M1 forcing me to Quicken Mac - Gotchas on import & use ?

qfive

With new M1 laptops I need to move to Quicken Mac or some other app, likely Banktivity, as Quicken Windows will no longer run on them as we've been doing for the past 10 years.

Are there gotcha's w/ the import (from Q Win 2015) that I should be aware of? We're mostly checkbook & tax management with limited investment stuff in it.

Once imported, what data is likely to be missing or inaccurate? E.G., what is most important to look for?

Tried this once a couple of years ago and Q Mac was quite awful. Hoping enough improvements have been made that we can stick w/ Quicken.

Thanks,

jacobs

In general, data from Quicken Windows 2015 should import fairly smoothly into the current Quicken Mac.

The import from Windows does not include attachments or reports, and you'll likely want to do some tweaking of what columns appear in your account registers.

If you have investment accounts with BuyX/SellX/DivX transactions (transactions which combine a purchase, sale, or dividend and a transfer to another account), you may find you have to do some manual editing work. (These originally didn't work at all in the conversion, but I think there have been conflicting reports in recent times.) If you have some, but not an unworkable number, it might be worth editing them in Quicken Windows into two separate transactions for the action and then the transfer, to insure they'll import smoothly into Quicken Mac.

Beyond that, it's hard to generalize. Most people have migrated pretty smoothly, but some run into road bumps and a few run into brick walls. There are definitely some Quicken Windows features which don't exist yet in Quicken Mac; you might not even be aware of them, or something may hit you immediately.

We all use Quicken differently, and really the best thing you can do it give it a try. Quicken has a 30-day refund policy, so you can buy a subscription to Quicken, install it on your new Mac, import your Quicken data, and work with it a bit to assess how it works for you. Don't listen to people who say "its terrible," nor to people who say "no problem" -- you need to find out for yourself, using your data and the features in Quicken you use.

What to look for? The most obvious is to check each account balance versus the Windows version of your data. Sometime Quicken inserts placeholder transactions which are easily found and in some cases simply deleted. For your investments, you'll want to check your security holding versus Quicken Windows to make sure all your investment data converted properly. Once your accounts and holdings are accurate, then it's just a matter of using the program to do what you typically do in Quicken, to see if it's viable for you or not.

jacobs

In general, data from Quicken Windows 2015 should import fairly smoothly into the current Quicken Mac.

The import from Windows does not include attachments or reports, and you'll likely want to do some tweaking of what columns appear in your account registers.

If you have investment accounts with BuyX/SellX/DivX transactions (transactions which combine a purchase, sale, or dividend and a transfer to another account), you may find you have to do some manual editing work. (These originally didn't work at all in the conversion, but I think there have been conflicting reports in recent times.) If you have some, but not an unworkable number, it might be worth editing them in Quicken Windows into two separate transactions for the action and then the transfer, to insure they'll import smoothly into Quicken Mac.

Beyond that, it's hard to generalize. Most people have migrated pretty smoothly, but some run into road bumps and a few run into brick walls. There are definitely some Quicken Windows features which don't exist yet in Quicken Mac; you might not even be aware of them, or something may hit you immediately.

We all use Quicken differently, and really the best thing you can do it give it a try. Quicken has a 30-day refund policy, so you can buy a subscription to Quicken, install it on your new Mac, import your Quicken data, and work with it a bit to assess how it works for you. Don't listen to people who say "its terrible," nor to people who say "no problem" -- you need to find out for yourself, using your data and the features in Quicken you use.

What to look for? The most obvious is to check each account balance versus the Windows version of your data. Sometime Quicken inserts placeholder transactions which are easily found and in some cases simply deleted. For your investments, you'll want to check your security holding versus Quicken Windows to make sure all your investment data converted properly. Once your accounts and holdings are accurate, then it's just a matter of using the program to do what you typically do in Quicken, to see if it's viable for you or not.

qfive

Thank you. I read this right after you posted and did an import to Q Mac and so far so good. As you said, a few things to tweak but far better than the last time we tried to migrate.

jacobs

Great. Best of luck moving forward!