Will there be a Quicken Home and Business for Mac in the future? (213 Legacy Votes +1 Merged Vote)

Goog1Eyes

Please create quicken Home & Business for Mac. I purchased this subscription and found out that it doesnt have the option on mac after the fact.

Chris_QPW

BTW for a "frame of reference", Quicken Mac doesn't even have a "proper" Premier edition (as compared to the Windows version).  In fact, it can be argued that it is still lacking even Deluxe features (as compared t the Windows version), but I have noted a few things that is does better than the Windows version.

And if we go back in history, we find that Quicken Mac never had Business features.

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

And if we go back in history, we find that Quicken Mac never had Business features.

@Chris_QPW While that's true, I don't see that it has any bearing on the present... or the future. If we go back in history, the Mac had about a 2% market share at one point, too.  We're looking forward, not backward!

There are clearly a significant number of people who have switched from a Windows computer to a Mac, or would like to, but who also want the features in Quicken Home & Business. Whether there are enough people to justify the significant development effort it would take to add those features to a Mac version is something we can only guess at. 

Let's also remember that this Idea thread was encouraged by the product manager for Quicken Mac, who wrote in post #2 of this long-running thread:

"Anyone else interested in this?  We still have quite a bit of functionality to add to Quicken for Mac just to get it even close to Quicken Windows so the reality is it may be some time before we get there but would love to find out how many people are interested in this."

He wrote that a little over 5 years ago, and they are clearly still working on getting Quicken Mac close to Quicken Windows, which is why it seems unlikely that a Home & Business version for Mac will happen anytime soon. But some day? We have no idea what Quicken management's thinking is on this.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs My post was more "put it in context" kind of post.  As in this isn't a feature that was "removed", and it is a feature that is one that you give after you have completed a lot more that was removed or in the case of Premier features never were but are going to be more important to more people than the business features.

BTW even though Mac has gained a lot since that time, it still isn't what you would call overwhelming.


EDIT side note. I wonder if @Quicken Marcus or others for that matter, would have guessed that would take this long.

I think one of main things proved by the rewrite of Quicken Mac is how many much really goes into a program like this, that over time you have to constantly deal with the fact that the world moves on and you have new challenges that you didn't ever expect when you started.

jacobs

Mac total market share isn’t a good indicator of market share for the people who use Quicken. For instance, many businesses remain all-Windows, yet some individuals who use a Windows machine at work have switched to a Mac for their home computer. In any case, the folks at Quicken don’t have to guess because they have metrics on exactly how many Quicken users are on each platform currently. But my point was simply that citing the absence of a Home & Business version for Mac in the past doesn’t have much bearing on whether there will be one in the future.

As for the speed of development of the Mac product, there is no doubt it’s taken far longer than Quicken senior management expected. The CEO has said so, as has Mac product manager Marcus. 

And yes, one has to look only at the recent Schwab connectivity change debacle to see how external issues can steal weeks or months of developers’ time away from things which were on their internal development roadmap.

redseagoby

Intuit TurboTax and Quicken are the only reason I still have to run Windows. Extremely disappointing that I'm paying annually for incomplete functionality.

jacobs

@redseagoby TurboTax runs on Macs; I've been using it for decades. I'm not sure why you'd say you need to run Windows to run TurboTax.

Quicken is a different matter, of course, as there are still significant differences between the Mac and Windows versions.

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

@redseagoby TurboTax runs on Macs; I've been using it for decades. I'm not sure why you'd say you need to run Windows to run TurboTax.

Quicken is a different matter, of course, as there are still significant differences between the Mac and Windows versions.

I wonder it TurboTax for Mac can be imported into Quicken Windows' Tax Planner.  I personally don't use that function anymore, but that might be one consideration.  It gives people a start on planning some tax items for the next year.

BreadMan

In any discussion of a Mac OS Home Bsn version a few more factors need to be considered.

The market research firms all quote PC vs Mac in total and don't break out personal home computer use vs company use at all. Quicken is targeted at the home computer market, so the only metric that matters isn't overall market share, but the installed base of Mac home computers. Apple is on fire right now in terms of Mac sales, with sales increasing 61% from 2019 to 2021. They sold 29 million Mac computers in 2021 alone, with most of them heading into personal home use. For perspective, there are only 120 million households total in the United States.

