If you have been a Quicken for Mac user you will be disappointed with Quicken Essentials. It is like someone programmed it who never used Quicken before. There are some things that are different like the downloaded transaction process. On the good side that process seems to work much faster than what it did before.
The worst thing is that there is no real Quickfill anymore. They just use the payee list which means, depending upon how long you have been using Quicken you could have 100s or 1,000s of separate payees. There is a payee merge feature that works well but that is a lot of unnecessary work. This also does not help as with every new transaction with a payee that is different the list continues to grow. And don't just delete a payee as then your transactions that use that payee will be blank. At least they warn you about that with a popup window. Until this mess is fixed you shouldn't be allowed to do it at all unless there are no matching transactions.
If you were a frequent user of the search reporting feature in the past with its multiple search criteria and the ability to save search reports then you will be disappointed as all of that is gone. There is a single criteria search feature located handily at the top right of the page instead of on a separate tab. But most saved searches that I commonly used in Q4Mac2007 had multiple criteria.
Several of the banks use a security validation process that stores a security key on your computer when you access their web-based system via a browser. Apparently Quicken has no way to store that key as updates continually ask you to answer your security questions. On the good side you were never able to access these banks for automatic updates before. So this is a half step forward.
There are no automatic data updates available to disk or iDisk (MobileMe). Q4Mac used to not only save versions to your hard drive each time you closed the program but the preferences let you save redundant backups in other locations automatically. None of that happens anymore automatically.
There is no way to "move" a transaction to another account if you made a mistake and entered it wrong.
All transactions are entered on a single line. This is OK if you have a wide screen. If you don't then you will be doing a lot of scrolling sideways. Previous versions allowed for transactions to be displayed on 2 lines which seemed easier for me to follow. It was just like a checkbook.
And there are a lot of other minor annoyances like account screens that do not leave your cursor where you left it when you change to another account or close the application. And transfer transactions that ask for categories. This causes an incorrect total in that category if you fill it in. And an odd column called "tags" the description of which is complicated and left me scratching my head as to why I would every use it.
The worst part about this is that Quicken for Mac 2007 no longer works with Lion. I saw a response to a user that commented on this from a "SuperUser" on the Quicken forum that it was all was Apple's fault and that the fix was not to switch to Lion. Well that is a little hard to do once you have made the change. I guess everyone should be stuck with 4-5 year old software. I think this is a case of the tail trying to wag the dog?
In general there is a lot of potential with QE. The look and feel is crisp and clean. But Quicken seems to be reluctant to assign the programming resources to this product necessary to fix these problems in a timely manner. I wouldn't make the switch unless you have to do so.
