Replacement for Quicken 2007?

[nanosour]

After much research, I decided to give SEE Finance a try. Just ported 6 years of data from Q07 to SEE Finance. It's shareware so you don't have to pay until you know you'll be using it. After several days, here's my assessment:

* Imported QIF file without a problem, very easy. Just export from Q and import.
* Reports take a bit to get used to, but get the job done. I don't use reports all that often with the exception of tracking monthly budget.
* Online downloads put Q07 to shame. Awesome job on this...very fast and downloads 6 accounts with one click.
* Budget doesn't handle quarterly payments yet
* Handles investments just as good as Quicken.

Overall, I'd say definitely worth the $30 bucks or so if you're looking to cut the Quicken chord.

[cdavis11]

I'll throw my 2 cents in as well.

I too have about 15 years of financial data and was using 2007 up until I heard about the coming Lion incompatibility.

I have tried Moneydance, Ibank, SeeFinance, Moneywell and even gave Mint.com a shot - they all had their issues, some more than others.

What I needed was a reasonably decent replacement for 2007 that would allow me to run end of year tax reports from a few business and personal categories, help keep track of my approx. 16 accounts across a few different banks and track my investments and net worth.

After trying all of the other options I ponied up $49 for Quicken Essentials and tried it out.

Data import went pretty well, just some adjustment transactions to make balances agree. Categories and scheduled transactions both came over with no trouble - something most of the other programs couldn't do.

I do use QE to connect and download transactions, but I enter receipts by hand and double check the matching.

One nice thing about QE vs. 2007 - the download from multiple financial institutions happens with one click, and is pretty fast.

As for investments - QE will allow you to enter share buys for investment accounts that aren't linked for download, but you won't have any ROI tracking ability. I decided that, for what I needed, I could live without that - or visit my brokerage house' website.

It took a little time to rebuild my reports, but it wasn't more than an evening of work - building them, running them on historical data and comparing them to 2007 reports to make sure I had built them correctly.

All in all, it was the least painful option and had the fewest problems.

[Bellamichelle]

Originally Posted by jljue

I currently use Quicken 2010 with an application call Crossover so that I don't have to crank up VMWare Fusion and Windows XP just for Quicken. I too have a long Quicken history, and I wanted to make sure that my data would carry over.

I have not heard of crossover before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. On the crossover website, they do indicate that Quicken 2011 is a 'bronze' in compatibility and it may have bugs and not all features may be available. How long have you used it?

I am looking at ibank right now, hoping to find something to switch my quicken 2007 files to before Lion comes out.

[tamvly]

Thanks to iMerik for the list of contenders. When I get a some time I'll try to put together a list with these titles and some of the plusses and minuses of each as posted.

I realize that there is a wide range of needs here. From what I have seen so far SEEFinance did the best job of importing the Q2007 data, but wasn't particularly impressive in managing investments, an item that is particularly important for me.

[Bellamichelle]

Hi Tamvly, I'd love to see any compilation you come up with. I am leaning towards ibank so far, but am not firm. I feel pretty overwhelmed at the shift since, once I go to lion, I cannot go back and pick up Qicken 2007 if the one I choose doesn't seem to be the best plan. I don't want to run paralles, bootcamp, windows, etc as I have no other need for windows stuff, so the cost of the extra windows friendly stuff seems like a poor expenditure of my money.

Anyway.. I'll check back and see what else gets posted.

michelle

[jameskohn]

I just want online banking combied with a good check register so I can forecast my cash flow. As rough around the edges as Quicken for Mac has been, it does enable me to pay my bills, charge all of my expenses to categories, and see how much money I'll have left when the bills are paid. I cannot believe that I can't find a replacement for that seemingly simple functionality.

Moneydance supposedly has online bill pay, but it looks and acts like it was designed by a highschooler and I couldn't get it working to pay a bill. iBank has no online bill pay, and neither does Quicken Essentials. I can pay bills online through Bank of America, but their "My Portfolio" product does not show how much money will be left after the bills are paid. This is a serious pain in the neck!

