2019 for Mac was released with little fanfare in November 2018. For this type of financial management, Quicken is still the only personal finance software game in town. There may be better cash flow and budgeting software (Banktivity and YNAB, for example), but these apps fall short, in my view, of keeping tabs on the intricate accounting treatment for the variety of obscure transactions that flow from owning stocks, mutual funds, stock options, and employer-granted restricted stock. While I take issue with how slowly the Mac version has developed, particularly in light of the abilities of its Windows counterpart, Quicken is still superior to any other personal finance program on the Mac if you need robust investment tracking. Quicken claims that portions of the program are four times faster in 2019. These lags have mostly been corrected. Last year, I complained of performance delays when switching investment views and exiting this program. Just since the 2019 rebranding. So, the improvements I’ll note here relate to software updates during all of 2018 vs. I can view investment returns by class of investment (stocks, bonds, cash, other), security, holding period, etc., and drill into lots of purchases for my original cost basis, current gain or loss, and most recent market changes. It’s been a while now since I’ve used the Windows version of Quicken, but I no longer feel like I lack analysis features for my investments. Long a sore spot on the Mac, investment tracking and analysis continued to see updates in 2018. I’m using a newer iMac to run Quicken, so your mileage may vary, but my experience has been positive.Investment Tracking and Analysis. I’ve used this function for the past two years in creating my own “Budget to Actual” report in Excel, but now you can do this with a lot more of your financial data. This allows you to copy data out of Quicken into a spreadsheet for analysis and reporting. I have complained about the lack of decent reporting in Quicken for Mac and will discuss that more in the next section, but some of this has been mitigated by Quicken’s new export to Excel functions which are available in more areas now, including investments. This is a big deal to me, and it’s nice to see the improvements Quicken made to the Mac platform.New Export Capabilities. The details open in a new window which can be customized and saved as its own report, or exported to Excel. Reports in Quicken for Mac finally gained the basic and longstanding Windows capability of drilling down to transaction-level detail. Not everyone will use this functionality, but for Excel nerds, it’s a handy addition.Reporting Improvements. ![]() Reporting in the Mac version of Quicken has improved a little, but not near enough. What’s Still a ProblemReporting, Particularly Against Budget. This has improved allegedly, though I haven’t tried it again. I feel more confident in paying my bills through my bank’s Bill-Pay feature than Quicken’s offering. I was flummoxed by the complexity of this service when I first tried it and stopped using it even though it’s a free service as a Premiere subscriber. If you use the Bill-Pay feature, things are cleaned up and more intuitive to use. I click the “try again,” and the process completes. I have a half-dozen banking, savings, and credit card accounts with this bank which is apparently too many. I’ve automated this the best I can, but still takes a time each month to update references and labels, and once in Excel, loses its interactivity and drill-down capability.Quirky Transaction Download Errors Every time I do an online update of my accounts, I receive the same throttling error for a random set of accounts with my primary bank. As a workaround, I export actual and budget figures out of Quicken to create a proper actual vs. A software engineer without any financial sense must have put these views together. Instead, you get a bizarre on-screen visualization of budget performance for the month, or an unwieldy 12 month stacked grid, neither of which I find at all useful. Set classpath on mac for javaThank you, Quicken!Mobile App is Underwhelming. Editor’s Note: These download errors were fixed in Quicken’s August 2019 (version 5.12.3) update. Try again later.” Downloading transactions in Quicken on Windows was always a tricky proposition, so I can’t say this is a Mac issue. Quicken’s response is consistent: “your bank’s servers must be busy. One of the biggest reservations I have with the Mac version of Quicken relates to its file export limitations. Quicken also released web access in the fall with similar capabilities.Trapped Investment Data. I’m not alone: the app ratings are abysmal which many reports of the app crashing or not being able to log in. I tried it again for this review, and I am still unimpressed. I tried it out when it first came out and was underwhelmed. This limitation affects not only your ability to move back to the more robust Windows version of Quicken should you grow tired of the Mac’s shortcomings, but also impacts your ability to switch to other personal finance software products on the Mac if you decide to give up on Quicken altogether. Investment accounts, and all the related historical transaction details, cannot be exported.
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