Customer Reviews

Quicken 2005 for Mac [Old Version]

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

I upgraded the 2004 version to this version (2005) and found it to be faster but most of the other improvements were bug fixes that should have been made to the 2004 version without an upgrade price. They seem to take the Microsoft approach of making customers pay for bug fixes. If the few, new features and faster speed are enough for you then get it!

I would recommend this program to anyone who is considering a Mac-based personal finance program for the first time. It is far better than the two-star rating given by frustrated upgraders on this site would imply. I would also recommend it to some of the holdout Quicken users like me who do not want to repeatedly pay for the same bugs. However, without any significant competition, and the limited market share of the Macintosh, one must be prepared to suffer from limited support for this program. Were it not for this shortcoming, I would give this program 5 stars.

My history of Mac-based financial tracking programs goes all the way back to "Managing Your Money" by Andrew Tobias using a Mac LC in the early 1990's. This excellent program was edged out by a glitzier program, Quicken, which I converted to because it could track investments such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. It was the only program at the time that could accurately calculate the "internal rate of return" (IRR) on investments, which I believe is the only way to see how well that one is doing. I have stayed with Quicken through all its upgrades and find it to be an excellent way to track virtually all personal finances. It is far better than anything else that is currently available for the Mac. I have used this program with very few negative incidents at least every week for many years and find it invaluable for tracking checking & savings accounts, credit cards, salary, and investments including stocks, bonds, and retirement(401k, 403b, IRA) accounts.

Looking at the other reviews on this site, one may think that this program is pretty much of a dog. This is far from true; the poor reviews are from those that have an earlier version and are disappointed that the upgrade does not add enough new features to justify the cost of an annual upgrade. I cannot argue with this perception. The frustration is compounded when an upgrade is offered with known bugs not fixed.

The permanent bug problem in Quicken started in the late 1990's . My biggest personal disappointment was converting to Quicken 2002. All my hand-entered price information for investments was not transferred over to the new program! Prices of publicly-traded items could be downloaded, but this did not cover everything that I had. I lost many years of data. I believe that there is a great pent-up demand of existing Quicken users for a new version of Quicken with no new features, but a comprehensive list of all fixed bugs.

Examples of persistent bugs were the following: Opening a split transaction sometimes put the cursor one line away from the cursor on the screen. Some, but not all, multiple-item Portfolio displays always collapsed and had to be manually re-opened, which is not fatal, but is annoying. Every time one tried to memorize a customized report, the program crashed. This bug started in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. The program recovers without losing anything, but this does inspire confidence. As OS X was upgraded, several features that worked started to behave erratically. Notes in the calendar would jump to the dock whenever they were opened. The quick-math calculator jumped to the upper-left corner with only the bottom edge of the window visible.

I tried to report bugs to Intuit in the mid 1990's, but learned that it was not a productive activity. This experience is confirmed by postings from other frustrated users, an attitude that pervades most of the current reviews of Quicken 2005. I transitioned from someone who always bought the next update to one who updated only when I changed operating systems.

When I got my latest new Mac, it came with Quicken 2004. A quick check confirmed that all the above listed problems still persisted in the program, so I just whacked it and stayed with Quicken 2002.

A little over a month ago, I received a letter from Intuit informing me that it would no longer support download requests for the Quicken 2002 program. Needless to say, I did not greet this with any enthusiasm. However, the program is so essential to my life that I felt that I had to do something. A serious review of alternatives quickly revealed that Quicken, with all its frustrations, is still very much better than anything else on the market. I got the program and applied for the $30 rebate because I have also purchased TurboTax.

To my surprise, many of the bugs that have persisted through several Quicken upgrades have been fixed in Quicken 2005. The program imported all my price information and all but one of the bugs listed above have been fixed. The program still crashes whenever I try to memorize a custom report, but I rarely do this anymore. In any case, the bug is like so many of the other problems with Quicken: merely annoying, but not damaging. My data file size has ballooned up from 2.3 MB to 8 MB and some processes seem to take slightly longer, but not significantly so. I find this performance degradation disturbing because these calculations are not that complicated and my processor speed has increased by a factor of a hundred over the years. On balance, I am very satisfied with the newest version of the program. Note that I have not mentioned any of the new features of Quicken. I have not used any of these because they are mostly fluff. The best parts of Quicken were completed years ago. View Quicken as an excellent tool like a shovel. Do you really need a blinking light on the handle of a good shovel? The home inventory connection to iPhoto should be useful to some, and I plan to look at the improved tax planner, but I am not particularly hopeful.

I found little to no improvements in this new version of Quicken versus the 2004 version. It is simply not worth upgrading if you own the 2004 version. Previous version owners may find an upgrade more compelling depending on how old their version is.

My only regret about having switched from Windows to Mac 2 years ago is that Microsoft does not make MS Money for Mac, thus forcing me to go back to Quicken. MS Money for Windows has it all-over Quicken for Windows. Sadly, Quicken is the only game in town for mac users. Even more sad, Intuit knows this, and offers a stripped-down version of Quicken for Mac that appears to reflect its seeming conceit. If you already have Quicken for Mac 2004, I would recommend NOT wasting your time or cash on this "upgrade". It is not worth it.