[rwsimon]

I too am one of those folks with more than 15 years of Quicken data (all from Windows versions.) When I switched to Mac 2 years ago, I installed Parallels and have been running the latest version of Quicken without any problems whatsoever. From time to time, I have tried installing various Mac finance programs (such as iBank and others) but none of them could even import my Quicken data properly. Since I have literally tens of thousands of transactions in my Quicken data, there is no way in the world that I would be willing to manually "repair" my Quicken data so that it would be correct on the new program. So unless another product can do the import properly or unless Intuit finally decides to provide Mac owners with a full-featured version of Quicken, I will continue to run my virtual machine. And given the fact that Parallels makes running Windows software seamless on the Mac, I don't really care.

[Bellamichelle]

If I already had parallels or bootcamp on my mac, i might think about switching over to the windows quicken.. but it would mean buying 3 pieces of software and I'd rather avoid that.. but if you have that set up already, it makes sense to keep at it.

I too wish intuit would choose to address the apple audience. I thought I read somewhere that someone high up in intuit is on the board of apple, or the other way around.. but if so, why are they not seeing the benefit to keeping the products apple friendly? I know no one can answer this here, I'm just frustrated at the need to jump ship when quicken 2007 has been working just fine.

I went to a website called http://software.toptenreviews.com/
and they show a list of software and how they rate out. On the list for mac ibank is high.

michelle

[Moof1904]

About a year ago we switched from Quicken to iBank 4. We imported 7 years worth of Quicken data with no trouble with the import. There was some cleanup that we had to do because of the way we had certain accounts set up but that was us, not iBank. The 7 year import was flawless.

[Bellamichelle]

thanks moof1904, I have been looking at the ibank website and watching the tutorials. I have a question that maybe you can answer. I have a few years of quicken to import as well. I watched the tutorial on how to do that. And in another, it shows how to go to your bank and download the data. I won't use direct connect as Chase Bank charges between $7-$10 a month to do it so I'll start with the web download first. For the past two years, I've been hand entering it as Chase could not work with quicken 2007. So my question is, when you imported your old quicken files and then had your bank import data, did you get double entries for any items coming in from the bank that were already there from the import? Maybe the idea is to import after a statement closing date but I cannot sort out how that would take into account transactions that had not cleared.. so is ibank able to recognize the duplicates?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

m

[MAH11]

If you want online bill pay, I think Moneydance is the only option. I had no problems importing 11 years of data from Quicken 2007, even though I know there are some corruption issues with my Quicken file. Setting up the online bill pay with my bank was a breeze, as was syncing with all my investment accounts. I don't budget my funds, so I cannot comment on that aspect.

Overall, the transition from Quicken 2007 to Moneydance was error-free and relatively painless. Moneydance seems to be a more solid program than Quicken 2007 (although that is setting the bar very low).

[mwittle]

Do any of these Quicken alternatives support specifying Investment LOTs on sell transactions?

(Thanks for the list of alternatives and experiences. I checked out about 1/2 of the alternatives on this list a year ago, but did not find any that handled Investment Lots.)

[tamvly]

Despite nanosour's comments, I find SEEFinance inadequate for investments. For example, I can't see ROI, IRR, and a whole slew of basic financial items for investments. And the whole reporting area seems very confusing to me.

If I am mistaken, I'd sure like to know how to get to this info.

[tamvly]

Here is Intuit's latest info, received just today.

http://quicken.intuit.com/support/ar...sion/8207.html

Even if you decide to migrate to the Windows version (yuch!) you would need to manually re-enter all investment transactions or download them.

Pathetic.

[iMerik]

Why can't this be an easy choice? I think I'll give MoneyDance an extended trial run, but part of me thinks I should just settle for Quicken Essentials for now with the hope that they will add onto it in the future, at which point I will already be using it and ready.

[T-Mac]

I'm in this same boat, probably going with MoneyDance.

