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Intuit Debuts Rebuilt Quicken Essentials for Mac

Thursday February 25, 2010 7:19 am PST by Eric Slivka

Intuit today announced the release of Quicken Essentials for Mac (QEM), a complete rebuild of the company's personal financial management application.

QEM launches a new era for Quicken on the Mac. It marks Intuit's first Mac-native application for Quicken, that is, a product developed specifically to run on a Mac operating system, instead of adapting a product originally designed for a PC. QEM's features serve a broad array of essential customer needs, focusing on quick set-up, ease-of-use, and Mac-like intuitiveness in design and workflow. The redesign reflects the influence of the Mint.com product team and its deep experience with Apple products.

Walt Mossberg offers a review of the new Quicken, finding "seriously mixed feelings" for the update. Mossberg notes that the application now benefits from a true Mac look and feel, along with updated data conversion from Windows versions and more banking interface options. QEM, however, also feels to Mossberg like a stripped-down version of Quicken for Windows and even loses some features that were present in Quicken 2007 for Mac.

Most important, Quicken Essentials doesn't display, or even allow you to enter or edit, individual transactions in investment accounts. It only shows a snapshot of the current status and value of the overall investment account and of the securities or funds it holds. It also lacks a bill-paying feature. And it can't export your data to Intuit's popular TurboTax program. Even the much-maligned older Mac version could do these three things.

Mossberg reports that the Mint team now in charge of the division has conceded that the Mac version is missing some important features and is currently targeted at users new to personal finance software with only basic needs. The company plans, however, to add such features as detailed investment tracking and bill pay to a future update.

Intuit announced in early 2008 that it would be rewriting Quicken for the Mac platform, and was expecting at that time to release the new version later that year. After several delays and another complete ground-up rebuild, Intuit committed last July to a February 2010 release that it met with today's launch.

Quicken Essentials for Mac is available via CD-ROM or direct download for $69.99, or from Amazon for $59.99.
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MacDawg
29 months ago
I have used Quicken on the Mac since 1991
It has not added any significant value in many years and seriously lagged behind its Windows counterpart

It is not surprising this long anticipated release would be a disappointment
It was pretty much expected to be a watered down and neutered version

Meh
In other news, the sun came up today
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Anthropogenesis
29 months ago
Does everything their own site, mint.com, does, but for a lot of money.

No thanks.
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bigjohn
29 months ago
It's a little shocking that a software company can so underserve a burgeoning sector of the market as much as Intuit does.

This is what they've spent so much time working on, a stripped down version of a product already released?

I hope they notify me when Quicken Pro for Mac is available.
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Bodhi395
29 months ago
If they make a similar version for the iPad, I'll buy it in a second.
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bassplayer13
29 months ago
If they discount it to say $14.99, I would buy it in a second. :cool: $69.99 for this? I think not.
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waywardsage
29 months ago
Finally. I was waiting for this for a while. I made the switch to Mac a while back and didn't want to install windows just to run Quicken.
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danielwsmithee
29 months ago
Since it essentially mint.com running locally, what is the point. With mint.com I can access it from anywhere, get a free iPhone App, with all the same features.

Why not just call the thing mint and have it sync with the mint.com server and make it cheap $10-20. I think they would have a lot more success.
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Cameront9
29 months ago
$70? Ridiculous pricing.
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0racle
29 months ago
The last time that a major software company announced something special for the Mac by writing a whole new app from scratch instead of porting the existing one we got Entourage instead of Outlook from MS.

And it sounds like Intuit just shipped their version of Entourage.
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roland.g
29 months ago
For the last year or so I was part of the beta test for this which was originally called Quicken Financial Life for Mac. A lot of the better features came along in recent builds and has seen great improvement since the start of the beta process. While I agree that the investment and export features are a disappointment, I think there are quite a few really nice features in this release and am looking forward to using it. It simplifies a lot of the process for the home user to pull CC and banking information into software, categorize and analyze their spending and budgets. I looked at a lot of other Mac financial softwares recently such as MoneyWell, SeeFinance, Money3 and almost every other software out there and many of them missed the boat on interface and reporting. This release will probably have bugs and still need improvement as it is a v1.0 of this incarnation for Quicken, but I think it has the potential through updates not only for bug fixes but for additional features to be a really good home solution. I pre-ordered mine and will be receiving it by early next week.
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