Features that aren't available in Mac currently Frustration [edited]

PFM

When will we get Ka-Ching? Why do we have to enter "Command + N" to enter a new transaction? When will get back a "reconciliation report?" If the Quicken Team was truly interested in the Mac community, I believe that they could and should look back to Quicken for Mac version 7 and simply update it to the 64 bit platform and maintain all the great characteristics of a great program!

jacobs

@PFM  I cannot (and don't) speak for the Quicken development team — I'm just a fellow long-time Quicken user — but from things they have said over the years, I can offer some thoughts...

In terms of mimicking Quicken 2007, they said from the outset that they weren't going to do that because while it contained many great features, it also had features very few people used, and because of two decades of development, was hard to continue to modify/update/enhance. Their goal was to provide a modern application which could keep up with ongoing changes in Apple's technologies, to provide a true Mac experience, to provide the features people need and want, and to be compatible with other parts of the Quicken ecosystem (e.g. the mobile app and web interface, which also work with Quicken Windows). Layer on top of that the reality that a small development tam can only tackle so many projects at a time, and that some of them take months of work with very complex code. The result: there are far more user requests for features than the developers can churn out, for now and the foreseeable future. So they prioritize the work they feel will have the greatest impact on the greatest number of users, and especially those things which Quicken currently cannot do at all as opposed to things which could be refined to work better.

You list three things of interest to you, and conclude that their absence means the Mac development team isn't "truly interested in the Mac community." I think that's an incorrect conclusion or accusation. The development team has hundreds of user feature requests. We users all use Quicken differently, depend on different features, and want different functionality to make our lives easier. Your three features wouldn't be on my Top 10 list, or my Top 25 list, of things I'd like the developers to implement! Of course, that doesn't mean your issues aren't worthy — it just illustrates we all have different priorities/needs/wishes for development, and that it will take years for them to work through the very large list of feature requests.

When will we get Ka-Ching?

I assume you mean a sound when you enter a transaction? I've seen a few requests for this, but not many, over the seven years that the modern Quicken has been on the market. There is an Idea request for this functionality which you should vote for if you haven't already. I'd note that the idea has so far garnered only 9 votes, which is why it likely has been a low priority.

Why do we have to enter "Command + N" to enter a new transaction?

The product manager has explained that creating a blank new transaction to always have open in Quicken does not fit the way the modern database works, and that the old approach also had its share of problems resulting in support calls. In any case, the architecture of the modern Quicken doesn't easily support having always-present blank transactions in every register. I suppose it's possible for them to do something like create blank transactions in every account every time you launch Quicken, and then delete them each time you quit Quicken, but I suspect they're not likely to add that complexity.

For most people, the initial annoyance after switching from Quicken 2007 to modern Quicken Mac is that we're use to simply pressing Enter to save a transaction… and then you need to press Command-N to start the next one. But if you're entering multiple transactions, you can save it and start a new one at the same time by pressing Command-N instead of Enter; this will save the current transaction and open a new blank one. (As my brain continues too slowly unlearn certain muscle memory, I find I still don't do this all the time, but I do it most of the time, and it's really not inconvenient to do Command-N instead of Enter.)

If you don't like Command-N, you can use the macOS capability to assign your own key commands to any menu command, so you could re-assign Transactions > New to a key like right arrow or down arrow, or Command-Return. (I won't go into the details of that here, but here's an article which explains how to do it.)

Finally, there's an existing Idea request to have the option to have Return create a new transaction, so you might want to add your vote for it. that Idea is marked "Under Consideration", which means it's received enough votes to be submitted to the developers, but the developers have not yet decided to definitely move forward nor to reject it. 

When will get back a "reconciliation report?"

I can't answer that, but I'd note that they have been focusing a lot on the reconciliation process in releases over the past half year or so. So a printable reconciliation report may be getting closer to the top of the priority list. That said, I also know these developers won't create things "just because that's the way it always worked"; they will develop things to meet genuine user needs. In that light, if you haven't zeroed in on the Reconciliation History feature which was added back in January, you might be surprised to discover that it functions very much like a permanent collection of reconciliation reports. When you open Reconciliation History, it shows each prior reconciliation, and if any old transactions have been changed or deleted, it shows such a discrepancy; when you re-open a prior reconciliation, it shows you exactly what was reconciled in that month, and if there are any discrepancies — an amount was changed, or a transaction was deleted — it clearly shows you what it looked like when you reconciled, so you can restore the original transaction or amount if you wish to.

I think that for most people, the functionality they built in Reconciliation History fills the need for why long-time users printed reconciliation reports — in a way that's comprehensive, easier to navigate than a drawer or file folder full of old reports, and makes it much easier to fix a problem from the past. Yes, it's different than our venerable Quicken 2007, but I think it's in many ways better.

That said, I understand some people still prefer the security of a printed reconciliation report, or need one to provide an accountant in some circumstances, so I would guess they will add the ability to print a reconciliation report, too.