Is there no alternative to an online subscription for Quicken Mac?

MaryLRB

I am still using Q Mac 2007 under MacOS Sierra. I bought Q Mac 2017 but don't like it. (That's another story.) I know that at some point I will have to upgrade my OS to one that won't run 2007.

1)Is there really no alternative to an annual subscription? I don't need the online services; I just want the basic bookkeeping and report generation capabilities.

2)Were there any non-subscription versions after 2017 that might still be available that would work with the newer MacOS verstions?

Please don't lecture me about updating. I just want to know what my options are.

jacobs

No, there is no alternative to an annual subscription. (Note that it's not an "online subscription"; Quicken is still desktop based, just as it has been.) This is the business model which keeps Quicken afloat. Even if you don't use online services, they need to keep maintaining the program to work with the annual changes in the Mac operating system. They also need to keep adding features which users demand, many of which existed in Quicken 2007 or Quicken Windows and haven't yet been built for the modern Quicken Mac.

Quicken 2017 was the last non-subscription version. It lacks a lot of features and fixes which have been made over the past 5 years. (I was still using Quicken 2007 back in 2017, because Quicken 2017 was missing too much for me; I eventually switched to modern Quicken Mac in 2020 because there had been significant improvements in reports and other areas of the program.) Since you have a copy of Quicken 2017, you may be aware that you now get constant notices when you launch it to upgrade because of changes and security upgrades, even though you aren't downloading transactions. 

MaryLRB

Thanks for the quick response, and for clarifying what the subscription involves. I do understand the business model and appreciate the company's need to keep updating the program. And yes, I've been getting notices about upgrading. It's just that after my disappointment with the 2017 version, I've been afraid to try the newer ones.

Would you say that the current version is at least as good as 2007? For example, you mentioned reports. One of the things I love about 2007 is the ease of generating reports. After running some sample reports in both versions, I found the process in 2017 to be clunky and didn't feel I could trust the outcome.

I admit to being over 70 and somewhat resistant to change but I'm not a technophobe. I know there will be an adjustment period. I guess I'm just looking for some assurance that it will be worth the effort. :-)

Thanks again for being there to answer my questions.

jacobs

I think we're all resistant to change!

The first time almost everyone switches from Quicken 2007 to modern Quicken Mac, they say "where's the 2-line register display?!" I did. But after I worked with Quicken Mac awhile, I found I like — and preferred — the one-line display, and found returning to look at things occasionally in Quicken 2007 actually jarring.

Reports have improved a great deal from Quicken 2007 to modern Quicken Mac. Do they have every feature of Quicken 2007 yet? No. But for most people, the reports are fine, or at least good enough. For a few people Quicken Mac still doesn't cut it. For instance, you can't specify multiple levels of sorts/subtotals by rows. You can't generate a report based on the text in a memo field (but you can do a Search on memo text, and print the results as a report.) You can generate reports for most investment data, but you can't yet save them as named reports, so you may have to play with the settings in your portfolio each time you want a particular investment report. There are some partial equivalents to Quick Reports, but you can't do everything from Quick Reports.

Some missing functionality will come in the future; whether 100% of every Quicken 2007 feature will get implemented is less certain, as there are some things the developers may decide were used by very few people. But if you're not downloading transactions, and doing basic bookkeeping, the odds are good that you will find it good enough. I can tell you that I've found Quicken Mac meets my needs — but only you will be able to tell if Quicken Mac meets your needs. (Can you upgrade your Mac one step, from Sierra to High Sierra? If so, current Quicken Mac will still run on that OS, so you can buy it, try it for 30 days, and get a refund if you decide it doesn't work for you.) 

MaryLRB

Thank you for your understanding/sympathy! Since I'm used to the one-line display in 2017, that won't be a big problem for me, but I'm sure there will be other changes that will take getting used to.

When I talked about reports, I was mentally including searching on all the fields including Memo. I don't actually print many reports but do use the function for searching to find transactions I'm trying to track down, including using data in the Memo field. It's reassuring to know I would still be able to do that.

Does your comment about upgrading to High Sierra mean that the new version won't run on Sierra? I know I can still use 2007 with High Sierra and have just been putting off doing the upgrade. If I need High Sierra to run a trial of new Q:Mac it may be the push I need make that change.

One final comment/question: why is it so hard for them to make functions from 2007 available in the newer versions? That was 15 years ago!

jacobs

MaryLRB said:

Does your comment about upgrading to High Sierra mean that the new version won't run on Sierra?

Correct. Policy-wise, Quicken officially supports the current and two most recent Mac operating systems. That would mean Catalina as a minimum, but the software still runs on Mojave and High Sierra. In the future, updates to Quicken undoubtedly will require a newer operating system than High Sierra, but when that will become mandatory isn't known. 

MaryLRB said:

When I talked about reports, I was mentally including searching on all the fields including Memo. I don't actually print many reports but do use the function for searching to find transactions I'm trying to track down, including using data in the Memo field. It's reassuring to know I would still be able to do that.

Search in modern Quicken is one of the features I think is better than Quicken 2007. You can search in a single account, a group of accounts or all accounts (including closed and hidden accounts). I would be lost if I couldn't search on the Memo field; that's functionality I use quite often. 

MaryLRB said:

One final comment/question: why is it so hard for them to make functions from 2007 available in the newer versions? That was 15 years ago!

You're right, and the trail between then and now would be comical if it weren't so painful! The first thing to realize is that Quicken 2007 was the culmination of about two decades of programming work. When the fundamental changes from the original Mac operating systems to the Unix-based Mac OS X required them to start over from scratch, even with the blueprint of what they had done before, it was going to take a long time to program all the features and functionality using new tools, programming languages, frameworks, etc.

Quicken at that time was owned by Intuit, and the brain trust there decided to create a new uniquely Mac personal finance program rather than just trying to create a modernized version of Quicken 2007. The first attempt was so bad it never made it out of beta testing; the second attempt was the 2010 Quicken Essentials — "essentials" because it was a very limited subset of Quicken functionality. It was poorly received by users, and before they could improve on it, there was a major management shakeup, and development ground to a halt. After the multiple mistakes, dead ends, stops and re-starts, and lost years, in 2013 they set out again to build a complete Quicken Mac, but they hired only a handful of people to work on programming it.  The first release of the modern Quicken Mac came in late summer 2014. It was missing a lot of functionality. But the product manager for Quicken Mac said at the time that they decided to release what they had, and add to it and improve it incrementally over time. And that's what's been happening in the nearly eight years since then.

The current Quicken Mac programming team is larger than it was a decade ago, but it's still fairly small. And there are more than 500 features listed as Idea requests on this site alone — features users have said they want to see added to Quicken Mac. Well, Quicken simply don't have the resources to implement all those feature requests in any short period of time. While the current program is leaps and bounds better now than that first iteration of the new program in 2014, it still lacks features from Quicken 2007, Quicken Windows, and newer features users want. Month by month, year by year, the developers continue building the functionality of Quicken Mac, and some of those Idea requests flip to "implemented."

Bottom line: it was simply impossible — absent tens of millions of dollars to hire a much, much larger programming team — to re-create every feature of Quicken 2007 in a modern environment within a few years… or even a decade. 

MaryLRB

I am grateful for your candor as well as your clear explanations. I intuited (!) that recreating the program on the new platform would be an arduous task but didn't know the whole sorry history. It's just a shame that a great product has actually lost features in the process. I bought the Essentials version and quickly went back to 2007. If I win the lottery I'll consider donation some of the money to Quicken for Mac. :)

Thank you so much for taking time to answer my questions. If there is a rating system, you deserve 5 stars.