Well…. I’m a fan of financial software. I must admit I love it. I’ve tried Microsoft money before they killed it off, I tried iBank, rudder, Mint, Quicken for windows, quicken for mac, tons of other programs I can’t recall and I must say, my one true favorite was Microsoft money… They really had a solid product. But when Microsoft decided to stop producing and supporting it I had to go elsewhere.
Enter Quicken. I tried quicken on my mac running a VM with windows, but it got to be a pain to have to wait for windows to load to balance my account so I tried Quicken for Mac (Quicken 2007.) It wasn’t THAT bad but it wasn’t anywhere near what the windows product was, but at least it had cash flow forecasting and was easy to use. Well, years had gone by and no new updates. About a year ago I signed up to be in a beta for a new release of quicken coming out and it was horrible! So bad in fact that Quicken stopped the beta and said “we are starting over.” Yes they redesigned the product from the ground up they said…
So when I heard Quicken Essentials for Mac 2010 was being release I was excited, finally a product that was supposed to be worthy of the Mac and do what the customers want, work and work well…. So I pre-ordered the product and waited for today, release day. I downloaded it as soon as I could and installed it and really liked the display when it imported the transactions, very Mac like, really neat. But once the import was over I saw a blank slate. Sure my transactions were there but all the reporting was missing that I was used to. The calendar was gone, no cash flow forecasting. Things I used all the time. I went to the quicken forums thinking I must be missing something and saw dozens of others asking “where is this stuff?”… No answer from quicken.
I’m glad that Quicken is a company that offers full refunds because this product (Quicken Essentials for Mac 2010) just really is a let down. They spent so long working on a version that was supposed to give us Mac users the features in the windows product and what’s sad is Quicken 2007 has far more features then Quicken 2010…. All I can see that is really new is tag clouds which I could care less about, and now thousands more banks to connect to. Ok that’s great buy I don’t use all thousand extra banks, just one and it worked on 2007 so I don’t need more access.
If you are a mac user and looking at Quicken essentials for Mac 2010 I highly advise you wait. I’ve seen so many unhappy customers writing and complaining today and most have said they are asking for refunds, and I too am joining those ranks. I highly expect Quicken to listen to the customer base and release a major update very soon to add in all they are missing.
It’s a shame quicken, a company that size can constantly get it wrong, time and time again when it comes to the mac version of their software. Honestly, the stuff in essentials for mac is what’s available for free on mint.com, another quicken company. So if you want bare basic functionality for free use mint.com, if you want bare basic functionality at a $70 price tag, then buy the latest version of Quicken for Mac.
I will say this, I’ve been trying to get to the refund page on quicken for the last 20 minutes and it keeps timing out… I’ve verified other sites work just fine so it looks like Quicken is getting overloaded right now… Successful release? I don’t think so.
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