[Gaelic2]

I've tried iBank and several other programs but settled on Quicken Essentials. I did so because I easily transferred all my data from an earlier version of Quicken. I only use it for tracking my Checking, Savings and credit card accounts. Data downloads from my bank and credit cards easily and works very well for me. I must admit, I was about to return it when I found how to transfer my data and then everything fell into place. If you are in the market and want to track investments, this is not for you, but works well for my simple tracking.

[OneForGadgets]

I am glad I stumbled on this thread, definitely one I am very interested in.

However, one of the main features I look for in the finance software is being able to sync with my iPhone. It seems that Quicken can't do that or am I missing something? I see Mint.com, but it doesn't link with Quicken does it?

[Mpittsb]

I have also been grappling with this problem. Downloaded SEE trial and had no difficulty importing data from Quicken. At first glance it doesn't do everything I want but will try it for a couple of weeks.

I suppose I will have to also try iBank. I choose SEE first because it's less expensive and the reviews for the iBank iPad and iPhone apps were terrible.

I would also ask if anyone knows if there are good (asking for excellent is probably too much) mobile apps for any of the other alternatives that have been suggested.

[jljue]

Originally Posted by Bellamichelle

I have not heard of crossover before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. On the crossover website, they do indicate that Quicken 2011 is a 'bronze' in compatibility and it may have bugs and not all features may be available. How long have you used it?

I am looking at ibank right now, hoping to find something to switch my quicken 2007 files to before Lion comes out.

I've been using Crossover for about 6 months without any major issues with Quicken 2010, but I'm also looking at iBank and MoneyDance. I'm having to clean up some of my imported data to get my accounts straightened up in iBank, but it does have the ability to capture attachements (receipts) with each transaction and has an iPhone app. Moneydance didn't seem to mess up with importing quite so badly as iBank, but it doesn't have an attachment feature. I would like to have the attachement feature internal to my financial program, but worse come to worse, I can do a more manual method of receipt capturing if a program and its iPhone app (now a must) is stable. I'm not done straightening out my data in iBank to determine if it is stable or not.

[riverfreak]

Originally Posted by nanosour

After much research, I decided to give SEE Finance a try. Just ported 6 years of data from Q07 to SEE Finance. It's shareware so you don't have to pay until you know you'll be using it. After several days, here's my assessment:

* Imported QIF file without a problem, very easy. Just export from Q and import.
* Reports take a bit to get used to, but get the job done. I don't use reports all that often with the exception of tracking monthly budget.
* Online downloads put Q07 to shame. Awesome job on this...very fast and downloads 6 accounts with one click.
* Budget doesn't handle quarterly payments yet
* Handles investments just as good as Quicken.

Overall, I'd say definitely worth the $30 bucks or so if you're looking to cut the Quicken chord.

Just wanted to weigh in the I've (partially) cut the Intuit cord and have jumped ship to SEE Finance. It's great for all the exact same reasons you list above.

I *did* lose my scheduled transactions but they were easy to set up. The reporting and graphing is far superior to the old version of Quicken I was using (2006).

Everything else seems to be running smoothly, and I have to say that I'm appreciating a more Mac OS X interface.

[class77]

I don't understand why it's so hard for Quicken to give up the same setup as the Windows version except to use with a Mac operating system. It seems that every subsequent Mac version had fewer and fewer features.

[waynep]

I have a Win 7 Virtual Machine to run my Quicken 2010 on my MBP. I moved from Windows to Mac in Jan and did not want to move to Quicken Essentials or any other program so the VM route works for me.

[tamvly]

I get the sense that my requirements are substantially more complex than many users of Quicken 2007.

For one, I need sophisticated investment features which many people don't seem to need or want. Also, I am interested in financial planning, which doesn't seem to be of much ineterst to others.

At the same time, I don't care much about automatic downloads of data or reams of automatic transactions. I am generally happy to spend a few moments a day doing that myself.

I am seriously considering writing my own app and have even started mapping out the user interface. Gruesome, but true.

[MacDawg]

Not sure what I am going to do yet

Here is an article from TUAW that lists several alternatives as well