I just bought, downloaded, and converted over to it yesterday, and so far, I like it better than the alternatives that are available, though it still definitely has some key things to work on.
Background: I've been using Microsoft Money for the last 15 years or so, most recently using Money 2007 Deluxe. I had used PCs for a long time, but I switched back to Macs in November, 2007. I was using an old PC for Money, but for the past couple of years, I've been using Money on my Mac via Parallels.
I have a love/hate relationship with Money - I'm used to it and really used to the information that it provides, but I'm really tired of both having to boot up a VM just to use it and dealing with the program slowness, even on the best of systems (and this is with most of my data archived). Reconciling transactions downloaded from my bank always took forever, with tons of lags.
I bought and switched over to iBank briefly about 5 months ago. I really liked how it looked, and I LOVED that it was a native Mac app, but it just didn't provide the information that I was used to from Money. After using it for a month or 2, I switched back to Money.
So, my situation is that I'm using a Mac, will never go back to Windows, I can deal with MS Money, but support for it is ending soon, I'm tired of running a VM for finance software, but it seems that every option available currently is lacking in one or more areas for what I need. I've been following this thread for a long time now, and it sums up a lot of what I've thought about the situation:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/801225/
So, that is what led me to try Quicken, and this has been my experience so far, albeit brief. I converted all of my data yesterday and updated everything I needed (bills, etc) today, so I think I have a decent feel for the program now.
Pros
1) Conversion - I don't think this can be overstated, but I haven't seen it mentioned much in regard to this version. If you have years of data in PC Quicken or Money, QEM comes with a free conversion program that handles getting it in the right format for QEM. Transactions, payees, categories, and even upcoming transactions (Bills in MS Money lingo) were all converted and were not truncated at all. This alone makes me feel less bad that I had to spend $70 for this app. I cannot emphasize enough how long and frustrating it was to get my Money data into iBank when I switched over to it.
2) Look and feel - Most things are straight-forward in terms of layout. Graphs and reports look really great. Windows for connecting with your bank look great. Basically, functional eye-candy.
3) Speed - After using Money for so long, the speed is amazing. It's even faster than Spotlight for searching for payees, categories, etc. There is no lag at all. When you download transactions from your bank, if they don't match with one you entered manually for some reason, you just drag the downloaded version onto the manually entered version and they're combined. This literally takes 2 seconds, whereas this process would have taken 1-2 minutes in the version of Money I was using.
Cons:
1) Loans - While you can set up loans as accounts (called Liabilities in QEM), you don't enter even basic information such as length of the loan and interest rate. The result of this is that payments to loan accounts reduce the balance by the whole payment amount, not just the Principal portion. This is Finance 101 - can't believe this isn't included. My workaround for now is that I created a Numbers spreadsheet with the loan balance and interest rate, so I can see how much of the current payment is interest, then I have to edit what I have set up as a split transaction, where the first split is a transfer to the loan account for the principal amount and the second is just an interest payment. This is definitely annoying.
2) Scheduled transactions - Two things here. First, Money had the ability to edit either the next scheduled transaction or the whole transaction series. This allowed you to handle a special payment one month, or for something like gas bill that changes over time, I could leave an average amount, then edit the next scheduled transaction for the actual amount. In QEM, you can only edit the whole series. Also, you can't set up a scheduled transaction to occur once. Well, you could, because you could set it up for monthly occurrence, then just set it so there is only 1 payment left. But, I can't believe "Once" isn't an option for frequency.
3) Investing - For me, I don't find it a big deal to not be able to enter transaction-level data. But, what is a big deal is that you can't enter investment holdings if your bank can't be downloaded. This has impacted me for several accounts, things like 529 plans, etc. You can set this up as a Savings account and then update the amount, but I want it to be recorded as an Investment.
Overall, I think I'll be keeping this version. The pros are significant enough for me, and the cons are more nuisance than deal breaker. Hopefully they come out with updates to address some of these things, and I would bet that I'll upgrade when the fuller version comes out next year.
If anyone has questions, feel free to ask.
