Review by John Faughnan

i’m updating a prior review.

Since I bought this product Intuit has discontinued development of Quicken. They are supposed to sell it to some other vendor. I’ve never seen a software sale of this magnitude work. For that reason alone this would be a two star rather than three star purchase.

What takes it down to 1 star is that today I’m getting Quicken emails about spending patterns. I did not (knowingly) enable online access to my accounts.

Don’t use this product.

——–nThe market for personal finance software is not what it was 15 years ago. It is now a niche market. (The reason why that happened is beyond the scope of an Amazon review.)nnI am sure nobody would develop Quicken for Windows (the gold standard) today. It’s development was funded in a different era, including the painful process of establishing connections to banks. So we can’t compare a new product (Quicken for Mac 2015) to that product. If you want all those features you need to run windows in a Mac VM or do dual boot.

So we compare this product to using a spreadsheet (ugh) or iBank 5. Unfortunately that’s a very hard comparison to make. I mentioned this was a niche market – I’ve not seen any serious head-to-head comparisons from a trusted source.

I opted for this product assuming it leveraged the bank connectivity network funded by Quicken for Windows. It does indeed do that.

It is not a stellar product. It desperately, desperately, needs a manual – but the finance market is now so small that even niche ePublishers won’t write a guide for it. Installation and configuration was quirky. Manual setup of 529 and other non-integrated investment tools is weird. I ran into several UI bugs and usability issues.

There’s no Help file.

On the other hand, after initial setup it’s bringing data in from a variety of investment sources and multiple US bank accounts. That’s something.

I think it’s worth the money. A manual might even make it four stars.