Quicken 2005 for Mac [Old Version]

Other products by Intuit

Product Features

• Save, invest, and track profits in minutes
• Download banking, credit card, and brokerage transactions
• Track spending; manage investments; prepare for tax time
• Track portfolio performance; read news stories related to holdings
• Track home inventory and value; convenient iCal calendar

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00029J1QI
• Item model number: 283646
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 28, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 1.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,226 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #18 in	Software > Personal Finance > Investment Tools
  #82 in	Software > Personal Finance > Money Management

Product Description

From the Manufacturer
Quicken 2005 for Mac lets you see you save, invest, and track profits in minutes. Track your checkbook and spending, manage your investments, prepare for tax time, and much more! Quicken 2005 for Mac helps keep your finances and investments on track.

Features:

• Easily download your banking, credit card, and brokerage transactions right into Quicken--instead of typing them in by hand.*
• Take advantage of investment indicators including detailed quotes, industry benchmarks, asset classes, and more to track the performance of your portfolio.*
• An informed investor is a confident investor. Stay on top of important news stories related to your holdings with News Alerts.*
• Track your home inventory and value--now synchs with iPhoto!
• Compare the potential impact of selling stocks and mutual funds before you actually sell with Capital Gains Estimator. By optimizing your gains and losses, Quicken helps you keep more of your money.
• Now keep track of important bills in your favorite calendar--iCal. Add upcoming bills or any transaction you want to a Quicken calendar on iCal.

*Online features require Internet access and are subject to change. Services vary among participating financial institutions or other parties and may be subject to application approval, additional terms, conditions, and fees.

Product Description
Quicken 2005 makes it easy to save, invest and track your profits in minutes -- while minimizing taxes, managing your investments and tracking your home inventory. Save, invest and track profits with tools that help you pay bills quickly, balance your checkbook, create a budget and more. Plan for retirement, simplify taxes and manage your investments - all with just a click! Stay informed with investment news flashes related specifically to your portfolio -- stock quotes, the Morningstar Rating for mutual funds and more

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

84 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars May not be worth the upgrade!, August 8, 2004

By	J. Weiker "moofpup" (CHARLOTTE, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recommended for new or holdout users, February 13, 2005

By	William Breiland - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

96 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not worth upgrade; little to nothing has been improved, August 5, 2004

By	Scott K "scottk" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

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.