There was a product, many years ago, called Quicken Online but that was discontinued in 2010. To access the online version you need to have an active subscription. Toan25 Quicken is only available as an annual subscription since the release of Quicken 2018.
![]() ![]() Quicken Version History Mac And WasWhat it is is an overview of the new program, and my observations after putting it to use for two days. Also the subscription sucks but I’ve realized its easier than the regular parallels 11/ windows 7 / quicken upgrade dance I had to do anyway.What follows is not a review of Quicken Essentials—we’ll have that done in the near future. For instance, on August 22nd, 1994, I paid $753 for a 1GB hard drive—ouch!)Finally moved over to the latest version of Quicken for my new Mac and was peeved at how difficult categorizing and splitting even the downloaded transactions was.At the top right of the Transactions window (and all registers) is a Spotlight-like search box. Accounts are grouped by category, each identified by a unique icon.To the right is a summary of your recent spending (we had a tax bill due in January, which explains the large percentage to one item), along with a preview of upcoming bills and an overview of your spending against your budget (not yet set up in my screen shot).Quicken Essentials overview window gives you a summary look at your financesThe new interface is undeniably nicer looking than the old nobody who has used Quicken would ever describe its interface as elegant.There are some useful tools, too—Transactions presents what is essentially a global account register you can use this to enter transactions in any account. Down the left hand side is a list of your accounts, along with some standardized tools at the top and reports at the bottom. The look of the program is completely unlike any version of Quicken ever seen—the default view looks much more like a program from the iLife suite than something from Intuit.In Essentials, the program opens to an Overview window that could easily be described as such. Now developed in Cocoa, you get all the benefits of the best OS X development environment—Services work, for instance, and if you’re used to various text field shortcuts (Control-A to jump to the beginngin of a field), those all work too. After you download your data, your operating system should.As you may have read by now, Quicken Essentials is a ground-up rewrite of Quicken.Those who found Quicken overly complex for their basic needs will probably find Essentials perfectly satisfying.My test import worked quite well—it took about 30 minutes, and brought over every single transaction without any obvious failures. Those who utilize most of the features of Quicken 2006/2007 (especially related to investments, taxes, and paying bills within the program) will find Essentials disappointing. Accounts Summary presents a summary by account, though you can’t drill down into it.I think Quicken Essentials will get different responses from different people, based on their own backgrounds.![]() If you do any trading at all, and want information at hand instead of only on your brokerage’s web site, Essentials will disappoint you.Even worse is that if you happen to have accounts at an institution that doesn’t offer direct or web downloads of your data, you’re out of luck: There’s no way to manually enter securities and balances in Essentials. (We don’t use the tax or bill pay features, so I don’t miss those in my use of Quicken.) When I interviewed Patzer, he implied that Essentials would be able to track investments, but not handle some “more complex” transactions.The reality is that Essentials can only track investments that it can download—and even then, all it tracks is your current position in those accounts. That limitation? The investments section of the program is quite a letdown in this version. For me, though, I like to be able to easily see and work with my primary accounts without closing and/or shuffling windows, and I can’t do that in Essentials. So where I could easily see two windows side-by-side on our 20” iMac, I can’t do that in Essentials unless I size one of them to require horizontal scrolling.If you only look at one account at a time, this won’t be a problem. Essentials eschews the multi-row layout of Quicken’s registers for a much wider single-row columnar table.While this improves readability, it means you’ve got to have a really wide monitor if you want to look at two accounts side-by-side without scrolling. You can’t use the keyboard to select an item in the picker, you must use your mouse. There are pickers for not just category and account, but even payee.Unfortunately, using these pickers is just painful. A picker is a pop-up window with ‘bubbles’ containing the choices for whatever item you may have clicked on. Add install libary for arduino macFor more help, there’s a button that links to the Intuit Live Community, which is basically a forum-like web page that opens in your browser. You can’t avoid them when customizing reports, however, and that’s a real shame—with 100+ categories and 50+ accounts, the pickers are a substantial waste of time when creating reports.For a brand-new program, I was surprised to find that Essentials lacks any real built-in help there’s just a Getting Started manual. Ugh.Thankfully, you can disable the pickers in the register view, and you can then use the keyboard and get the same auto-completion features as exist in Quicken 2007/2006. You must tediously click each and every item you wish to select, scrolling slowly through a hard-to-read list of bubbles. You can’t even drag-select multiple items. While this may not bother everyone, it’s grabs my eye every time I see a screen in Essentials, because it’s just fundamentally wrong.So will Essentials succeed? Possibly—for those using Quicken who don’t rely on TurboTax integration, the investment tools, or the bill pay feature, Essentials will probably be a compelling upgrade, although I find the price a bit steep at $70 (with no discount for existing customers). They must be positive because of the basic accounting equation, Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity.)This problem extends to the account registers, too—payments are shown in red (good!) and as negative values (bad!), even though they’re in their own Payment column. (Liabilities have positive values, just like assets they’re just on the other side of the balance sheet. I managed to crash the program twice doing nothing more than clicking on an item on the screen.For someone with a financial or accounting background, there are even issues with the display of numbers: Essentials shows liabilities as a negative number, which is completely wrong. I saw the spinning gear icon way too often when switching views or creating new reports. You can’t memorize transactions as you could in prior versions.
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