Has/Does anyone use this app, I would love to give it a run but the reviews don't look to promising. Is there a better option?
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Quicken Essentials for Mac; Anyone?
- Thread starter zipur
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I use it, but only as a checkbook program. I had quicken 2007 (I think) and quicken essentials was the only upgrade that would work without rosetta and would read my old quicken data.
other people haven't been happy with essentials, but it's fine for me since my needs are pretty basic.
I don't connect to the net for downloading financial stuff to quicken.
other people haven't been happy with essentials, but it's fine for me since my needs are pretty basic.
I don't connect to the net for downloading financial stuff to quicken.
Quicken is the only reason I run Parallels in my rMBP. Quicken Essentials is a joke; and in serious need of an upgrade.
I've never understood why they have left it so feature poor when compared to the windows versions. With their Quickbooks product line they are much more aligned.
Save your money. Don't buy Quicken Essentials.
I've never understood why they have left it so feature poor when compared to the windows versions. With their Quickbooks product line they are much more aligned.
Save your money. Don't buy Quicken Essentials.
Well enough said for me, I'm gonna follow the all the other post and just use men VMware for Quicket.
Thanks.
Thanks.
I know not about Essentials, but if you still have Quicken 2007, that has been updated to once again work without Rosetta. And it (still) works with 10.8.5.
Alas, if you removed Quicken from your computer, I don't know how to reinstall it. Perhaps someone at the Quicken forum knows.
Quicken Essentials works perfectly for my needs. I don't understand why people hate it. I have never had any problems tracking any of my accounts with it.
Savings, Checking, Cash, 401K etc, it's all there and works flawlessly.
Savings, Checking, Cash, 401K etc, it's all there and works flawlessly.
Can it download credit card charges, do re-occurring bills (like a mortgage, car loan, etc), track principle/interest of loans?
If you have ever used Quicken for PC or are currently using it, you'll find Quicken Essentials very limited in what it can do. If you're just looking (as stated above) for a checkbook program to keep track of accounts and are not using Quicken for PC, you'll probably find it adequate but I think the online program Mint gets better reviews than Quicken Essentials for Mac. I use Quicken PC via Parallels/VM Fusion to track and make stock purchases, download and pay bills, transfer funds between accounts. Essentials for Mac has very limited functions compared to the PC version. Many more banks support the PC version than the Mac version.
I don't use it to do all of the things you mention (also running PC version) but I do want some basic functions (see my previous post). Will Essentials do those things? I am very leery of putting all of my account info online and where does my history go if they go out of business or decide to discontinue that product?
Right now, the only thing I use in Windows is Quicken and I would really like to move to another program because I don't want to pay for a new version of Parallels just to support Mavericks/Quicken. I will probably just use Bootcamp, but that is hardly convenient.
I also didn't want to run Windows just for Quicken. I ended up buying iBank http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ and am very happy with it. The only issue for me was that I found there is a bit of a learning curve -- more than I expected, but not horrible. It works very well and easily replaces every thing I used to do in Quicken on a PC but has enough of a different way of doing things that it took a while to get used to. They do have a 30 day free trial.
I've been using iBank since v3 and have no complaints.
I'm hoping 5.0 adds a few more features (more customizing and smart reports), better searching, etc.
I'd like iBank to know if I enter a dollar amount for a specific purchase, how long will it take for me to repay the charge based on my previous years spending and income reporting -- or have better alerting features - like, hey, we noticed last year you spent $xxx on something - maybe you need to start saving for that purchase again (ie taxes, etc).
I'm hoping 5.0 adds a few more features (more customizing and smart reports), better searching, etc.
I'd like iBank to know if I enter a dollar amount for a specific purchase, how long will it take for me to repay the charge based on my previous years spending and income reporting -- or have better alerting features - like, hey, we noticed last year you spent $xxx on something - maybe you need to start saving for that purchase again (ie taxes, etc).
My situation is a bit different as I purchased Windows and Quicken a long time ago (and recently updated Quicken). So I would not incur another expense for a couple years (another Quicken update). However, I will have to spend something to update Parallels ($49) in order to run the new OSX. So I can justify some of the iBank expense by being able to avoid that upgrade. So that's a positive. I like that they have a 90-day trial. That should be long enough to put it through it's paces.
Well, I tried iBank. After a few tries at getting my Quicken 2013 data in correctly (which really was pretty easy) it came pretty close to meeting by basic needs. The killer:
To download credit card transactions I had to use their browser to navigate to my CC site and manually download the transactions for the activity period I wanted (my nationally known CC company was not supported by iBank). All came in uncategorized (and I have a lot of them). Which means I have to manually categorize each CC transaction. Quicken has direct download with my CC company, transactions come in categorized and if I change the categorization, Quicken will learn and automatically add the correct categorization the next time transaction source appears.
Sorry iBank, you came very very close. I think if you had a relationship with my CC company I would have gone with you. If you are considering this app, you might want to go to their website and navigate to a list of direct download supported financial institutions and check out if your's is listed.
Also, I should mention the app did start using 100% of my CPU once while working on it. Had to go into Activity Monitor and shut down the process as Quit was not working. That was a little concerning.
To download credit card transactions I had to use their browser to navigate to my CC site and manually download the transactions for the activity period I wanted (my nationally known CC company was not supported by iBank). All came in uncategorized (and I have a lot of them). Which means I have to manually categorize each CC transaction. Quicken has direct download with my CC company, transactions come in categorized and if I change the categorization, Quicken will learn and automatically add the correct categorization the next time transaction source appears.
Sorry iBank, you came very very close. I think if you had a relationship with my CC company I would have gone with you. If you are considering this app, you might want to go to their website and navigate to a list of direct download supported financial institutions and check out if your's is listed.
Also, I should mention the app did start using 100% of my CPU once while working on it. Had to go into Activity Monitor and shut down the process as Quit was not working. That was a little concerning.
Here is a link (for others) to the financial institutions for which iBank supports direct download. iBank uses the OFX (Open Financial Exchange) format. http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ofx_info.php
It doesn't categorize the initial download but does learn and categorize subsequent downloads.
It doesn't categorize the initial download but does learn and categorize subsequent downloads.
We were Quicken users for a long time, however our versions was too old to keep running when we switched to OSX.7 Lion. My wife is the CFO and really liked using Quicken, so we moved to Quicken Essentials after briefly considering our other options. The move was a bit of a pain, because although Quicken Essentials may run under Lion, the "Quicken File Exchange Utility" does not. This means if you want to update your old Quicken data, you still have to be running Leopard or Snow Leopard. I ended up having to pull out an external firewire drive and install Snow Leopard on it just to run this one application. It has functioned fine since then and through all the update to OSX.8.5.
It really is a shadow of what Quicken used to be, and what it is on the Windows side.
It really is a shadow of what Quicken used to be, and what it is on the Windows side.
Does it have the capability to directly download credit card transactions from the card issuer? Or do you have to navigate to a website and manually download?