And then you have the fact that Macs are the preferred platform for almost all of your freelance creative types like photographers, graphic content creators, writers, YouTube creators, etc. You know, the kind of people that have home based businesses. These are your solo or very small teams that Quicken HB is perfect for.

Like many of you, I've gone the Parallels route and am using the PC version for my home based business. BUT... I'm very close to abandoning the PC and going back to the regular Mac version without the HB and finding something else to keep track of my real estate and solo bsn. Why? because it's a royal pain. I have to keep Windows and Parallels updated, backed up and virus free. It's also expensive. Not only do I have to keep up my subscription to the higher priced version of Quicken, I also have to keep paying parallels and will undoubtedly have to purchase and upgrade Windows at some point. To make it all more painful, the whole set up gets slower and slower with time because of software bloat and the inefficiency of emulation.

Yes, I love the consolidated perspective of my finances in Quicken HB, but I'm reaching the end of my patience. On the other hand, I would GLADLY give Quicken another $100 a year on top of what I'm paying them now to have a Mac version of HB.

Chris_QPW

@BreadMan If want to throw sell numbers how about this one 344.3 million Windows PCs were sold in 2021.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW You're missing his point. Yes, there are far more Windows PCs sold each year; Mac sales were about 29 million in 2021. But that's not really relevant to Quicken. A ton more Windows PCs are sold each year because a significant majority of companies use Windows PCs. But (a) the numbers cited are global, where Quicken is only concerned with the US and Canada markets, where Mac usage is higher than worldwide; and (b) of computers purchased for home/personal use, the percentage of Macs is higher than it is when looking at total computer sales.

There are many ways Quicken might want to slide and dice computer platform data. For instance, if they are looking for the next generation of Quicken users, you'd want to look at the breakdown of platforms among young people. If you've been on a college campus in the past decade, you'd see that Mac users positively dominate PC users; as they move into the adult workforce, some switch to Windows PCs over time because of work needs, but the vast majority continue to use a Mac for their personal computer.

While we can all cite market share data and other factors which might be significant, the folks at Quicken don't have to guess. They know precisely how many Quicken users are on Mac versus Windows (including Quicken Windows users running in a VM on a Mac). So they know what the market is, and they know what the trend in platform use has been over the years. And so they know there is a market, as illustrated by this thread, of people who would like to run Quicken Home & Business on a Mac; the only question is whether that market is large enough to justify the significant programming time it would take to create such a product. 

Chris_QPW

@jacobs my point was that we can all throw out sales numbers, but it isn't what really counts like you said.  It is just that I feel it was done to impress people about how Mac is taking over the world or such when it really isn't.  I should have included that point in my comment.

This is really long thread that people think they need to convince Quicken Inc of the value of providing a business version for Mac.  I personally think that is totally unnecessary.  I'm sure they are very aware of that fact that people want this feature.  The reason it hasn't shown up yet isn't because they don't see value in it.  It is because it is a lot of work, they have a lot of features they need to add, some of which are more important to their core users of Quicken Mac.  Even on the Windows side the number of users using Home and Business is a very small amount.  I think there is only like one or two SuperUsers using it.

That is the way it works, need vs difficultly vs current emergencies (which we have been having a lot of lately especially on the Windows side).

The same kind of thing is true for features in Quicken Windows.  There have been ideas for both dark mode and supporting cryptocurrencies in the "Planned" state on the Windows side for years.  There is no doubt they know that people want them, but people are still waiting for them.

BTW I doubt they know which machines are running in VMs, under Mac.

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

BTW I doubt they know which machines are running in VMs, under Mac.

It's easy enough to capture the computer environment information; I don't know whether Quicken Windows reports such info when it "phones home".  

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

Chris_QPW said:

BTW I doubt they know which machines are running in VMs, under Mac.

It's easy enough to capture the computer environment information; I don't know whether Quicken Windows reports such info when it "phones home".  

True, I just don't believe that they are that look at such information even if it is gathered.

I think people give them way too much credit for "knowing things".

dbloyd

I don't see any current posts about H&B for Mac in this thread. It is now needed more than ever as the new Macs with the M1 chip cannot easily run Windows. I just bought a new M1 Mac only to discover that my VMware Fusion partition will not run Windows. Other options to run Windows on a Mac are sketchy.

jacobs

@dbloyd Actually, Parallels runs Windows on M1 Macs. It's not free like Fusion, but it's an available option. While it's possible that Microsoft could in the future decide to break their limited support for ARM chips (like the Apple M1), it's a workable solution now and at least for some time into the future.

