You know because you have a bad habit or 20 that. Open About This Mac in the Apple Menu. Your Profile and Settings.Some couldn’t import the full 15 years of data from my Quicken file others lost valuable information in conversion and many just didn’t match the way I thought about recording transactions and running reports, something that Quicken had certainly shaped. Horrors.I have tried nearly every Quicken alternative over the last five years, including Mint and the terrible Quicken Essentials, and none suited me. I pictured myself setting up (as I had before) a virtual machine running an older version of Mac OS X just to keep Quicken 2007 alive. #1577: iPhone 12/12 Pro repair program, fix corrupted Chrome extensions, iCloud Mail custom domains, Chipolo AirTag alternative, 10-digit dialing changesWhat I wanted out of Quicken 2015 for Mac wasn’t improvement so much as a path forward: I wanted to know that when OS X 10.10 Yosemite shipped, I wouldn’t be waiting for Intuit to issue yet another extension on life for Quicken 2007.
Why Is Quicken So Bad? Download Transactions AndBecause I use a large set of custom reports to manage my business — from tracking income to filing city, state, and federal taxes — I’m holding out to see if Intuit addresses the reporting limitations.A bit later in this review, I’ll get into the missing features of importing and reconciling. Some people use Quicken just to enter or download transactions and then check them off, keeping their budget in line and ensuring there are no illegitimate charges. That could be true if you don’t need detailed itemization and summation reports for tracking income and expenses as a sole proprietor or small corporation. After finding much to like about it, including a crisp interface, a better way to specify transaction details, and good connections to online financial accounts, its failure to import my Quicken 2007 reports (honed over 15 years for business and personal tax and other reporting) and its lack of report customization makes it a non-starter.Quicken 2015 could be adequate if you don’t rely on its reporting or don’t mind its simple set of reports. At $74.99, Quicken 2015 is also not cheap, but given the small amount I’ve paid for minor updates to 2007 over the years, I was willing to plop my money down.But for my purposes, Quicken 2015 still isn’t fully baked. That’s great praise given how bad Quicken Essentials was and Intuit’s long-running inability to update its flagship financial software for a platform of customers who desperately wanted a new version.Intuit has done a lousy job with threaded and asynchronous operations. It can take 30 minutes (with mobile sync) to import a large Quicken 2007 file and then sync everything. I know Intuit already tells you that, but you really must close it or the import will mess up completely.Have patience. Don’t leave Quicken 2007 running. I made mistakes so you don’t have to. Intuit has created an up-to-date Mac program that looks like it was written this year, and that acts as expected. I spent almost two hours manually matching transactions to be sure that my records corresponded.A Random Walk Down Quicken 2015 — This new release is crisper and cleaner than Quicken 2007. If you create an online linkage in accounts that already have manual entries, you may be flooded with duplicates. (Quicken 2015 offers multiple levels of undo, but not for every operation, and you can break the chain of undos across accounts and launches.)Match transactions with care. Had I clicked to proceed, I would have wound up with transactions imported into the wrong account and then had to back those out and relink. Quicken attempts to match up accounts you already have with ones on the financial server, but I found a number of mismatches. It’s a good approach, because you rarely need to see those elements in multiple windows at once. The 2015 version integrates the Accounts view directly into the main window, as well as reports, bill reminders, investment views, and budget. Also missing from Quicken 2007 is automatic backup on quit — you’ll need to rely on Time Machine, other backup software, or Dropbox to retrieve older versions ofQuicken 2007 made heavy use of palettes and windows and menu items, which was common in older Mac apps. Clearly, Intuit needs to auto-save preferences, too. After a crash — the only one across many hours of imports and intensive use — all my data changes were saved, but changes to the default column view in every account were gone. If I press Return, that signals “I’m done editing” in most software in Quicken 2015, it advances to the next field if the cursor is in the date or payee/payer field, and accepts the transaction and records it only when the focus is on the category field.If you’re familiar with Smart Payees from Quicken 2007, the change in Quicken 2015 may be maddening. Details, which provides more informationSplits, a feature carried over from earlier Quicken versions to break a transaction into piecesAttachments, for adding photos of receipts and tying into the mobile versionChecks, which let you set up check printing for transactionsAltogether, transaction entry and editing is improved, but it often requires more clicks or pressing Return than should be necessary. And after this many years, there is still no keyboard shortcut to mark an item reconciled, my single most common mouse action in the program?)Click Edit Details, and you get a four-tab view containing: Click the New button to create a transaction or double-click on an existing transaction, and you can modify simple details: date, payee/payer, category, amount, and any other editable columns you choose to display.(Massive irritant: the default view doesn’t show the Reconcile column, which would seemingly be the point of integrating online accounts with a financial app. (You can also click a Columns button at the bottom right of the view.)Entering and reconciling transactions in Quicken 2015’s simplified view is much the same as in the 2007 edition, but Intuit has made improvements in the amount of detail you can attach in this update. For instance, right-click anywhere on the header bar of any view and you can choose columns to show or hide. Launch emulator in the newer version of android studio on macIf there’s a way to edit these rules I haven’t found it, and if it’s really gone, that would mean that all imported entries from 2007 would have changed from storing both the original data and the display/report name to just the plain text of the matched name — reducing utility in my older records!The category entry has also been simultaneously improved and made worse. Quicken 2007 had “learned” all these, and they all collapsed on entry to a single line item.In Quicken 2015, the Smart Payees set of rules has disappeared, and you’re left with a simple text entry. For instance, one grocery store chain in Seattle shows up on my credit card bills as several because each store has a unique number.
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