Lion OS X 10.7 and Quicken 2007

There's an article and discussion about Quicken replacements on the TidBITs Web site: Finding a Replacement for Quicken.

Just a quick and final followup on my own experience with IBank after switching from Quicken and posting here. Basically summed up, I cannot believe I stuck with that DOG Quicken for all those years! IBank is so much faster and easier once you get through the natural learning curve.

At first I thiught it wouldn't do this or wouldn't do that, but in almost all cases it would,better and faster, once I spent the timeand learned how. Too many specifics would just confuse issues since we all have different needs and styles of hadnling our data. But one simple example that brought me here this morning to give my opinion.

Did and income and expense report, reviewing I noted I had made an error somewhere along the way and had too exopense categoreys do to mispelling, Itune and iitunes. Click mispelled categorey immediately go to all the entries listed for that categorey. Click on any entry immediately go to that entry. Change to correct categorey, instantly changed on reports etc. In contrast in Quicken 7 would have had to go to the register in question and do a find going through finding entry each one by one. With Ibank stayed doing just what I was doing, a couple clicks and continue where I was no in and out of this register and that doing finds and corrections.

I have scratched head trying to reconcile creating statements and found it annoying getting numbers to be right, not a problem reconciling account itself but getting representation to appear correct. I have also had a moment or two of frustration trying to understand how reporting works in some areas but once I spent some time was more than happy with results.

Bottom line after using IBank for a while now I am far more satisfied with it than I ever was with Quicken 7. And I have now changed over to LION without any difficulty concerning IBank.

George in NY - For what it is worth departmen

TidBITS has a follow-on article about replacing Quicken: Finding a Replacement for Quicken.

Jim,

I am very sad to hear this - I split just about everything. I also have data back to 1989, and really need to keep the cost basis of investments.

I was hoping that iBank would be the solution so I could update to Lion. Guess I'm just going to stick with Snow Leopard.

So, are you running Snow Leopard client? or server? According to the Virtual Box documentation, only OS X Server is supported as a guest OS. Have you been able to run the Snow Leopard client in a VM as a guest, with Virtual Box running under Lion? Thanks.

I'm running standard Snow Leopard client in Vbox with Lion as the host OS. Running on an iMac with 3.06 Ghz Intel processor and 4 GB RAM.

Keep in mind that what is "supported" and what works are two different things.

I'd like to add my 2 cents hope they come up with a solution. I purchased Lion and installed it on every non-Quicken 2007 computer, 2 laptops and a mac mini. My main desktop is still running SL because I need Quicken 2007. Main computer also has all the movies, music and photos. Its itching to run Lion but without PPC support or an upgrade for Quicken 2007 its a no go.

Michael Pitogo wrote:

I'd like to add my 2 cents hope they come up with a solution.

I'm not sure who you refer to as "they", but I doubt if it would be Apple. Your best option is probably to investigate the dozen or so possible Quicken alternatives.

I have VMware Fusion 3.1.3 and mainly use it for XP on rare occations. Now I am looking at ways of sneaking in a Snow Leopard installation with Quicken 2007. VMware fusion running on Lion with an SL guest would be ok.

You may want to investigate this on your own, but it's my impression that VMware Fusion enforces Apple's licensing terms by refusing to run Snow Leopard (non-server) as a guest operating system.

I've been running this way for a month or two now and the experience is getting scarier and scarier. I have an external hard drive with SL installed so I can run Quicken. And I have upgraded my internal harddrive to Lion (no going back now...).

Each time the I switch over (I normally run on Lion but every day or so, I need to switch over to do some financial stuff), I can book ok from Snow Leopord but the internal harddrive refuses to appear. I've taken to keeping the Quicken datafile in the cloud (Dropbox) in order to work around this. Then when I go back (like today), I often can't get the Lion drive to boot at all. Today I had to reset the PRAM to get everything to come up. Unfortunately, that toasted my TimeMachine backup so I'm having to start all over again and have lost the ability to go back in time.

Any hints?

Not wanting to have to worry about two operating system plus being totally disenchanted by the poor support from Intuit, I decided to bailed on Quicken. I have that migrating over to iBank has been great and it works on Lion, stuff that Intuit

Allan

I am using CheckbookPro when I lost Quicken and I love it. Very simple and adequate unless you need more financially-sensitive features.

For anyone who hasn't yet decided what to use to replace Quicken, here is an article that described 10 financial programs that run under OS X 10.7.

I bought iBank as it seemed the best. And I did an export (QIF) from Quicken. I've ended back at Quicken for a few reasons:

(a) iBank does not handle hidden accounts. In Quicken, as you know, you can hide accounts that have fallen into disuse so long as the balance is $0. iBank, so far as I can tell, does not provide this functionality. My import ended up making visible many (many, many) accounts that were previously hidden that I now have to deal with in one way or another. If I delete them, perhaps this throws my checking account off because of the volume of one-sided entries that would result.

(b) While I don't blame iBank for this, QIF does not support complete home mortgage exports. When I imported, while the balances were correct, all of the underlying calculations were gone. I would have had to reenter all those mortgages and start from some point in the middle of the mortgage.

(c) Likewise, QIF does not export scheduled transactions. While I could reenter them, there seemed little point given that I had them all in Quicken.

And it turned out that some of the difficulty I had going back and forth from my Snow Leopard boot to my Lion boot was a bad internal drive. That's now taken care of. There's still a problem with the screen not recognizing keyboard input (even though it knows the keyboard is there) but the last time this happened, I solved the problem by turning all external drives completely off before restarting in Lion. Haven't had the heart to call Apple about this issue, too complicated, too specialized. Something I guess I'll live with.

Anyway, I'm probably just as angry with Intuit as anyone but so far the transition issues seem insurmountable. I almost feel that if I do decide to dump Quicken, I might as well plan to start again from scratch.