Quicken 2018 for Mac – A Long-time User Review

An update to this review for Quicken 2019 for Mac is available here.

Personal financial management is important to me. I’ve always tried to be disciplined when it comes to money, and as a CPA and business planner as my chosen vocation, managing my own money comes pretty naturally. Applying finance strategies I’ve used in managing businesses to my personal finances has paid dividends. Like an accounting system at the office, a well-managed home needs its own financial record keeping. In my case, that system has been the venerable software tool Quicken. What follows is a history of how I’ve used Quicken and reactions to the most recent version of Quicken 2018 for Mac.

Background

I’ve been a user of Quicken personal finance software since 1989. Back then I used a Mac SE, painstakingly capturing every transaction with the proper income or spending category on a nine-inch black and white screen. The discipline of tracking my expenses and using a budget helped me control my spending and keep my focus on long-term financial goals. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I would not be in the financial position I am today without the discipline this software cultivates.

In the 1990s as Microsoft Windows took hold and the days of the Mac waned, I switched over to the PC version of Quicken. My data file had grown so large it no longer fit on a 3 1/2″ floppy drive.  I couldn’t find an easy way to transfer the data file. Quicken offered a “feature” back then to archive (i.e. erase) your financial history, so in a keystroke, I lost all that meticulous bookkeeping of the previous decade. I’m sad about that now as I would have liked to revisit the financial transactions supporting both by frugality and spending extravagance of my twenties. And remind myself of how little I had back then. Oh well.

I switched back to a Mac at home in 2003. It was fun to return to Apple with a beautiful new iMac at home while I used a Dell laptop for work. Quicken wasn’t available on the Mac at that time, so I kept my financial records on the Dell. This was OK because I had compartmentalized the Mac and PC this way: the Mac was for creative work: movies and photos, writing, games, family time. The PC was all business.

Fast forward another ten years. By 2013 everyone in my family was using a Mac, plus iPhones and iPads. I turned in my work laptop in favor of a MacBook Pro, using a virtual PC software program called Parallels to get access to the short list of PC software titles I still needed: an arcane business intelligence tool for work and … Quicken. A Mac version of Quicken was available, but it lacked many of the features that the PC version, like investment tracking and budgets.

New Mac versions of Quicken would come out every year and I would read reviews by unhappy customers lamenting the awfulness of the software. Buggy, lacked many important features, basically a shell of the PC version. And so I kept using Quicken for Windows along with updates to the VM software and waited.

By last summer, the only PC software I still needed to run on a virtual machine was Quicken. Everything else was native Mac.

Last fall Quicken 2017 for Mac was released. And guess what? The early reviews were positive for a change. I spent about an hour reading up on the new software and decided to try it. I might waste $75, but if there’s a chance it can work for me, I would be able to leave the PC software world for good.

The Transition from Windows to Mac

Installation was uneventful in my case. You can either start from scratch or import an existing Quicken file. I was coming from Quicken 2014 for Windows so I chose that option, found my Quicken data file and clicked proceed. I was worried that this process would somehow corrupt my existing Quicken for Windows data file, so I made to sure to make a complete backup before proceeding with this import, but I needn’t have worried. The process created a new data file for the Mac software while leaving the original unchanged and still usable by its Windows counterpart.

During the import process, I watched the progress bar with some trepidation. Fourteen years of some pretty complicated financial transactions made me think this couldn’t really work. The process took about five minutes during which the familiar account bar on the left-hand portion of the screen progressed from a meaningless gobble of positive and negative balances to finally the exact balances I had in the Windows version. That was a nice way to start.

There were a couple problems. A new mystery credit card account appeared with my name followed by the word TEMP, but it had a zero balance so I didn’t worry about it. Later I found that this was a doubling of an actual credit card account that I had opened and closed in the past five years which resulted in a double-posting of the transactions for that account. Once discovered, it was easy to go back and delete the temporary account transactions, but it took some time to discover and I received no warning messages during the import process that this had happened.

