In my first looks, Quicken Essentials for Mac does a good job of downloading transactions and matching those transactions to ones that I've entered myself. There are problems with manual matching and unmatching of transactions.
First, a couple of screenshots. Before downloading -- the two top transactions were previously downloaded, and the rest are ones that I entered manually:
After downloading -- blue dots next to the ones that were downloaded and matched. Notice that there's a Safeway transaction that wasn't downloaded; my bank is still listing it as a pending transaction.
The downloading and matching was all accomplished by choosing Update from the Accounts menu (or by using the Update toolbar button), and was fully automated -- no confirmation of matches involved.
Manual Matching and Unmatching
One of the annoyances with older versions of Quicken is that the matching of downloaded transactions would fail:
- I found that it would sometimes mismatch transactions of the same amount -- if I took out $20 in cash, and went to the store and spent $20, it would sometimes swap the two transactions.
- If I had two transactions to the same payee with the same amount, but at different points in time, and only one had cleared, it would match the later transaction instead of the earlier one.
So, I'm naturally distrustful of matching transactions. How do I know it's matched against the right transactions? What if QEM makes a mistake? Can you manually match or unmatch a transaction? Let's take each of these in turn.