I skipped the 2004 version, but foolishly bought the 2005 version. I understand that it has one or two minor new features that are documented. Here are some of the much more significant ones, that are undocumented:
1. Every other time you download information from your bank, it makes you wait while it updates the entire list of financial institutions.
2. Every other time you download information from your bank, it nags you to register online. But their online registration is broken, so there is no way to avoid the constant nag screen.
3. There is a screen redraw problem when you open the accounts window, so that you need to resize the window in order to make the buttons accessible.
4. One great feature still remains from the 2003 version. If you click "Unmatch" in the Reconcile window, nothing happens until you click it a second time. Hooray!

Tech support says that they will resolve some of these issues, someday, when they feel like it. Respectable software companies (and individuals producing freeware) can put out bug fixes very quickly. There is no excuse for Intuit to wait a year to fix serious problems.

I concur with some of the other user comments in that this is not much of an upgrade over the 2003 version.

I use my Quicken program regularly to keep track of my finances and have found it very useful. So, if you've never used a financial software before, I would recommend it. One of the features of the 2005 versions is that it allows you to incorporate photos of your valuables to keep track of your possessions. Might be useful in case you need to make an insurance claim for losses. Downloading of account information from credit cards, online banking, etc., was a little better. The installation went smoothly, with no hassles.

But my biggest problem was that this program would not adequately support more than 1 budget setup. For some reason, whenever I tried to setup a second budget, for planning purposes, the numbers for the different budget items would not add up correctly and the totals would be incorrect. I use the budget feature quite often to track my family's expenditures, and it would be useful to be able to setup more than one budget to be able to plan ahead for next year or the year after. This was a problem with the 2003 version; and only became worse with the 2005 version. I haven't been able to get any response from Quicken about this bug either. I have sent my upgrade back for a refund since the 2003 version is adequate for my needs.

After "upgrading" from the 2002 edition, I was suprised that after 3 years Intuit hadn't managed to make any real improvements besides making the icons a little prettier. The new features I describe as "fluff" at best.

The software itself is OK, but there is no reason for anybody to spend any money to update from an earlier version. This software is in any case no reason to make the switch from Windows. Quicken for Mac is still greatly inferior to even Quicken1999 for Windows!

First of all, if you have never used this program, it is a useful application that may be worth the purchase price. But as an upgrade, there is little to justify the price. Also, Intuit has a well deserved reputation for crummy user policies, so beware.

Upgraded Features - Quicken for Mac 2003 did not support multiple accounts at a single financial institution when each account requires a different user ID. (Windows version does provide this capability.) This was described to me as a "bug" in Quicken 2003. So after the "bug" was never fixed in the 2003 version, I bought Quicken 2005 to solve this problem. Unfortunately, it is now a "feature" in the 2005 version and has not been fixed. I would return this software if I could. I only used it briefly before reverting back to 2003 version, but I see no real feature upgrades worth the $$.

Installation - would not install properly. Installer would only start in Classic, and this version is not supported in OS 9. Had to contact Intuit technical support and endure a 45 minute online chat session for them to tell me to simply copy the application from the machine to my desktop.

So, buy if need a decent financial program for Mac; don't buy as an upgrade to a recent version.

I didn't pay for this upgrade but rather got it 'free' when I bought a Mac Mini. Converting my old files seemed to go fine*, and I had no problems with downloads.

*I did notice that my cash balances remained incorrect until I clicked in every transaction and hit Return, thus slapping it upside the head to make it add/subtract the transaction (!)

There are Very Basic Errors in this program that drive me crazy:
1.) It's very difficult to enter stock purchases with a purchase price other than that which Quicken has in mind... You have to bash it over the head again and again.
2.) You will get basic math errors, only some of which could charitably be attributed to rounding, and will end up with a trail of adjusting .o1 entires here and .00045 shares there...
3.)It does not handle stock spinoffs with more than one spinoff-ee.
4.)It does not handle capital gains correctly for stocks that have had spinoff-ee (see Quicken's own forums for this).
5.) For some reason beknownst only to them, the portfolio accounts are horribly crippled compared to the checkbooks.. so.. NO copying of transactions in case you make a mistake, NO scheduled transactions, NO calendar, NO memorized transactions (yeah, I was thrilled to enter 15 years' worth of monthly dividends by hand... I loved typing "$17.11" one hundred and sixty-something times..) uhmmm this is a COMPUTER? right?

Downloading transactions - four stars
Checkbook - four stars
Investment functions - negative ten stars

I have been using Quicken since 1992, and have kept waiting for new versions to address some of the things, like memorized xactions, before plunging in and entering all my old statements. I started anyway with this 2005 version and am sorry I did!

Some smart programmer somewhere should be reading this and firing up his compiler.. The World Deserves Better Software Than This!

This was a waste of money. No difference between this and the buggy version 2004. Mac users are the losers here. Although the windows version is ok, this is a real disappointment. I think we paid to have the bugs that were in 2004 fixed. Save your money!! - I'd give this a zero star if that was possible.