Powerful but disappointing personal finance suite

Quicken Essentials for Mac is a powerful personal finance suite for Macs that aims to bring all of your finance needs under one umbrella.

Quicken Essentials for Mac is the successor to Quicken 2007 and has been a long time in coming. Many may be surprised by how bloated it has become. Quicken Essentials for Mac certainly tries to fit a lot in – it allows you to view all of your bank accounts in one place within a heavily revamped interface that aims to make things clearer.

Quicken Essentials for Mac automatically categorizes transactions so you can see where your money is going plus snapshots of upcoming bills and paychecks. It also supports importing of data from earlier versions of Quicken as well as the Windows version. Annoyingly however, major features such as the ability to pay bills, store investment transaction history and export to TurboTax have been dropped in this version. Quicken Essentials for Mac also leaves something to desired on its much vaunted reporting functions for many users. The way it handles calculations of money in and out isn’t as straightforward as it should be and you can’t arrange categories in batches very easily has been noted. It’s also rather annoying that there is not trial version available with which to assess whether its worth trusting Quicken Essentials with your finances.

Quicken Essentials for Mac is a powerful finance suite but the decision to drop many online features and lack of improvement in certain areas mean it will be a disappointment to dedicated Quicken users.

Bug Fixes Double-clicking an account in the Account Status window will open the register for that account. Files that have the HFS “busy” flag turned on will no longer cause a “File is busy” alert on Lion. Register searches using date ranges will now work properly in all time zones. Register searches will now find values in the Check # column. Direct Connect downloads that have unexpected Bond or Option data will no longer affect the market value calculation. Direct Connect servers that generate invalid OFX DTEND values will no longer prevent future downloads. Direct Connect servers that generate invalid OFX with un-escaped ampersands will no longer prevent downloads. Direct Connect connections now time out after 3 minutes instead of 30 seconds. Transactions that contain illegal characters (like tab, new line, and return) are no longer skipped when importing a Quicken 2007 file. Accounts that have a Last Check Number of 0 are no longer skipped when importing a Quicken 2007 file. Importing a Quicken 2007 file containing multiple accounts that have the same online banking settings will no longer cause some accounts to be skipped. Transactions that have split lines which do not add up to equal the transaction amount will no longer be skipped when importing a Quicken 2007 file.

Changes

• Bug Fixes Double-clicking an account in the Account Status window will open the register for that account. Files that have the HFS “busy” flag turned on will no longer cause a “File is busy” alert on Lion. Register searches using date ranges will now work properly in all time zones. Register searches will now find values in the Check # column. Direct Connect downloads that have unexpected Bond or Option data will no longer affect the market value calculation. Direct Connect servers that generate invalid OFX DTEND values will no longer prevent future downloads. Direct Connect servers that generate invalid OFX with un-escaped ampersands will no longer prevent downloads. Direct Connect connections now time out after 3 minutes instead of 30 seconds. Transactions that contain illegal characters (like tab, new line, and return) are no longer skipped when importing a Quicken 2007 file. Accounts that have a Last Check Number of 0 are no longer skipped when importing a Quicken 2007 file. Importing a Quicken 2007 file containing multiple accounts that have the same online banking settings will no longer cause some accounts to be skipped. Transactions that have split lines which do not add up to equal the transaction amount will no longer be skipped when importing a Quicken 2007 file.