If you have ever used Quicken for PC or are currently using it, you'll find Quicken Essentials very limited in what it can do. If you're just looking (as stated above) for a checkbook program to keep track of accounts and are not using Quicken for PC, you'll probably find it adequate but I think the online program Mint gets better reviews than Quicken Essentials for Mac. I use Quicken PC via Parallels/VM Fusion to track and make stock purchases, download and pay bills, transfer funds between accounts. Essentials for Mac has very limited functions compared to the PC version.
Many more banks support the PC version than the Mac version. If you have ever used Quicken for PC or are currently using it, you'll find Quicken Essentials very limited in what it can do. If you're just looking (as stated above) for a checkbook program to keep track of accounts and are not using Quicken for PC, you'll probably find it adequate but I think the online program Mint gets better reviews than Quicken Essentials for Mac. I use Quicken PC via Parallels/VM Fusion to track and make stock purchases, download and pay bills, transfer funds between accounts. Essentials for Mac has very limited functions compared to the PC version.
For this, you can also visit Quicken telephone support site to know more about uninstall Quicken Essentials from your Mac in an instant manner. Furthermore, you can dial a toll-free Quicken help phone number to get the right technical support for uninstalling Quicken Essentials. Feb 9, 2017 - When opening Quicken for Mac, you see the message Unable to open file. This error can occur if the file was opened incorrectly in a previous.
Many more banks support the PC version than the Mac version. Click to expand.I don't use it to do all of the things you mention (also running PC version) but I do want some basic functions (see my previous post). Will Essentials do those things? I am very leery of putting all of my account info online and where does my history go if they go out of business or decide to discontinue that product? Right now, the only thing I use in Windows is Quicken and I would really like to move to another program because I don't want to pay for a new version of Parallels just to support Mavericks/Quicken. I will probably just use Bootcamp, but that is hardly convenient. I've been using iBank since v3 and have no complaints.
I'm hoping 5.0 adds a few more features (more customizing and smart reports), better searching, etc. I'd like iBank to know if I enter a dollar amount for a specific purchase, how long will it take for me to repay the charge based on my previous years spending and income reporting - or have better alerting features - like, hey, we noticed last year you spent $xxx on something - maybe you need to start saving for that purchase again (ie taxes, etc). Click to expand.My situation is a bit different as I purchased Windows and Quicken a long time ago (and recently updated Quicken).
So I would not incur another expense for a couple years (another Quicken update). However, I will have to spend something to update Parallels ($49) in order to run the new OSX.
So I can justify some of the iBank expense by being able to avoid that upgrade. So that's a positive.
I like that they have a 90-day trial. That should be long enough to put it through it's paces. Well, I tried iBank.
After a few tries at getting my Quicken 2013 data in correctly (which really was pretty easy) it came pretty close to meeting by basic needs. The killer: To download credit card transactions I had to use their browser to navigate to my CC site and manually download the transactions for the activity period I wanted (my nationally known CC company was not supported by iBank). All came in uncategorized (and I have a lot of them). Which means I have to manually categorize each CC transaction.
Quicken has direct download with my CC company, transactions come in categorized and if I change the categorization, Quicken will learn and automatically add the correct categorization the next time transaction source appears. Sorry iBank, you came very very close.
I think if you had a relationship with my CC company I would have gone with you. If you are considering this app, you might want to go to their website and navigate to a list of direct download supported financial institutions and check out if your's is listed. Also, I should mention the app did start using 100% of my CPU once while working on it. Had to go into Activity Monitor and shut down the process as Quit was not working. That was a little concerning. We were Quicken users for a long time, however our versions was too old to keep running when we switched to OSX.7 Lion. My wife is the CFO and really liked using Quicken, so we moved to Quicken Essentials after briefly considering our other options.
The move was a bit of a pain, because although Quicken Essentials may run under Lion, the 'Quicken File Exchange Utility' does not. This means if you want to update your old Quicken data, you still have to be running Leopard or Snow Leopard.
I ended up having to pull out an external firewire drive and install Snow Leopard on it just to run this one application. It has functioned fine since then and through all the update to OSX.8.5. It really is a shadow of what Quicken used to be, and what it is on the Windows side. We were Quicken users for a long time, however our versions was too old to keep running when we switched to OSX.7 Lion. My wife is the CFO and really liked using Quicken, so we moved to Quicken Essentials after briefly considering our other options. The move was a bit of a pain, because although Quicken Essentials may run under Lion, the 'Quicken File Exchange Utility' does not.
This means if you want to update your old Quicken data, you still have to be running Leopard or Snow Leopard. I ended up having to pull out an external firewire drive and install Snow Leopard on it just to run this one application.
It has functioned fine since then and through all the update to OSX.8.5. It really is a shadow of what Quicken used to be, and what it is on the Windows side.