Sunday, April 25, 2010

Converting old Quicken Files for use with Quicken Essentials for Mac

If you've been a Quicken user making the transition to Quicken Essentials for Mac you're probably interested in migrating your old data file. Quicken Essentials for Mac comes with a separate application for translating data files, the Quicken File Exchange Utility. Let's see how well this utility works.

Friday, April 23, 2010

$20 rebate for Quicken Essentials for Mac Early Adopters; Improvements Promised

Intuit has announced today that they are dropping the price for Quicken Essentials for Mac from $69 to $49, and is offering a $20 rebate to those of us who bought the software before April 19, 2010. Go to quicken.com/macrefund to find out the details of this rebate. Act fast -- the rebate period ends on May 31st.

In the same email that announced the rebate, the Quicken team has made promises of updates in the months to come. By the end of April, you'll be able to password-protect your data file and export transaction data to spreadsheets. By August, they're promising that we'll be able to:


  • Get a complete picture of current net worth by entering investment holdings from brokerages that do not connect to Quicken
  • Better understand spending by comparing between different time periods
  • Export tax-deductible expenses to tax filing programs like TurboTax
  • Track a budget across several months
We welcome these changes, and we'll check 'em out when we get them. (The second bullet point sounds like they're talking about the comparison report, which we noted was missing in action in our post about reports).

Update 4/24/10: Feel free to use this feedback form to tell Intuit what you think about Quicken Essentials for Mac.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Reports in Quicken Essentials for Mac

This is the latest in our series deconstructing Quicken Essentials for Mac.

Quicken Essentials for Mac comes with a significantly reduced set of reports, as compared to previous versions of Quicken. There are essentially three different types of reports:


  • A monthly summary of transactions
  • A category summary report
  • A "spending cloud"


I've already given my opinion on the spending cloud. Let's focus on the other two reports.