Quicken Essentials for Mac available for pre-order

I foolishly just purchased Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac, thinking it would at least be no worse than Quicken 2005, which has been usable. I actuality, they have added lots of glitz and taken away substantive pieces. You can follow investments *only* if you are able to download same from the investment website--which 3 of 4 of the companies with which we deal do not support. No manual entries allowed for investments. Wells Fargo, not exactly a small firm, is not on their banking list, though you can at least download from their site and dump into this version of Quicken, which was true of 2005 too.

I is far less intuitive than was 2005, and I have yet to find a single feature that I thought was better. I have asked for a refund.

I was a beta tester for the new Quicken Mac program and gave up on them. They didn't seem to give a darn about doing a good job, and they gave the project to a young guy with no experience who botched the whole thing.

The reason it is so limited is because they couldn't get any resources from Intuit to get the job done, and the developers were clueless about how to write a good piece of financial software (I think they were all new hires.)

Terrible.

I use iBank and love their iphone app that automatically syncs with the main app. It isn't perfect (reports and loan implementation could be better) but they are improving it and are a 100% mac developer.

Anyway, iBank has been doing a good job for me and I really like the mac like interface.

I too love Mint but...

1. Every six weeks or so they break it in such a way as it will not connect to my credit union. It usually stays broken for 3-5 weeks.

2. It still cannot download loan account information from my credit union.

On the other hand, Quicken Online has no problem at all connecting to my credit union and downloading information from all of my credit union accounts. Of course, it doesn't do investment accounts.

So I am still looking for that elusive personal management tool that can do it all and do it reliably. BTW, iBank is not the answer as it is incapable of transferring any type of data from my credit union.

I am a big fan of Mint, but still use Quicken 2003 for one very important reason: future transactions. I can look six months or more into the future in my Quicken register and see potential cash flow issues. Best I can tell, nobody has a good solution for this.

I found this on the Quicken support page for Quicken for Mac: Quicken discontinuation policy

Q. What Quicken 2006 services were discontinued on April 30, 2010?

The following services to Quicken 2007 were discontinued on April 30, 2010:

* Online bill pay
* Downloading financial data from your bank, credit union, credit card, brokerage, 401(k) or mutual fund accounts
* Downloading stock quotes, news headlines and other financial information into Quicken
* Uploading portfolio information from Quicken to Quicken.com
* Access to the investing features on Quicken.com including portfolio tracking, any watch lists you have created, One-Click Scorecardâ„¢, Stock Evaluator and Mutual Fund Evaluator.

Looks like they will force you to upgrade if you want to actually use any online services.

My wife uses Microsoft Money under VMware but it's been discontinued. I wish I knew what was up with money apps, I would have thought that it was a profitable market. However with MS leaving the market and Intuit unable to deliver a suitable replacement I'm not sure where to go next.

I'll give MoneyDance a look but will personally stay far away from the web based solutions.

I'm still using Quicken 2006 and likely to stick with it.

I tried iBank but it couldn't import my data from Quicken. Sigh.

I'm still not going to use any Intuit products! I've moved on to Moneydance and am a happy camper -- I can run it at work or home since it's Java based.. No, there's no speed issues because of that.. It just works!

mint.com is great,
it automatically gets your transactions each night,
creates budgets for you, and has great charts and graphs.

it also automatically categorizes spending for you.

i currently use mint (on web and iphone app)
i also use cha ching (mac app and iphone app)
and squirrel (mac app and iphone app)

quicken 2010 looks promising
(i used to use quicken online and it looks to have similar features)

ibank is very functional, but the interface is so rugged.
not mac like at all.