getting rid of quicken

i’ve used quicken, the personal money management software package, for years and years. before there was quicken, i used check free software to pay bills online.

i haven’t written a check for a bill since about 1989.

so i have some expertise in this area. and my one gripe about switching to a mac was quicken.

it’s not apple’s fault. intuit, the publisher of quicken, just does a lousy job with the mac version of the program. it’s completely inferior to the pc version. i’ve adjusted, but i’m doing a lot of things manually that used to be automated.

here’s why i’m so gripey about quicken.

it’s greed.

intuit chooses to charge banks twice for quicken account file download support–once for pcs and once more for macs. ever wonder why so many banks and financial institutions don’t support quicken for the mac? they choose not to pay again for the smaller installed base.

the real crime is that it is the same file. the only thing that happens is that when you try to download a .qfx file on a mac, the bank is required to “call home” to intuit via the internet. there’s then a check to see if the bank has paid twice. if they haven’t, usage of the file is disabled.

and the quicken mac software itself has an inferior subset of the features available on the pc version. and the quicken data file is not cross-platform, so migration from one platform (pc) to another (mac) is a nightmare. and there are bugs which have been around for several versions which have yet to be fixed.

i could go on, but you get the idea. i’ve detailed all of this more extensively in previous posts, and i really shouldn’t rehash all of this.

but the good news is that i may have found an alternative.

moneydance.

on first glance, it seems to do everything that i need for it to. if it will import my financial information from citibank and from fidelity, something that i can’t do now, then we may have a deal. there’s a free trial, so i have nothing to lose but some time.

of course, i’ll report back.

update: i downloaded moneydance and gave it a very quick test drive. it looks like it would be very good software if you were working from scratch, but i tried to import .qif files exported from quicken 2005 for mac and it was somewhat problematic. i’m sure i could fix the entries but, having done the same thing when i moved from quicken pc to quicken mac, i just don’t think there’s any point to yet again reinventing the wheel. and, even though the features that are present seem to work well, there are many missing features. it might work well for some people’s situation, but not for mine.

aaargh. i used to love using quicken. now it’s somewhat of a chore.

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