Well, fellow Mac users, who’s the daddy you love to hate? Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit, the makers of Quicken.
Microsoft and Adobe because Office and Photoshop CS apps have more features than a committee could figure out how to use. And Intuit, because their on-again, off-again commitment to the Mac means the best Quicken was released back in 2007.
If you’re ready to dump Quicken and look for greener pastures for your money, you won’t have to go far.
Quicken Essentials or MoneyWell
We were actually excited a year or so ago when Intuit announced Quicken Essentials. It was the company’s new commitment to the Mac.
Unfortunately, Essentials came with bugs and a shortened feature list that didn’t even match Quicken from 2007.
Essentials must mean the lowest number of features a Mac user can put up with and still pay money to Intuit.
Quicken Essentials still gives you multiple accounts for bank, credit card, checking, etc. It even categorizes expenses and gives you a view to where your money went with just a click.
You can set budgets, set up reminders, and track transactions using the best Quicken interface ever. See how pretty Quicken is?
Negatives? It doesn’t import standard QIF files from other Mac money apps (just files from Quicken Windows or Microsoft’s defunct Money).
For example, there’s no forecasting capability. It’s an app that seems to monitor your accounts and not much more.
Sigh.
MoneyWell To The Rescue
We’ve long advocated MoneyWell as the Mac money app for the rest of us, and for good reason. While Quicken languished without updates all those years, MoneyWell was the financial turtle app, plodding along, always improving.
Like most Mac money apps, MoneyWell tracks your money in accounts but uses the time honored envelope budgeting method. The spending buckets make it easier than ever to track where your money went.
Like Quicken, MoneyWell is visual and all the detail you need for each bucket, income or expense, is a click away.
It even handles multiple currencies, and direct connect banking (but not to every bank in the country). Plus, it imports common financial formats, including OFX, QFX, QIF, and CSV.
What tips us in favor of MoneyWell? Simplicity, ease-of-use (what good is a big list of features if you can’t figure out how to use them?), and the iPhone apps.
MoneyWell for iPhone will sync with MoneyWell on your Mac using Dropbox. The advantage here is that pretty much everywhere the check book or credit card goes, the iPhone goes, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of the transaction details until you get back to your Mac.
Fortunately (and sometimes, unfortunately), time marches on. The latest MoneyWell runs on Mac OS X Lion and comes with standard Lion features like full-screen, auto save, auto restore, et al.
Also new is Even-based Budgeting so you can set up MoneyWell easier than previous versions. Transactions can be tagged and therefore tracked in reports easier. There’s also an option to repeat transactions and pop up calendars to make date entry easier.
MoneyWell isn’t an app for managing a stock portfolio or mutual funds, or doing balance sheets or P & L’s. It’s the app for the rest of us, especially those left behind by Quicken’s multi-year denial of Mac users.
It isn’t just MoneyWell that we love. Here are the Top 10 Best Mac Money Apps To Replace Quicken. Or, check out The Mac Money Apps That Quicken Should, Could Be. There’s Part 1 and Part 2.
More love for alternative apps and less love for Quicken.
Listen to Apple’s Siri read my article:
About Bambi Brannan
If you haven’t already checked out YNAB, you need to take a look. It runs on Mac Lion as well as Windoze, is not loaded down with bloatware and really, really helps you get out of the “living from paycheck to paycheck” syndrom. A great budgeting tool.
AccountEdge is a great program if you do not have an accountant or outside company interface with your books. Quickbooks has the “Accountant’s Copy” capability that allows us to send our books to our accountant up through a specified date and continue to work in Quickbooks until our accountant is finished their review and updates. Then we upload their file and everything is done. I wish Accountedge had this feature and could import/export Quickbooks files. To me, it is like having a spreadsheet program that is not compatible with Excel.
FYI…I hate Intuit..I would buy an alternative in a second if it worked for me.
I moved to money dance. I tried iBank free 30 day and encountered immediate problems with downloading brokerage transactions after loading up with Quicken 2006 as imported starting point. Their support for this issue was nonexistent. I thought the iBank approach to manual entry of transactions was too far off from the way Quicken (and finance types) actually process transactions.
Money Dance is pretty good, easy to import and balance accounts. It is quirky in how it handles imported transactions from brokerages, such as interest and dividends, purchase and sale of securities. Not exactly logical inhow it works, but seems to do the job, and does a much better job of utilizing the Mac’s interface.
As much as I see that some people hate Quicken, I don’t have any major issues with it other than having to go to Essentials for Lion compatibility. It is nice to see good alternatives.
Perhaps this is the kick in the pants Intuit needs. I’d like to see the ability to enter a transaction on my iPhone or iPad and have it update the register on my MBP at home so I can dispose of the receipt instead of having it stuffed in my jeans until I get home.
Don’t forget to check out SEE Finance. All of the features of Moneywell, plus it outputs TIF files, which save a lot more time than the MW forum hosts suggest.
Review by L. Hughes for Office 2008 for Mac, Home and Student Edition (3 User Edition) (Mac) Rating: I am by no means a cupeotmr genius but talking from a novice point of view I have to say that after purchasing this product 3 months ago I have been perfectly happy with it. I previously had the office 2004 for MAC which admittedly was perhaps a little more user friendly and generally straight forward, but decided to upgrade to the new Office 2008 when I purchased a new iMac.I generally only use Word and Excel, occasionally Powerpoint, and they serve the purpose that they are there for. After a little bit of getting used to, I’ve figured most things out, although creating web pages with the Word is not as simple as it was with 2004, and would happily recommend it to a friend. I am currently using it with Leopard operating system.If you simply want to be able to create Windows compatible documents then this pack should give you everything you need. I use mine for writing word documents and creating spreadsheets and transferring these between my Windows based PC at work and my iMac at home. For this everything serves the purpose well.