Quicken Essentials Stopped Working

lisahthomas

I just upgraded to 10.14.3 Mojave, and now my Quicken Essentials won't work. The only thing I use Quicken for is to keep a check register. That is it. Absolutely nothing else. When I make a payment out of my checking account, I manually enter it into Quicken to keep track of how much money I have in my account. I've been doing this for a million years.

How can I get my data back? Is there a version of Quicken I can buy so that I can continue to update my register? I don't want a subscription, as it seems ridiculous to pay $30/year just to enter data into a register.

smayer97

If you do not want to pay annually, purchase the Deluxe version and pay once. Then turn off Auto-renew in your QUicken.com account. Then you can use Quicken in manual mode for as long it stays compatible with your macOS.

Shop around to get the best price.

lisahthomas

If I go that route, do you know if I will be able to import my data from Essentials? 

Thanks!

jacobs

Support for Quicken Essentials was discontinued four years ago, and the last macOS it worked on was El Capitan (10.11), three macOS versions ago.

The successor program to Quicken Essentials was Quicken 2015, followed by Quicken 2016, Quicken 2017, and then the current Quicken Subscription (2018-2019) products. If you want just the basic check register, you could look around online for someone selling any of those pre-subscription versions. (The best option would be Quicken 2017, which has many improvements over the 2015 and 2016 versions). Although automatic downloading for Quicken 2017 will end about a year from now, if you're just entering transactions manually, that won't affect you. You'll be able to keep using Quicken 2017 indefinitely... until inevitably some macOS update will break it. It that point, you'll need to decide to get the lowest-level subscription or find an alternative... but you don't have to cross that bridge for several years.

lisahthomas

I'm open to either option. It might actually be less expensive to get the Deluxe subscription and then turn off the auto renew. But I'd want to make sure I can import the data file from my old version of Quicken. Does anyone know if this would work?

jacobs

Yes, any of the versions from 2015 and beyond will directly import Quicken Essentials data files.