Support corporate acquisitions/mergers and divestitures/spin-offs in Quicken (Mac) (4 Merged Votes)

Yes, they definitely read them. They just don't have the capacity to act on all the requests. Exactly how they determine their priorities is something we're never privvy to. Has this not gotten acted on yet because they think it affects only a small percentage f the user base? Because it's a big coding project which would take a lot of time away from other priorities? We just don't know.

@Randy Chevrier I'm a fellow Quicken user, not a Quicken rep, but I can clarify how "Idea" threads work. These are the official mechanism for users to request new/improved features in the program. When an Idea topic passes a critical mass threshold, it gets sent to the developers and is marked as "Under Consideration". The developers then consider whether they think the idea has merit and fits with the program. Then they undertake a process to estimate how much time will be needed to design, code and test the feature. They also look at whether the change in one area would impact other areas of the program, or if there are multiple proposed changes in the same section of code which should be done in concert. They also evaluate who on the development team is needed (e.g. changing the database and building/modifying database queries, connectivity issues, user interface architecture, printing architecture, etc.). That analysis allows them to then look for a spot on their development calendar to schedule the work to be done. Only then do we see an Idea's status change from "Under Consideration" to "Planned".

Unfortunately, many Ideas languish in this "Under Consideration" state for a long time, like planes at an airport which have pushed back from the gate but have to wait to be scheduled onto a taxiway and runway. If the developers had decided it was a bad idea or outside the scope of what they planned to tackle, they would mark it "Not Planned." But "Under Consideration" can mean the work needed is still being analyzed, or more frequently, that there are other things filling the upcoming calendar and they don't yet have a time slot to schedule the work to be done.

This process can feel painful for us as users, because it can feel like nothing's happening (possibly true) and that nothing will ever happen (probably not true). It's just a reality that the Quicken program is actually quite complex, and that the Mac development team is quite small. Some of the most recent features released were in "Under Consideration" limbo for years before they were marked "Planned" and were finally just released. Last fall, the developers marked a fairly significant number of ideas related to planning and budgets as "Planned", and until those are completed and released, they likely aren't scheduling more features.

As we can see looking over the release notes over the past months and years, the developers are listening and are implementing features users have been asking for. The problem is that among all of us Quicken Mac users, there's little unanimity about the absolute priority rank of the many feature requests. The developers have to decide how many people they think a particular issue will affect, how big the affect is (e.g. does it make it easier to do something, or does it make it possible to do something which is currently impossible?) and how to parse their time (e.g. is it better to spend four months working on one big feature or tackle 6 smaller features requests in the same time?).

The lack of action so far on a mergers/spinoff feature is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, as it's a pretty fundamental issue in managing investments, presumably touches a significant number of users, is a feature which exists in the Windows version, and has no easy work-around. I would have thought this would have risen to the top of the list by now. But there are other fundamental investment features missing, such as being able to use average cost basis (or other cost bases than LIFO and FIFO). My guess is that they're waiting to tackle a bundle of investment feature requests together. If 2024 is the year of planning tools, maybe 2025 will be the year of investment tools?

I understand it's frustrating to wait year after year for a feature like this. It's a reality that there is more demand for enhancements than the development team can supply. I have no doubt they'll get to it eventually, but is that 6 months from now, 2 years from now, or longer? We don't know, and they don't provide any insight to guide our expectations.

@jacobs Your comments in the second to last paragraph illustrate the point. This particular feature exists. Why it can't be implemented for Mac is baffling to me (not an IT guy). And it has been brought up multiple times in the past. Exceptionally frustrating.

And the rest of my post tries to explain. It's not that "it can't be implemented for Mac" — it's that building this feature is competing with all the other feature ideas for the limited bandwidth of the development team. There are dozens, probably hundreds of features which exist in Quicken Windows which haven't yet been built for Quicken Mac. It would be great if they could snap their fingers and bring those features into existence, but each one needs to be built, and that will continue to take time. Looking backward, it's impressive to see how much Quicken Mac has improved and rounded out over what is now nearly a decade since it debuted; but here in the present, it's always frustrating that a strongly desired feature doesn't yet exist.

For this specific feature, we have no way of knowing if they have it slated to be part of a group of investment feature requests they plan to address at some unspecified future time, but that's my guess why it's still on hold. If there's a silver lining to be found, it's that this Idea thread has now reached 150 votes, which puts it in the top 10% of all Quicken Mac Idea threads. While that guarantees nothing, as some of the top voted Ideas get implemented, it those which remain are much more likely to move into position to get development attention.