My financial institution account logins and passwords did not carry over from the PC version and it was a little confusing at first to figure that out. Setting up online downloading of transactions was pretty straightforward, and once you get the hang of it, maybe easier than on Windows.

Any budgets I had created in Windows did not carry over to the Mac version. It took about 30 minutes to recreate my budget for this year. The budget creation and edit process are a little clunky but no worse than Windows.

With my accounts fully connected to their respective financial institutions and my budget created, I was able to better evaluate the new user interface and capabilities of the Mac version.

Initial Reactions

My initial impressions were mostly positive. Gone was the incredible bloat of 20 years of features added to the legacy Windows product. I don’t need a built-in credit score checker, college/retirement plan, or a maze of menu options to navigate even the simplest thing.

The Mac version is simpler and has most all the essential features intuitively organized and easy to find. Investment tracking is simple but accurate. The register and data entry tools are far better and fit the retina display capabilities of the Mac whereas the PC version ported through Parallels always needed tweaking just to see your transactions.

Reporting is much more basic and less customizable, but I found I was able to get the information I needed from existing reports and from an onscreen analysis that didn’t exist in Windows. Still, It feels like reporting is a work in progress. There’s also no way that I could find to schedule a loan/mortgage payment based on an amortization table which is a weird omission for a personal finance program (more on this in the next Quicken 2018 for Mac section).

A Year Later: Quicken 2018 for Mac

I continued my trial of using the Mac version of Quicken over the course of the last year, choosing the simplicity of a native application. I learned a lot more about the software’s feature set and a growing list of things I missed from the PC version. I let my Quicken for Windows file languish. After 12 months and a lot of financial transactions later, it would take a tremendous effort to reconstruct my financial world in that PC software, so I resigned myself to deal with the good and the bad of the Mac version of the software.

In November, Quicken released a new version for the Mac, Quicken 2018. I waited four weeks to purchase a subscription (more on this later) after reading many, many negative reviews of the update, mostly about the outrage customers felt about being forced to pay each year for a substandard piece of software.

Quicken’s decision to move to a subscription service, alongside so many other software developers this year, didn’t surprise me. In fact, I already considered Quicken a subscription service after having to upgrade every two to three years just to keep bank and credit card downloads working properly. I bought a 27-month subscription from Amazon.com during a Black Friday sale which worked out to be roughly $35 per year for the Premium edition of Quicken. I now have a license for both Mac and PC if I choose to somehow migrate back. That’s like buying the software every two years which is about what I have done over the past decade. I’m OK with this, though I know many, many other customers are upset. In my view, the developers of Quicken have an opportunity to use this steady income from subscriptions to finally make the necessary improvements to the Mac version after so many years. However, if they fail to make improvements and continue to hobble the product after now forcing customers to pay annually, this will hasten their demise, at least on the Mac platform. Quicken developers: you better get to work!

The Premier subscription of Quicken includes free BillPay services and premium telephone support. I made use of this support service after discovering that Quicken was charging me $9.95 per month for BillPay while it should have been free. My phone call was answered promptly and helpfully, and while they couldn’t solve me BillPay issue (I had to call another number and waited 45 minutes on hold), I was pleased to know I can pick up the phone and quickly speak to a technician when I next encounter a Quicken problem.

Once Quicken 2018 for Mac was installed, I had a hard time finding many changes. Loan amortizations are now supported, along with some small changes to investment tracking and bill paying. No improvements to reporting though which I consider to be the biggest drawback of using the Mac.

