Lion OS X 10.7 and Quicken 2007

I guess that's where I fell as well. I tried See Finance and found it imported great, but there is no internal bill pay, and last time I checked, no check printing--although that's promised.

In the end, it seems like I would have to go through too much to start from scratch as I have ~50 total accounts with about 30 unused and hidden, but a source for transfers, etc. so I have to leave them "alive."

I just can't beieve that with all the Mac Quicken users out there, our "friends" at Quicken can't gin up a migration update. Heck, I'd pay for a migration tool or service even if they wanted to charge me a couple of hundred dollars.

I'm thinking I will have to resort to a dual boot system, but am waiting for my next computer upgrade to tackle that project.

"Friends" indeed. This is the worst form of "stickiness."

I guess that from Intuit's perspective the problem is that Quicken as a product is basically done, ie. there's very little demand for new functionality. They tried to offer online stuff as a revenue stream but it's never worked well and, at least for me, I prefer to balance my checking account from the paper printout (or a .pdf). So, I can see that they're kinda stuck - which is probably why they only keep a very small programming staff (I've heard they have one person working on the Mac product) and don't have the capacity to deal with the fact that Rosetta went away.

Begin to feel the way so many Blackberry users must feel...

William Campbell, CEO of Intuit, is on the board of Apple. How could he not have an interest in getting Quicken 2007 to operate on Lion?

I think Intuit operates with only 1 interest. Making monet with the least possible expense. They do not think. Am just trying Checkbook po at the suggestion and so far it looks like a winner. iBank is not.

Is strange. On the other hand, that guy from Google was on Apple's board for a long time and we know how that turned out...

Interested in hearing how it turns out.

yesyesyes wrote:

William Campbell, CEO of Intuit, is on the board of Apple. How could he not have an interest in getting Quicken 2007 to operate on Lion?

Apparently Intuit tried to rewrite Quicken for the newer Cocoa/Universal scheme, but the result was a late disaster. Finally they pulled back and released the crippled Quicken Essentials for Macintosh, which pleased almost no one.

I upgraded to lion but kept Quicken 2007 running under Mac OS X 10.6 Server. I found an unused copy which was an AMP upgrade with some retired servers. 10.6 Server works great under VMware fusion to run Quicken. Its just so sad Apple is limiting the use of Rosetta. I've started looking at other options a new cool option I found is mint.com. Amazing how you can consolidate all your financials accounts onto a single pane of glass. I hope mint.com is very secure, its scary to put all that power, (account usernames and passwords) into one system.

That's my problem with mint.com or any .com. That's my life up there. There are 3 worries about online:

1. Security: who is going to get my information

2. Integrity: do I really trust that the data will remain uncorrupted going back & forth on waves?

3. Longevity: at least if the data is on a drive I control, I can control how long it will be useful. What if they decided that mint.com isn't worth keepting? In a year or 2? I've been running Quicken for 22 years.

I did update to Snow Leopard and it is working very well. My MacBook is 6 years old and running fine. So, I'm good for now. If I were smart, I would have kept my Cube just for the games...

I'm in same boat with Q2007 Mac and have kept my main machine on Snow Leopard because of it. Thanks for the info provided in this thread about the alternatives. I have a question:

One of the features of Q2007 is automatic reconcile to online balance. That is, transactions downloaded from my bank are automatically matched to my register and marked cleared. Then a reconcile window shows uncleared items and compares online with register balances.

In the alternatives that I've looked at (including QEssentials), all seem to have only manual reconcile. This involves using a paper statement and manually checking off in the register each transaction shown on the statement. I used paper statements 20 years ago....I don't want to go back........

Anybody know if any of the alternative products offer automatic reconciliation to online balances?

I am doing a trial run of iBank, and it does not support the check format that I use. There is much discussion of check formats on the iBank support forums. It seems many Mac Quicken users are having trouble with the check formats. I also disovered that my printer driver is a PPC app, so I guess I will lose the ability to use my Canon i70 printer if I upgrade to Lion. I have doubts about using Quicken Essentials. If Intuit is dropping Quicken, who is to say whether they might also drop Quicken Essentials.

For my purpose, iBank is okay except for the check printing. I do not have to print checks, however, because I pay most of my bills using my credit union's online bill pay system. I have not tried doing an account reconciliation as yet. Will report on that when I try it. But I reconcile against paper statements, not by downloading from the bank/credit union.

I checked in About This Mac, and I find I have a lot of PPC apps. Many of them are unused. I need to find out how to get rid of unused apps. I do not want to switch to Lion, at least not for a good long while. But when I finally do, I will need to find out how to remove those old, incompatible apps.

