It’s been a crazy month on the Quicken Mac team. We’ve hired 2 new outstanding Mac developers who are already contributing to the project. We have also been working tirelessly on 3 big features: 12-Month budgets, As of Date for investments which marketing is calling Portfolio Time Machine and Direct Connect Bill Pay support in scheduled transactions. Thanks to all of our dedicated beta testers who provided us bugs and feedback on these new features. The 12-Month budget we’re releasing today is a lot better because of the hard work of our team but also the great input from our beta community. I think there’s a world of difference between Beta 1 and what you’ll see in 3.3. If you want to join our beta program you can
click here.
As always, we’re releasing 3.3 in small spurts so not everyone will be able to get the update today but it should be widely available to everyone in a week unless we find a major issue. For those of you who are able to upgrade, please let us know if you find any issues and report them here in the forum post. This way we can find and fix new 3.3 issues quickly. Please try to keep issues to just the 3.3 release to keep this forum focused on just these issues. Once it looks like 3.3 is a solid release we’ll submit it to Apple for their review to update Mac App Store customers. It can take up to 10 days for Apple to approve a release when they are busy but hopefully this is a slow time for them and we’ll be able to get the release out quickly to Mac App Store customers.
Here are more details about the new features.
12-Month Budgets- We’ve added the ability to plan and track a budget over a 12-month period. This is a huge improvement over our previous single month budget feature and was the number 1 requested feature from our Quicken.com voting page. If there is a feature you want, please go to that page to add your suggestions.
- We’ll automatically create a new budget with default values from your previous year’s income and expenses. You can then edit categories and values in the budget set-up screen. There’s also a feature that will copy a budget value to other months.
- We also have a 12-Month budget view that shows you actual and budgeted values and a chart that provides a quick way to see whether you’re on target, under or over budget.
- There is also a Summary column that allows you to see how you’re doing compared to your entire year's budget or up to the current month.
- We have also removed the ability to budget based on tags. This was added in Quicken Essentials but Quicken Windows never supported this feature and it became clear why since it made the 12-Month budget overly complex since tag totals could overlap and cause double counting with category totals. We also have statistics that show only .08% of users created a tag budget so there's are only a handful of people that use it. Because of both these facts, we decided to remove this feature from the product. Of course if you are one of the people that used this feature this won’t be great news. We’re going to automatically create a tag report for you that will do a similar thing but we also ask for your feedback so we can better understand how you used this feature which will help our planning in the future.
Portfolio Time Machine (Investment As of Date)
- This feature is fairly simple but really powerful. This was a feature that many of our investor customers were holding out for before they stopped using Quicken 2007 or their Windows VMs. Basically this feature allows you to change the date of your portfolio view after which all the numbers “go back in time” and display the numbers of your account on this entered date. You may want to do this if you are reconciling your account with a brokerage statement or if you’re trying to do your taxes and want historical information or maybe you’re just curious to help inform your investing strategy.
Direct Bill Pay and Scheduled Transactions
- Basically Direct Bill Pay didn’t work with Scheduled Transactions. Thank you to all of you who reported this issue in the 3.2 forum post. This was a complete miss on our part and just didn’t work so it’s not even a bug. We had to do a bunch of stuff and planning to make it work. Please give it a try. I hope it’s working as you expect but if it's not, report back here and let us know.
This release also includes tons of great stability fixes. Please refer to the
release notes to see if we fixed one of your issues.
Thanks again for using Quicken and we hope you like this free feature upgrade.
The Quicken Mac Team
5/5 UPDATE: Today we're starting to roll out 3.3.1 which has a few bug fixes to 3.3.0. We expect this release to be available to everyone within a week except for Mac App Store customers. It takes a little longer for App Store because Apple has to approve the release. I'll report back here when it's also available to App Store customers.
5/6 UPDATE: 3.3.0 and 3.3.1 are now being used by about 30% of our customers. If all goes well we'll open up the release to everyone including App Store customers on Monday. Apple was incredibly fast with their review this time so we're good to go a lot earlier than we expected.
5/9 UPDATE: 3.3.1 is released to everyone including Mac App Store customers.
