To Convert or Not - Rather Lengthy

strolyt

We’ve been using Quicken for Mac for as long as we can remember. Our main focus is keeping track of our “checkbook” which has a fair number of “accounts” feeding into it. We’re keeping track of household expenses and several 529 accounts for our grandkids as well as our own retirement accounts. No business or even budget - we gave up trying to do the latter ages ago :-).

We got Q2007 when it first came out and have used it ever since. We tried converting to Quicken Essentials at one point but were immediately turned off by the difference in the user interface. We dropped that idea pretty quickly.

Fast forward to now and we’re fully aware of the 64-bit issue with Q2007. We’ve kept a laptop running Mojave just for this reason. But recently we relocated and needed to change banks and thought it might be a good time to reconsider upgrading Quicken as well.

My wife and I are both in our mid-70s and are reasonably tech savvy. A couple of reasons we wanted to convert was being able to sync transactions from our bank instead of all the bookkeeping that goes with manual data entry. We also wanted to be able to look at up-to-date banking data on our phones instead of having to be tied to a home computer.

It turns out our new bank doesn’t support online transaction syncing. Also it seems that Quicken requires a manual intervention to sync data across all our devices (have to push “sync” button on laptop to sync to the cloud and thus to our handhelds). In addition, there are some activities that we can do in Q2007 that are either not supported at all in the subscription version - QuickMath is one glaring example - or seem to be done so very differently as to require going back to square 1 - the way we tracked various investments in Q2007 is totally unrecognizable in the latest version and I don’t even know where to start to try to fix that. Transaction entry in the new version seems a lot more user-intensive - three screens to do what one would do in Q2007. Lastly, we seemed to have much more flexibility with reports in Q2007 - some of our old reports just don’t seem doable now without some radical changes in how we characterize transactions - classes, “starts with” option in many data fields, separating “her” transactions and “my” transactions from “our” transactions, etc.

All by way of asking for some advice from users who have made the switch if we’re cutting off our noses to spite our faces to stay with tried-and-true Q2007. And, for what it’s worth, we have an old version of Microsoft Office running on the Q2007 machine and it won’t run in a 64-bit environment either, and we are absolutely NOT going to upgrade that software even though it’s no longer supported by MS.

Sorry this is so long - had a lot of relevant stuff to describe.

RickO

I'm not going to get into advising if you will like or hate the current version. I will say that QMac's interface is very much like QEM, but with much improved functionality. Still very different than Q2007.

That said, the old machine running Mojave is eventually going to die. All computers do eventually. One thing you can do is to run Mojave in a virtual environment (eg. Parallels Desktop) on a newer Mac (as long as it's not an M1 Mac). That's what I do for some legacy software that isn't 64bit (not Quicken).

jacobs

My advice starts along the lines of Rick's above, but goes in a different direction. Thinking that you'll be able to keep using Quicken 2007 in a virtual machine -- forever -- is fraught with potential pitfalls down the road, not the least of which is that the database in Quicken 2007 can fill up and/or suffer various corruption problems, minor or major. It might work for you fine for another 5 years or 10 years, maybe more. But do you feel you will be better prepared to move to other software should you need to in a decade or more? Or biting the bullet now?

It might take you awhile to transition, and it will likely require you making some adaptations to how you've done things in the past -- but it will provide you a secure future with Quicken. (Well, as secure as the company continuing in business.) It won't cost much more; you'd need to stay up-to-date with Parallels if you stick with Quicken 2007. 

Another thing to think about is that at some point in the future, I'd guess that Quicken will remove the conversion from Quicken 2007. It's old code, and requires them to maintain a server to handle part of the conversion process. At some point, they will conclude that there are too few active Quicken 2007 users remaining, and remove the conversion path. Then, should you ever need a replacement for Quicken 2007, you might need to start with Quicken or something else from scratch.

There's no right or wrong answer here, but my thought is that you are likely better able to transition now than you may be in the future. You can run Quicken 2007 and Quicken Mac in parallel until you have perfected your transition.

And yes, I miss QuickMath! I still hold out hope that it will get added to the current Quicken sometime in the future. 

RickO

I totally agree with @jacobs. My suggestion was only intended for the short term.

smayer97

For more info on using a VM for QM2007, see this thread:

Running Quicken for Mac 2007 in a Virtual Machine (VM)