I have been patiently awaiting the arrival the the new Quicken for Mac product. The Unofficial Apple Web Log says the Quicken Essentials for Mac (formally Quicken Financial Life for Mac, formally Quicken for Mac) is actually, finally available for pre order. It will be released February 2010. Yet, It cannot do the one single thing that I need it to do.
3. Can I pay my bills within Quicken?
While you cannot pay bills within the product itself (“direct bill pay”), you can track your bills and make sure you have enough cash to pay them when they’re due. A few alternatives available include using Quicken Mac 2007 or using the bill pay functionality on Quicken Bill Pay.
Downloading transactions from my bank is a huge time saver, but paying them directly within a single application, using several banks, is a even bigger time saver. So much more that I’m wiling to suffer using a crappy three year old application to do so. As far as I can tell, iBank doesn’t do this.
It does every thing every other financial app on the mac does, just not as good and doesn’t include the feature that I use Quicken for the most. I wonder if I will have to wait another three years for this to get added back into the product.
Greg, I have been trying to figure out if Quicken Essentials is an upgrade of Quicken 2007 for the Mac or a stripped down program for folks new to Quicken. Can you answer me on this? Cannot get an answer out of Intuit.
Judging from your and other comments I have read, there are a lot of Mac folks unhappy with Intuit!
Appreciate your help.
j.
It’s the next version of Quicken for Mac, but I wouldn’t call it an upgrade. Although they have improved many aspects of the program they left quite a bit out. I would hope that it becomes feature comparable in a few more versions after this one.
@Greg Smith
I am one of those people pretty unhappy with Intuit. I have been using Quicken and TurboTax on Windows from almost the beginning. I wanted to move everything to my Mac. I thought Quicken Essentials was finally the solution. I ordered it. Almost immediately, I learned on the forums that Quicken Essentials does not work with TurboTax. Therefore, no use to me. I tried to cancel the order next morning since it was to not be shipped for several days. After a lot of hastle with Customer Service (oxymoron), I was told that they have to ship it to me and I will then have to reply for a refund and ship it back. I have now discovered iBank and it seems to work well. This is my first step to get away from Intuit altogether. Wish I had done so before.