Quicken Mac Widgets for Desktop and iOS App

gobuckeyes

I have been a long time user of Quicken all the way back from Quicken Windows in early 2000s to now on Mac. With Mac now having option to add widgets, this would really help my family that even though I gave them app access to Quicken for Mac, they say its too complicated. Adding widget capability could help us display budget widgets, top spending widgets, upcoming payment widgets things that will be for anyone in the household to look at and be like ok without having to dig into the app or desktop version to see where things stand.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @gobuckeyes,

Thank you for coming to the Community to share your idea! You may find this similar Idea interesting also:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7935045/dashboard-widget-for-quick-data-entry-of-transactions-on-the-mac

If it's something you'd like to see implemented in the future, please make sure to vote for it. Ideas that get enough votes may be implemented in future versions of Quicken.

Thank you!

jacobs

Perhaps you could show your family members how to click the one link to the Dashboard page. The Dashboard seems to have all the features you're looking for, and simply going to the Dashboard doesn't require mastery of all the depth of features of Quicken Mac.

I'm not sure how feasible it would be to replicate these features as stand-alone widgets. For widget to show up-to-date data, it would require the widgets to open the Quicken data file to compile the information to be shown from the database on the fly. It would need a way to deal with users having more than one data file. And users would want configurability — which accounts or categories to show, over what time period, etc. It seems it would require a lot of the functionality of the application under the hood, not just a small, simple widget.

gobuckeyes

@jacobs you make good points. I was not thinking the widgets would try to replicate functionality in quicken but simply be a mirror of what is already in quicken. So like budget for example. I have several budgets in Quicken today that I track several things. While you can see the budget in the mobile app, my family hates how to get to the budget in mobile app, you have to click like 5 to 7 things before you can see what you want to see. So the thought is almost like creating a report in Quicken Desktop where you can set all the accounts, categories, etc, there could be save this to widget view and then when you go to create a widget, you can choose from your saved views. Actually now that I am thinking about it, there maybe more synergies of putting some functionality in the mobile app sync area than adding check boxes all over everything.

I am also no techie expert on widgets but I think someone told me they are definitely not real-time and to your point quicken would need to be open, but I am fine with a widget that showed like above example the specific budget and then says last updated X date. Like I have a Tesla widget on my desktop and it's not real-time but every 1 hour I believe it updates itself. I know the mobile app is capable of updating itself so maybe every 6 hours or something the widget is capable of being updated.

Anyways, it's just an idea, I think even if Quicken were to start small and as Apple progresses widgets to be better and better, there could be something great there.

jacobs

@gobuckeyes I wasn’t thinking of a widget connecting to Quicken Cloud to pull its data; I was thinking it would pull from the desktop data file. (I don’t use the mobile app, so it isn’t front of my mind.) Since the desktop opens pretty quickly for me, I’m not sure I’d get much value from bite size widgets, but I understand your vision for how it could work.