Quicken Home & Business [for Mac]

lcendara

When will you release a full MAC Home & Business version ???
At my last work we used the Home & Business and I miss this... we are now full MAC.

pplprsn

Quicken has been dragging its feet on this stuff for years. It's really annoying. Quicken has tons of room for improvement and I barely see any actual steps in a good direction.

jacobs

In Quicken Windows, the Home & Business version is built atop all the features of Quicken Premier. On the Mac side, the process of building the new Quicken Mac from the ground up a decade ago is still ongoing, and the features still don't match the Premier level of Quicken Windows. It would be difficult to build all the business features into Quicken Mac while still missing some of the features in the Premier version of Quicken Windows, particularly in having robust business reports.  So the developers have been plugging away at adding features to Quicken Mac, which should be bringing a Home & Business version closer to being plausible. But the progress is slower than anyone — including the developers as well as users — would wish.

The big unknown is whether the executives at Quicken have calculated they would make enough money from the significant investment it would take to build a Mac Home & Business version. 

There is a long-running Idea post requesting a Mac Home & Business version; you can view it here and add your vote for it. The Idea has a status of "Under Consideration". 

Chris_QPW

pplprsn said:

Quicken has been dragging its feet on this stuff for years. It's really annoying. Quicken has tons of room for improvement and I barely see any actual steps in a good direction.

Quicken Inc isn't dragging their feet.  Implementing the Business features is a HUGE undertaking, and so far it has taken the Quicken Mac developers a long time to fill in the basic features of what would be considered Deluxe in the Quicken Windows world (with some exceptions where Quicken Mac is actually ahead of Quicken Windows in some features).

@jacobs I don't use Home & Business, but I have done a beta test or two on it and I can be pretty sure that getting to "Quicken Windows Premier" level isn't required.

Premier over Deluxe is pretty much adding some "bells and whistles".  There isn't anything in it that isn't already in Deluxe that the Home features needs.  The Home features really don't do anything magical as far as the underline features are concerned.  It does make extensive use of tags, and has "special tags" reserved for its use.  But most of it it is a few new account types, reports, forms, and tax line items and such.  There is a LOT of things to do, but none of it is really that complicated.

But that isn't to say that Quicken Inc might do exactly that where they first fill out Premier level.

And I would state one thing else that I think is true, and that it most likely would have to be like 90% completed when they released it otherwise people would probably just complain that it is not usable.

Sort of like the problem they had when they released Quicken Mac Essentials.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW I mostly agree with your comment that some of the features of the Windows Deluxe version are not needed should they want to add the Home & Business features to Quicken Mac; I should have parsed my statement above into a longer thread digging into the features missing from Quicken Deluxe. But a simple example would be that there are no business-specific reports in Quicken Mac, like an Income Statement or Balance Sheet. Now, the reality is that the Category report can be made to produce an Income Statement-like report, and a New Worth report is pretty much a Balance Sheet (except that it doesn't have an equity section to add to liabilities in order to match assets). 

I think the other side of this is how Quicken executives want to allocate their program development resources. I think adding core features to Quicken Mac — adding investment reports, make the budget more usable, handling investment transactions it currently can't, perhaps adding a retirement planner or tax planner, perhaps adding integration with Zillow or Morningstar Portfolio X-Ray, etc. — are likely to impact more users than the narrow segment who would love to have invoicing and receivables features, and that's why they continue to work on adding features which will help the broader base of Quicken Mac users.

Of course, what we don't know is whether they've had a programmer or two and a designer working on Mac Home & Business version for the past year! I would think that they were working on it, they'd at least say "coming in 2023", but that's just not the way Quicken management typically works. So it's possible they're already working on it, it's possible they haven't done any work but have it on their roadmap for the future, and it's possible they've decided not to decide until they hit other benchmarks for completion of features in Quicken Mac. 

Chris_QPW

@jacobs Maybe my statement wasn't to clear.

I was only stating that Quicken Inc doesn't have to get Quicken Mac to "full Premier" level to implement the busines features (if that is what they want to do, which I doubt).

But a simple example would be that there are no business-specific reports in Quicken Mac, like an Income Statement or Balance Sheet.

And neither does Quicken Windows Deluxe.  Those are business features that would have to be implemented, but again I stated that putting in the business features would be a LOT of work, but there isn't anything in Quicken Windows Premier that isn't in Quicken Windows Deluxe that is needed to do that implementation.

I certainly don't expect Quicken Inc to develop business features in Quicken Mac until it has put in a lot more features in at the Deluxe and Premier levels for the very reasons you stated.

I was just saying "they could".  And I personally agree with not implementing the business features at this point.  There are a lot of Premier or lower features that could be put in that will help a whole lot more Quicken Mac users and they don't have the staff to "do it all".

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

@jacobs Maybe my statement wasn't too clear. I was only stating that Quicken Inc doesn't have to get Quicken Mac to "full Premier" level to implement the business features (if that is what they want to do, which I doubt).

No, I understood what you were saying. And as I wrote, I for the most part agree. For example, adding some of the investment and budget functionality currently missing in Quicken Mac is separate from, and not a requirement to build upon, if they wanted to add invoicing and receivables features. But I used the example of Income Statement and Balance sheet reports as features currently missing from Quicken Mac which I think would be prequisites to a true Home & Business version. 

Bottom line is your last statement: they don't have the programmers and resources to "do it all", so it comes down to their evaluation of which programming efforts would positively impact the largest number of users and/or help them generate more revenue. It's still not clear if building a Home & Business version for the Mac would satisfy either of those criteria. And we're not likely to know their thinking unless and until one day they suddenly announce a Mac Home & Business version. Until then, users are left to complain about its absence, and in some cases, drop Quicken and move to other software to meet their business needs.

Chris_QPW

Note that Quicken Windows Premier has neither an Income statement nor a Balance sheet report, these are business features only.

But in truth I don't consider the reports to be a big deal.  Such reports should be easy enough to create.
The real work is on creating a interconnected system to that understands the business workflow.  Invoices, account receivables, sending out emails, taxes, and all the forms that are needed.

It is all so "interconnected" that it is even hard to decide what you would to start with.

jivanyi@shaw.ca

I don't see why Quicken is not providing Home and Business for the mac. Really, just how hard can it be? Or this just shows how frugal Quicken is with improving the software.

jacobs

jivanyi@shaw.ca said:

I don't see why Quicken is not providing Home and Business for the mac. Really, just how hard can it be?

How hard can it be? Hard! Look at how long it takes to add far, far smaller features to Quicken Mac, and extrapolate to the amount of work it would take to add all the business features. I'd take a wild ballpark guess that it would take a few developers between 6 and 18 months to create. They have hundreds of other things on their roadmap which have been committed to or they hope to get to, so the real issue is not simply how long would it take, but when and whether to commit all the resources to that project instead of many others. One of the factors they consider in planning new features is how many people it will affect; the market from Home & Business is tangible, but a small percentage of the Quicken user base. (We users don't know the exact breakdown of Quicken users at each subscription level, but the folks at Quicken do, so they likely have a very good idea how many users would be impacted if they create these features. Again guessing, I'd expect it's only a few percent of all Quicken users.)