Take, for example, the common actual vs. budget report that I’ve used to manage my finances for decades. It’s a pretty simple layout: actual, budget and a variance for the current month and year to date. For business or for personal finance, this is the most basic way of measuring whether you’re on plan or not. In Quicken for Windows, this is one of the default reports. Not so in the Mac version. In lieu of a budget report, you get either a grid view of your monthly budget interlaced with actual results, useful if you want to update your budget or a graphical display of one particular month vs. budget which takes up a whole lot of space without conveying much information. Not very useful. As a workaround, I export actual and budget figures out of Quicken to create a proper actual vs. budget report in Excel. I’ve automated this the best I can, but still takes a time each month to update references and labels, and once in Excel, loses its interactivity and drill-down capability.

Another example of reporting shortfalls came to light when I prepared my taxes earlier this year. Quicken tracks all my expenses by category and I needed a simple report of all my charitable contributions for the previous year broken down by payee. Simple, right? In Quicken for Windows, it would have been automatically provided for me by simply drilling down from my summary budget report for the year. In the Mac version, it’s not so easy. After a lot of tweaking, I was able to create a summary report summarized by payee for a particular category, but the report, understood only by a non-finance developer, did not include a total. So, if you flipped through my tax return support for last year, you’d see totals added in pencil for every supporting schedule on my tax return. So basic, and yet still unresolved on the Mac these many years.

Or, how about suppressing zero balance rows in reports? So basic, yet missing. Reporting in Quicken for Mac remains a big disappointment to me in using the software.

Another pet peeve is Quicken’s amnesia when it comes to auto-assigning categories to downloaded banking transactions. I pay the same utility company every month, yet inexplicably, Quicken fails to categorize the transaction. I have to go in and update the transaction with the proper category. This happens with a half-dozen routine expenses, yet many other transactions, particularly from credit cards, are categorized correctly. Perhaps all the bloat of 14 years of financial history in my situation has complicated things, but still … this is such a basic feature in Quicken for Windows that I scratch my head in wonder with the Mac version.

Quicken for Mac has an auto-backup feature, similar to Windows, but is much more intrusive to the user. Every time you quit the program, it launches a dialog box with a spinning gear while it backs up, taking over your system while it works, visible even if you move to another application. In Windows, this was completely invisible. Sloppy programming on the Mac.

Performance is OK, even with a fairly large data file of financial history, but any transaction searches will result in a beach ball delay for a few seconds. Just slightly annoying vs. the zero delay in the Windows counter-part. I’m running Quicken on a new souped-up iMac, so others with older computer hardware might find that performance suffers much more on the Mac.

Welcome to the Hotel California

Perhaps the biggest reservation I have with the Mac version of Quicken relates its file export limitations. As I described earlier, the process of exporting a Quicken to Windows file to the Mac worked pretty well. However, the reverse process of going from the Mac to Windows, considered now an industry file standard for personal finance software, has serious limitations. Investment accounts, for example, simply won’t transfer. In my test to go from Quicken 2018 for Mac to Quicken 2018 for Windows, I had an astounding 26,000 errors which resulted in a Quicken data file that was completely unusable. This limitation affects not only your ability to move back to the more robust Windows version of Quicken should you grow tired of the Mac’s limitations, but also impacts your ability to switch to other personal finance software products on the Mac if you decide to give up on Quicken altogether. The lack of this common export function feels intentional to me to keep customers from leaving the product.

If you are using the Windows version of Quicken and you have investment accounts, you should be very cautious before migrating to the Mac version. You’ll likely be able to move everything over to the Mac, but you’ll be stuck with limited choices of ever leaving. This is probably the biggest disappointment I have with Quicken 2018. Shame on Quicken for taking your financial data hostage.

Closing Thoughts

So, after all these years, where do I stand with Quicken for Mac? I’d summarize my current feeling as grudging acceptance. Quicken for Mac is good enough that I’m not willing to go through all the work to revert back to the Windows version and deal with running a virtual PC on my Mac. I’m disappointed that my Mac data file can’t export to other software programs. I hope with a subscription revenue stream that future Quicken versions will finally improve enough to be on par with Windows, though past experience makes me very skeptical. If you find yourself a guest in this Hotel California, stop by and say hello.