They thought it would be to their advantage to use their marketing and demographic expertise to give our grandmothers a program they could enjoy while still using a pencil and paper to do most of the work.

How futuristic of them.

I hope another financial software company takes advantage of this golden window of opportunity and slam dunks Quicken.

If their plan is to bring advanced capabilities to an online plateform for Mac users in the future, than they should say so.

The loss of tracking buys and sells is a deal-breaker for me. Without that data, how can I use the program for looking back to old purchases/sells so that I can determine my cost basis? I have data from stock purchased over 10 years ago. Why would I want to lose that information??

Oh, and you can move the columns around! That was cool, but not essential… oh well. Yes, I’m a Mac guy, but that was not the reason I got QEM; I wanted to be native on my new MacBook Pro, but I would have been perfectly happy with QH&B 2009 had I known the reporting was not up to par. Oh well, serves me well. I just hope they update soon.

To tell the truth, I never used the advanced functionality, so that part doesn’t bug me. I used Money as a glorified spreadsheet and never downloaded data, paid bills through it, etc. I prefer to go to my bank/cc websites and manually enter my transactions. It’s just personal preference. QEM does allow me to do this, but not easily. It’s not as quick to enter them and scheduled transactions are a real pain.

There are several basic functions that I used all the time that I miss dearly though. I never used Quicken before, so I don’t know if their other/previous products had these functions or not. Maybe it was just Money that had them.

1) I want a column to see a C for cleared transactions. In QEM you can mark a transaction as cleared, but there’s no indication on the register if you have marked it. You have to change the filter to see which ones aren’t cleared. I want to just be able to glance at it! Plus, I don’t want to waste my time clearing transactions that have already been cleared.

2) I would love to have a follow-up flag. In Money, I would flag all my transactions when I scheduled their payment online. Since I pre-planned everything and had several months worth of bills already entered, it helped to see which ones I had already set up and which ones hadn’t arrived, etc. I would clear the flag when it cleared the bank. This was immensely helpful to see which checks hadn’t cleared yet. For now, I’m using the notes field in QEM to attempt to handle this. I mark “S” when it is scheduled and delete it when it is cleared. Any checks that haven’t cleared with still have the “S.” It’s not ideal, but it’ll do.

3) If you use the scheduled transactions, you cannot change the value unless you mark it as “Paid.” You can change all future scheduled transactions, but you can’t change a single one.

Even with all of this headache, I’m planning to continue using it. Like I stated before, I’m tired of launching the VM every time I pay a bill. It is for this reason and this reason only that I will continue to use QEM.

I just installed the Windows Business Edition onto the virtual machine. It’s a little inconvenient to get into it, but it works well and has the features missing from Mint that I really need…such as reconciling transactions and being able to record who I write a check to. (Honestly…how much longer can Mint go before they implement that?!?)

After I made the switch to Mac, I was less than perfectly pleased with the version of Quicken for Mac available at the time — its functionality seemed prehistoric, and it “disappeared” all my investment data.

That notwithstanding, I stuck with it because of the difficulty of moving large quantities of data to another program.

Getting laid off my job, however, provided a golden opportunity to consolidate and simplify the finances. Coincidentally, I was canned on December 31, making it easy to start everything anew in Excel.

If your finances are simple enough that you can do your taxes yourself, it makes sense to use one of the applications in the Cloud. If you have to send your data to a tax professional, Excel will do as well as Quicken.

I was already tracking my investment data in Excel — it doesn’t absorb data from the Web, but how hard is it, really, to do your own updates? The beauty of Excel is that it works on all platforms and doesn’t quit working just because Microsoft issues a new version.

To help address the investment question: The product does not allow for an investment account import NOR does it allow for the user to enter transaction information manually. It essentially downloads a “snapshot” of your daily investment account information when you do an on-line update; and God help you if your financial service provider does not offer web connect- then your just plane screwed with no ability to track investment account information! To me, the investment tracking resembled something you’d see in the on-line financial offerings like Quicken.com or Mint.com (now owned by Intuit).

Seriously Intuit, you never should have released this version. You had YEARS to come up with a decent solution for a growing market segment drooling over a dynamic product such as what you offer with the Windows platform. I know I can run Windows on my Mac, using a program like Parallels, but why bother with the OS cost and all the security updates when all I really would use would be Quicken?! Even The Quicken Essentials Forum (a large quick link button is provided through the software in the lower right corner of the program) is filled with nothing but negative comments about the product- loyal users are even sharing to others on how to return the product for their money back. This has to be a PR nightmare for Intuit.

After playing around a few days with it, I determining that I’d be more frustrated using this lame version than sticking to my older version, I applied for the money back guarantee posted in the Quicken Forum by another 10+ year Intuit customer.

As to the export issue, I tried a million ways to make it work – even copying and pasting. No luck. Without that, Quicken is useless to me, so I very snottily took them up on their money-back guarantee. I even offered to provide feedback about the issues but shocking, no one has followed up.

I actually speculated that this program is a jab at Mac users as people who like pretty things and don’t need to worry about money – because sure, it’s pretty, but good luck figuring out how much money you have.