But its real benefit is its budgeting tools. Like the now-departed Microsoft Money, Quicken Essentials will show you activity in individual accounts or in a combined ledger with everything. It aggregates categorization corrections from other users to continuously improve its performance (the Windows version, by contrast, uses Yellow Pages lookups). Patzer says Quicken is very smart about automatically categorizing expenses so you can identify your habits accurately. Once your accounts are hooked in, an Overview page gives you a super-clean Mint-like screen that shows you where your money is going to and coming from. It is very easy to set up if you're starting from scratch. In exchange for its limited feature set, Quicken Essentials gets ease of use. It's missing features like bill payment, and it's no good at tracking investments. It's clearly not a Mac port of the Windows version of Quicken that old fogeys like me are accustomed to. It's approachable instead of feature-laden, and in most areas it's very Mac-like.
Quicken Essentials takes a page from Mint in its approachability (sample data used). Quicken Essentials, the first new version of Quicken for the Mac since 2007, finally ships Thursday, at a retail price of $59.99. Features were dropped from QFL, the interface was redesigned, and Patzer made sure new users could set up the product in 10 to 15 minutes. Mint's CEO, Aaron Patzer ( interview), became the general manager of Intuit's Personal Finance Group, and took as one of his first jobs overseeing the re-creation of Quicken Financial Life into Quicken Essentials. Before the product could make it out of beta, Intuit bought, the upstart online personal financial information company. The ancient Quicken 2007, which was the last new version of Quicken for the Mac, was so unloved that you didn't have to look far to find people running Windows (inside Parallels or VMWare Fusion) on their Macs just so they could use one of the grown-up versions of Quicken that was available for the PC. They were getting frustrated with Quicken's maker, Intuit. Eagerly awaiting its release were Mac users who needed a personal finance app with some meat on its bones. It contained a beta version of the company's long-overdue update of the Mac version of Quicken, called Quicken Financial Life. A year ago at the Intuit booth at MacWorld, Quicken founder Scott Cook pressed a CD into my hand.
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