Review by Michael

I have used Quicken over the years until it got to be a chore and got away from it (also because I had switched to a Mac and the Mac version wasn’t up to the PC version). When I saw that Quicken Essentials for Mac was launching I was intrigued. Reading many of the reviews I hesitated in getting it but decided to do so in light of their guarantee. I kept the receipt handy because I anticipated returning it for a refund, but have now concluded I will keep it and use it daily.

First of all, as so many have stated, this does not offer many of the features of other prior Quicken versions for the Mac, let alone the PC versions. That being said, for what it offers I am happy with it. I need something that will make tracking things easy for me. I love the ability to be able to download just about all of my banking, credit card, etc. info. I think of all the accounts I set up, only one or two were not possible for synchronizing over the internet.

I did run into some issues with initial balance adjustments that were not right. And with two separate transactions that had the same vendor and dollar amounts on the same day not downloading (only one of the two did), no doubt the program thinking they were duplicates. (I now do those transactions on different days.) It also took a while to go through everything and make sure the initial figures were right.

My biggest complaint is no password protection. No password protection! What are they thinking of in this day and age? I expect that will be addressed in a future update.

I love the graphics, the interface, the reports I get (you can tailor them to give you what you want) and the ease of the downloads.

Yes, it would be nice to track my investments and have the history, price changes, etc. available to me. I miss that and hope that can be rectified down the road.

I didn’t pay bills in the past with Quicken so I don’t miss that function.

But for the simple daily downloads and tracking of many of my financial transactions in a clean, appealing interface, I am happy with this product. They make it quite clear what this version can do and what it can’t.

For what it does I am quite happy and it fits my needs.