As for the future with Quicken, the possibility of a Home & Business Mac version remains shrouded in secrecy as it always has been; whether it's on the drawing board for the future or not has never been shared by the company. It's undoubtedly a big project, and the question is whether they want to devote all those resources to building such a product for the subset of customers who want H&B capabilities versus using that time to continue to add to the overall capabilities of Quicken Mac. 

GeraldL

I would like to see a Mac version of Home and Business. I saw some numbers where it said that Mac users only make up 10% of the users. However, like me, I am running the Windows version of Quicken on my Mac using a VM. And I am sure there are others doing the same thing. So that 10% of users being Mac Users might be more like 25% or 30%.

LMayhem

Please, please create a Mac version of Home and Business. Mac ownership is skyrocketing (I switched to Mac 18 months ago). I am running Home & Business on my Mac using a Windows virtual machine and so want to get away from needing that because there are issues where it occasionally crashes and locks up (only with Quicken, not my other Windows program on the Mac).

LMayhem

Please, please create a Mac version of Home and Business. Mac ownership is skyrocketing (I switched to Mac 18 months ago). I am running Home & Business on my Mac using a Windows virtual machine and so want to get away from needing that because there are issues where it occasionally crashes and locks up (only with Quicken, not my other Windows program on the Mac).

LMayhem

Please, please create a Mac version of Home and Business. Mac ownership is skyrocketing. I switched to Mac 18 months ago. I am running Home & Business on my Mac using a Windows virtual machine and so want to get away from needing that because there are issues where it occasionally crashes and locks up. I will add that is only with Quicken that locks up the VM, not my other Windows program on the Mac.

LMayhem

Please, please create a Mac version of Home and Business. Mac ownership is skyrocketing. I switched to Mac 18 months ago. I am running Home & Business on my Mac using a Windows virtual machine and so want to get away from needing that because there are issues where it occasionally crashes and locks up. I will add that is only with Quicken that locks up the VM, not my other Windows program on the Mac.

LMayhem

Please, please create a Mac version of Home and Business. Mac ownership is skyrocketing. I switched to Mac 18 months ago. I am running Home & Business on my Mac using a Windows virtual machine and so want to get away from needing that because there are issues where it occasionally crashes and locks up. I will add that is only with Quicken that locks up the VM, not my other Windows program on the Mac.

dgunby

I'm surprised there STILL isn't a Mac version for H&B!

Chris_QPW

dgunby said:

I'm surprised there STILL isn't a Mac version for H&B!

I'm not, it is a VERY extensive feature to put in, into a product that hasn't even reached the level of supporting all that was in it before the start of the rewrite in 2006.  And now it looks like they are losing developers.  I haven't seen a post from Quicken Marcus in months, so I suspect he quit.

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

I haven't seen a post from Quicken Marcus in months, so I suspect he quit.

Marcus is still with Quicken in another role, but is no longer Quicken Mac product manager. Quicken Victoria took over that role.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs thanks for the information.

MLoQuick

Is Invoicing functionality on the roadmap for Quicken for Mac? If so, timing?

jacobs

@MLoQuick Invoicing is part of the Quicken Windows product called Home & Business. [EDIT: Your request has been merged into this longstanding thread requesting a Mac Home & Business product. You should jump to the first page of this thread here and add your vote in favor of it. This Idea request has a large number of votes, and more can only help the cause.]

The product teams and executives at Quicken are certainly aware there is desire for a Mac Home & Business product, but implementation would be a major undertaking which would take many months of programmer time away from other priorities on their list — and they have to assess if there is a return on investment for the time and money it would take to build such a product.

Quicken rarely comments on what it will be working on, other than marking some of these Idea threads as "Planned", which means they have agreed to develop the feature and have a spot for it on their development roadmap. And Quicken never comments on when a planned feature will be released, because schedules are ever-changing to due sudden new priorities and complications which extend the planned development timeframe. 

Quicken Anja

Hello @MLoQuick,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

I went ahead and merged your Idea to this active Idea thread regarding this topic.

Thank you!

lms

I just switched from a PC to a Mac and the fact that I cannot see years of invoices or issue new ones is going to make me leave Quicken. This issue was first requested 6 years ago and it hasn't been resolved, which gives me no hope that it will be added any time soon. Unfortunate that I will have to stop using this software.