FKandt wrote:

I'm in same boat with Q2007 Mac and have kept my main machine on Snow Leopard because of it. Thanks for the info provided in this thread about the alternatives. I have a question:

One of the features of Q2007 is automatic reconcile to online balance. That is, transactions downloaded from my bank are automatically matched to my register and marked cleared. Then a reconcile window shows uncleared items and compares online with register balances.

In the alternatives that I've looked at (including QEssentials), all seem to have only manual reconcile. This involves using a paper statement and manually checking off in the register each transaction shown on the statement. I used paper statements 20 years ago....I don't want to go back........

Anybody know if any of the alternative products offer automatic reconciliation to online balances?

I use QE and here's how I reconcile: when downloading transactions it matches and clears them in the Reconcile column, as you stated. I don't get too many paper statements anymore-- I download the e-statements. Then I select "Reconcile account" and enter the starting and ending balance and "Start Reconciling". For me it provides a good way to double-check and I have actually found this is easier and there are fewer errors to go back and correct than I used to have with Quicken 07. I

I believe that fate has smiled upon us. There is a new release (4.1) of VMWare Fusion 4 now out. That release allows non-server versions of Snow Leopard to run in a virtual machine. I've had good luck with Fusion on my wife's laptop for a specific Windows program and see no reason why it wouldn't be just fine for the relatively undemanding resources required by Quicken.

The real question is what will Apple do about this. They have consistently said virtualization software should not permit non-server versions of Apple software to run, so they may move to disable the use of non-server Snow Leopard in the next Lion upgrade, but then I'm only out $~44.00 for Fusion 4 and I probably need it anyway. See: http://www.macworld.com/article/163755/2011/11/vmware_fusion_update_lets_users_v irtualize_leopard_snow_leopard.html#lsrc.rss_main

I have found Fusion 4 available with free shipping at several Mac-focused outlets for $44.00. It's $49.00 with free shipping in the Apple store--but not available in the App store.

FYI: Parallels, the other popular virtualization software solution, doesn't allow non-server Snow Leopard.

One other suggestion that I want to try works if you have an old Mac lying around somewhere. Connect that Mac (running Snow Leopard) to your Mac running Lion and use a screen sharing program, or the capability built into OSX, to control that Mac remotely. Not too many of us have the luxury of an old Mac that can become a dedicated Quicken machine, but I have one of the first MBP's lying around that should do the trick.

I had upgraded to Mac OS10.7 (Lion) without realizing Quicken for Mac would no longer work on it. I first tried to get Quicken for PC set up using a VM on my Mac - that part was easy but transferring a Mac Quicken file into the PC version of the Quicken was a 'simple' 20-step tedious manual process that was just unconscionable from a software design perspective. I cannot imagine it being more painful. I spent probably 20 hours on it and was nowhere closer to accomplishing what should be a simple task, just getting my accounts switched from the Mac to PC version of the same Quicken software. Total nightmare!

I did a ton of research and considered running virtual 10.6 so I could continue to use Quicken for Mac but that's a pain, too, and I figured it's time to stop rewarding Quicken for making my life miserable. I considered the alternatives listed here and decided to try out SEE finance's free trial. About 20 hours later I had not only loaded all my past data into it successfully (it went SO smoothly!), I've learned just about every feature of the software and am really comfortable with its usage; the documentation is great and nearly comprehensive. I asked a few questions via support and got replies within a couple of business days (with an apology for the 'delay' due to it being a busy season for them! I've never gotten such quick response from a software company). I should mention that the lengthy parts of the switchover process was Quicken's fault, not SEE...it took me a while to check that the data in SEE was accurate and it turned out it was because the data in Quicken was screwed up.

I've got all the accounts reconciled, my budget re-created, weirdo transfers functioning, and recurring transactions set up. Things that never worked in Quicken (e.g. retirement account balances that never matched up / required balance adjustments, and a budget that continuously forgot values and got corrupted) work smoothly in SEE.

The only feature I'm missing relates to tracking expenses using the budgeting tool - there's not quite enough drill-down capability so to dig in you have to go to the separate Report tab (at least there's a workaround). This is listed as an upcoming improvement in SEE so I'm willing to live with that, and again, given that Quicken had certain things just broken (seriously, every once in a while the budget would just lose all its subcategory values and require me to re-create them from memory) and given how Quicken has handled its Mac products, I am SOOOO happy to have abandoned Quicken!

You give me hope!

I was elected treasuer of a small non-profit this year, and had to move the books from a PC running Quicken for Windows onto my Mac running Q2007. It was rediculously difficult - a software engineer, CPA, me, instructions from Google and 2 hours and we had jammed the data from the newer version onto my computer and crosschecked the sums. But I still had to re-create the budget from an excel spreadsheet and change the starting accountng month every time I change from the NP to my personal accounts and the categories occasionally go nuts.

So, did SEE keep your investment history? This would be very important for me.

At least I have an option other than keeping this laptop until I retire...