Add ability to link accounts to brokerage accounts to Quicken for Mac (104 Legacy Votes)

@noel67 At the top of this page, under the first post in the thread, there's a blue box for voting. Click the little gray triangle under the vote counter to register your vote. 

@bobluck. The information that this is planned is at the top of this thread, in the same yellow box where users vote for ideas. Because this thread has many comments, you need to click on the “1” icon below to jump to the top; then scroll down enough that you can see the yellow box under the first post.

The “when” part of the question can’t be answered, unfortunately. The developers never say when a particular feature will be added. Priorities sometimes change, and timeframes shift as other work hits snags or unanticipated delays, so we never know where a particular idea fits in their plans.

@Jim Markisohn  Quicken almost never announces when specific features will be coming for release. There are many variables in their development timelines, and they apparently feel it would be worse to give a timeframe and miss it due to unexpected delays than to not give a timeframe at all. My understanding is that when an idea is actually marked as "Planned", it has been assigned a slot on the development roadmap. That slot might be a month or a year in the future, and is often dependent on one or several particular developers for implementation, so if they get delayed finishing something else or get pulled onto what they believe is a more urgent priority, the schedule can and does get juggled.

There are, by my rough approximation, close to 600 Idea threads on this forum. Of those, about 50 have advanced to the "Under Consideration" stage, and about 15 have been marked by the developers as "Planned." Quicken users among ourselves reasonably disagree about which issues should be at the top of the list, so the developers sift through them and decide based on things they think are most worthwhile, would impact the largest number of users, would make the biggest positive impact, how much time they estimate it will take to implement, how many and which programmers are needed to work on implementation, whiter there needs to be any coordination with the Quicken Windows and/or Quicken Cloud development teams, whether there are multiple enhancement ideas in a related area of the program they want to group together for efficiency in revising the code, and more. 

Of the 15 Idea threads for Quicken Mac marked as Planned, and some go back much farther than this one — but for the reasons above, that gives us no insight into when a particular feature will be released. And some which never get marked as "Planned" get implemented as they're working on other changes in the program. 

All of that is a long-winded way of saying your request for an update on the status of this feature request is not likely to be answered. The developers and management don't typically read these threads on the forum (except perhaps on working on implementation of an idea request, to make sure they understand what user expectations are), and for the reasons above, they don't provide progress reports or timeframe estimates. 

@Jim Markisohn Yes, I agree that it would be better for consumers if Quicken has a better way of communicating what it's top priorities/works in progress/6 or 12 month roadmap was. I was just explaining why they don't, and probably won't, do that. There are too many variables in the development process, too many things which get pushed back because of unexpected complexity, and unexpected issue which puts programmers off their planned tasks to deal with, bugs which turn out to need significant additional work to fix, etc. I've seen features in a beta test be removed from a released version because they needed more work and wanted to push out other features/fixes which were complete. And I've seen instances where the product manager has indicated that a particular feature took much longer to complete than they had anticipated.

If they were to pre-announce what's coming and when in any way, they'd get complaints/raise anger/lose loyalty on two fronts: (1) for features on such a list which don't end up shipping when they said they would, customers would howl their dissatisfaction; (2) for features not on such a list, customers would scream about other features which are not on the list. As much as I'd like to see them communicate more about what's coming, I understand why they don't.

As for the differences in features between Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac, there are dozens and dozens -- some which are different, some which are incomplete, and some which are missing entirely in Quicken Mac. Over time, they are working to narrow that feature gap, but as we've seen, progress is slow. As you note, they never offered Quicken Mac for less money, and now they have blurred the lines because you purchase a subscription level and get to choose the platform (or even both platforms), making it impossible to offer price differentiation were they inclined to (which they clearly are not). But it would take lots of bullet points and fine prints to disclose the differences, and such a list would likely also cause as much confusion as it would aim to alleviate.

Not that I am urging sympathy for Quicken management (haha!), but I do understand that they're in a bit of a no-win situation. I've seen many tech companies and programmers over many years feel the best thing they can do is keep their heads down and power ahead as quickly as they can, without taking time away from development to engage in much discussion between developers and customers. I feel we are fortunate to have Marcus as the Mac product manager, because we get at least some explanations about what they're doing and why from time to time. Not as much as we'd like, but more than nothing. 

For what it's worth, this feature request is marked as "Planned" by the developers. This means it's either being worked on or is on their schedule to be worked on. Only about 2-3% of the Idea requests on this site are marked as "Planned", so that's the good news. The bad news is that no one knows when it will be complete; it could be a month from now or a year from now or longer. (Even though it's frustrating to us users, Quicken never says when features are scheduled to be released, because the development schedule morphs continually as certain features consume more time than expected and as new priorities pop up.)

@hbwilliams22 Your banking transactions will appear in the brokerage account, adding to or subtracting from the cash balance in the account, just as you'd want them to. the only problem you may run into is if your brokerage account has a cash balance in addition to the linked checking account; in Quicken, these amounts will be merged together as cash in the account.