2:28 A year ago at the Intuit booth at, Quicken founder Scott Cook. It contained a beta version of the company's long-overdue update of the Mac version of Quicken, called Quicken Financial Life. Eagerly awaiting its release were Mac users who needed a personal finance app with some meat on its bones. They were getting frustrated with Quicken's maker,. The ancient, which was the last new version of Quicken for the Mac, was so unloved that you didn't have to look far to find people running Windows (inside Parallels or VMWare Fusion) on their Macs just so they could use one of the grown-up versions of Quicken that was available for the PC.
QFL never saw the light of day. It was unloved even inside Intuit. Before the product could make it out of beta, the upstart online personal financial information company. Mint's CEO, Aaron Patzer ( ), became the general manager of Intuit's Personal Finance Group, and took as one of his first jobs overseeing the re-creation of Quicken Financial Life into Quicken Essentials. Features were dropped from QFL, the interface was redesigned, and Patzer made sure new users could set up the product in 10 to 15 minutes., the first new version of Quicken for the Mac since 2007, finally ships Thursday, at a retail price of $59.99. Quicken Essentials takes a page from Mint in its approachability (sample data used). Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET.
The app is a modern financial product. It's approachable instead of feature-laden, and in most areas it's very Mac-like. It's clearly not a Mac port of the Windows version of Quicken that old fogeys like me are accustomed to. It's missing features like bill payment, and it's no good at tracking investments. In exchange for its limited feature set, Quicken Essentials gets ease of use. It is very easy to set up if you're starting from scratch. Once your accounts are hooked in, an Overview page gives you a super-clean Mint-like screen that shows you where your money is going to and coming from.
Patzer says Quicken is very smart about automatically categorizing expenses so you can identify your habits accurately. It aggregates categorization corrections from other users to continuously improve its performance (the Windows version, by contrast, uses Yellow Pages lookups).
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Like the, Quicken Essentials will show you activity in individual accounts or in a combined ledger with everything. But its real benefit is its budgeting tools. Here again its smart categorization helps a lot: It does a good job of analyzing your spending habits to help you create realistic budgets, and it has a good, simple screen to keep track of them. As I said, Quicken Essentials doesn't do bill payment for you.
Patzer says that only 6 percent of Quicken Windows users use this feature; most people today pay bills either through their banks' online systems or at the site of the companies billing them. Quicken Essentials is also a miserable product if you want to keep track of investments. You can't even enter investment transactions manually. Quicken Essentials will download and record your transactions, but you can't see them.
You can't get more detail than current values of your holdings, in fact. There are no historical charts or other forms of analysis. Patzer says that in 2011, a Deluxe version of Quicken for the Mac may include these features. There's also no integration with Intuit's consumer tax product,. Quicken Essentials features 'the mother of all file converters,' Patzer told me.
It will read data files from any version of Quicken as well as from Microsoft Money. But you do need to run old files through an external converter, which I did not receive in time to test. The aesthetic is clearly part of Quicken Essentials, and that's good. Patzer told me he's aware that Mint will never appeal to a large number of users who don't trust a company, even Intuit, to store all their financial passwords on computers outside of their control.
For many of these people, Quicken Essentials is a very good solution. The app is simple, attractive, and useful. It doesn't overreach and it's not bloated.
However, people with complex financial lives may run into walls with the product. The app's portfolio tracking tools are nearly nonexistent. Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET.
If you're Mac user who is new to personal finance software, Quicken Essentials may just be enough for you. But, if you switch to another software later on, you may not be able to get your data to import into other software and you would have to enter transactions all over again (however, iBank 4 imports Quicken Essentials for Mac data). If you just need very basic personal finance software and doubt you'll have a need more money management features in the future, Quicken Essentials is worth a look. Quicken Essentials was very responsive, screens opened when called and data updated quickly. Everything in the software is bright and colorful, from the overview screen to spending category selection in the budget. This aspect of the software makes it really enjoyable to use. Pie charts and bar graphs are used to convey information at a glance.
Click on these graphics to drill down and see the transactions or accounts that make up the graph. The visuals are nicely done and never pokey, with boxes that flip open with options to be chosen. Speaking of adding accounts, the three credit cards I set up are all at one financial institution and Quicken Essentials recognized this so transactions for all cards were downloaded at once. I usually have to establish each of these accounts separately in the personal finance software. Account balances are found by clicking on Account Summary in the left toolbar, and account registers are accessed by clicking on the accounts listed in the same toolbar. To find a list of payees, categories, and tags, click on Window on the top toolbar. Quicken Essentials comes with six reports which are listed on the left toolbar, with very basic customization options.
If you used Quicken for Windows or are a financial report hound, you're not going to be happy. Options included the ability to select accounts, categories, and tags to include in the reports and the date range can be changed. There is no budget report that shows month to month budgeted amounts compared to actual spending, you will only find a bar graph available in the budget module. Setting up the budget is easy in Quicken Essentials for Mac. When you first open the budget feature, spending goals per expense category are recommended based on a three-month average of your downloaded transactions.
You can change the goal amounts and add goals for that the automatic doesn't pick up, or remove categories you don't want to track. That's about all there is to budgeting in Quicken Essentials. As noted above, there is no comprehensive budget reporting. If keeping a more detailed budget is important to you, try, or MoneyWell. If you track tax-related budget categories, you can export data for use in any tax software that supports the, and most if not all do.
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To export data to tax software, categories are assigned to tax line items found on IRS tax schedules and forms used for your tax return. It is critical that these assignments are made properly. At the end of the year, click on Tax Schedule found in the toolbar under Reports, then select Export Taxes. This produces a TXF data file, which is then imported into tax software (the tax interview will ask you for it). The great thing about this personal finance software is that it has speedy downloads from a huge selection of financial institutions, and it actually looks and behaves like a Mac application, unlike earlier versions.
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Unfortunately, Quicken Essentials for Mac also lacks some of the features users counted on in earlier Quicken Mac versions, but Intuit is still supporting Quicken Mac 2007. If you need the, investment and other features in Quicken Mac, you should probably keep using it and wait for Quicken Essentials features to expand before you switch.