Add Lifetime/Retirement Planner to Quicken Mac (70 Legacy Votes)

@wcagwin In the former days where people purchased annual copies of Quicken, I think this argument of lower pricing for Quicken Mac because of fewer features made some sense -- although the company always ignored it. But currently, it's basically a moot point because you aren't purchasing Quicken Mac or Quicken Windows; you're purchasing an annual subscription to use Quicken software. With your subscription, you are able to use Quicken Mac or Quicken Windows or both. Since they don't have two different subscriptions for each platform's software, they have neatly sidestepped this issue. If you buy a Quicken Deluxe subscription, it gives you the rights to use either or both desktop products, the mobile app, the web interface, all for one flat price. 

The problem they -- and we users -- have is that the list of feature requests far outstrips the capacity of their development team to implement. They've been making some solid progress at adding features year by year, but there are still hundreds of feature requests on the table. And every user says a different one is the most important one! So they try to decide which ones to pursue in which order based on lots of factors, and we anxiously await each new release to see if any of our wishes have been granted.

In the end, it comes down to a personal decision for each of us: are we getting enough value from Quicken for what we pay for it, or not. If not, people go off to find something they think better fits their needs and/or costs less. Many don't leave, or come back, because they find Quicken -- despite its limitations -- is the best at what it does and is worth the annual fee. Because we all use Quicken differently, and have different financial tracking and panning needs, there's no single right answer for everyone.

I find that for financial planning, I do the work to update data and review my plans basically once a year, so the absence of planning tools in Quicken isn't a big factor for me. (But I've always used Quicken Mac and never used Quicken Windows, so I don't know what I'm missing!) I have a couple spreadsheets from a financial planner I worked with, and I update my retirement and non-retirement funds balances and my annual expenses in those spreadsheets every once in awhile, and that's good enough for my "what if" planning. Some similar tools can be found online for free, as well as for a fee. And perhaps, someday, in Quicken Mac.

This Idea thread currently has 160 votes, which you can see if you go to the top of the first page of the thread. Compared to other threads here, that's a high vote total, probably in the top 5% of Idea posts. It's marked as "Under Consideration", which means it's been sent from the team which manages this site to Quicken's product and development teams. One of the odd things about how they do things is that it doesn't change to "Planned" status until it has been assigned a development time slot on their schedule. So even even if they agree with the idea and plan to implement it, the status doesn't change and we don't know their intentions if they haven't yet assigned it to a future development cycle. Meanwhile, all users can do is continue to vote for the Idea posts they want, because higher vote totals do help  to have a louder voice in moving this up their priority list.

@garysmith87 Good points about Quicken Windows Lifetime Planner. My hope would be that if the Mac developers decide to tackle implementation of their feature, they would do it like so many other things they have implemented, and not try to merely mimic the Windows implementation, but truly look at the best design for the feature. In this case, they could clearly Build Back Better. (oops, didn't mean to make this political.  )

wcagwin said:

So, let me get this right . . . if I use Quicken Deluxe for Mac, but my husband's computer is a PC, does that mean I could install Quicken on both computers (without extra cost)? This could almost solve my problem if it is true. I could use my Mac for day to day stuff, and open it on my husband's PC if we want to track how we are doing on our retirement planning stuff. Did I get that right?

Yes... and no. With one subscription, you can install Quicken Mac and your husband can install Quicken Windows. That's the good news.

Unfortunately, these programs are different enough that you can't share a unified data file between them and move back and forth. There is a converter from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac which works well for most (but not all) people. There is a converter for Quicken Mac to Quicken Windows which flat-out doesn't work unless you have no investing accounts; they have never finished building this. Bottom line: these programs are not interoperable. You may be able to make a one-way transfer from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac, but that's about it. 

But wait! There might still be a viable option for you. Quicken has a mobile app and web interface which works with both Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows files. If you use Quicken Mac, your data file live on your Mac, but some of your data can be synced to Quicken's cloud server, which you can then access from a web browser on your Windows PC. The web interface isn't a full-fledged version of Quicken, so depending what you want to check, this may or may not fill your need. (I don't use the web interfaced, so I can't offer any detail about what it does and doesn't provide.)

Steve, very well stated. I hope that some day, a Quicken software executive or manager reads it and "gets it". (But the cynic in me wonders if any of these comments are ever seen by the people who matter most! )

And no, you're not missing anything. This is an old feature in Quicken Windows (which some Quicken Windows users note has not been updated and is therefore not as useful as it should be) which never existed in the legacy Quicken for Mac. In the modern generation Quicken Mac, the developers have been working to add new features every couple months, but there are many more requests for features than there are programmers. When the modern Quicken Mac came out in 2014, it was woefully under-featured, but a lot of progress has been made over the ensuing years. My hope is that over the next few years, we'll see some longtime requests like this come to fruition. Unfortunately, Quicken management believes in not sharing what they're working on or planning to work on, so we still have no idea whether this is on their development roadmap or not.

Anyone who wants to see this functionality added to Quicken Mac, please jump to the first page of this thread and add your vote for it (by clicking the little black arrow under the vote counter in the yellow box). Driving vote counts higher is the main way users can express their feature desires to product management. 

It just doesn't work like that. Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows use radically different technologies in almost every area of the program — different databases, different frameworks, different programming languages, different memory management, different file formats, different operating system tools, different user interface tools, different printing tools, etc. The Mac development team could look at the screens and functionality of Quicken Windows to design similar functionality for Quicken Mac, but the software needs to be created from scratch.

And there's no reason that can't or won't happen. It's just a matter of prioritizing the work. The problem is that there are literally hundreds of features Mac users have asked for, and the development team has to evaluate which ones to tackle in what order. Voting for ideas on this forum contributes, as do user surveys and feedback from Quicken customer support. While this may be the top feature request for many of those who have posted on this thread, there are plenty of other users who think other features should be at the top of the list.