Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

EDIT: I have spent literally hours on hold and with tech support trying to figure out why this piece of software gives an error that it can not connect to the bank. It doesn't even tell me which bank! Because I have several different financial institutions set up when it fails it just fails. I have reconnected to every institution and uninstalled and reinstalled the program, shared my screen with tech support and put them in touch with the Quicken person for my primary bank. Once it started working again for no good reason, but has now quit again. In addition to having to give them all of my data that they keep in the cloud somewhere I have now had enough and am going back to Moneydance. It is ugly, but it never, NEVER, had these kinds of problems. ORIGINAL REVIEW: Thank you, Sweet Jesus! Finally a financial package for the Mac that isn't developed in someone's garage in Ethiopia. Fortuitously, I happened to search for Mac financial software on the day that Quicken for Mac 2017 was released. Seeing that it had all of the features I needed (primarily Bill Pay) I downloaded from Amazon and within minutes was underway. I will describe my findings from installation onward below. Download was very fast, maybe a minute. Installation was like always on a Mac, click the dmg file and drag the Quicken icon to the Applications folder, then authenticate. I had already exported a QIF file from MoneyDance to my desktop and selected that to import 13 years worth of transactions. This did take several, maybe 5, minutes, but it also did some investment accounts. It seems that Quicken has anticipated people switching back from other software as their help section mentions known problems in importing QIFs from MoneyDance and Banktivity. I did not have the problems described. Next I went about connecting all of my accounts online, which was mostly seamless. I _think_ that Quicken has remedied the problems I had with MoneyDance fudging up my Fidelity accounts to the point that I gave up trying to use them at all, though I will have to delve deeper and report back. The SunTrust connection was wonderful (except for Bill Pay, described later) in that ALL accounts were downloaded and setup automatically, including a trust, mortgage, credit card, and kids' savings accounts. I did have to do a little back and forth to name the accounts something friendlier than the account numbers, but that was not unexpected or difficult. The only problem I had was really with SunTrust, not Quicken, in how I setup Bill Pay. SunTrust has two separate logins, one for the web with bill pay and one for PC Banking with Bill Pay. I did not remember this from MoneyDance setup years ago and used my web login. The great thing about this is that I discovered that Quicken has telephone support. Real, live, English speaking natives who answered my call! I ended up asking support several questions, two of which became bug reports, one was resolved, and the Bill Pay problem that was eventually solved by SunTrust from a second phone on the other ear. In all she patiently spent almost 80 minutes with me on the phone. As to my initial impressions with the software... It looks very nice: Modern and professional, unlike the MD software that looks old, tired, and undeveloped. I have found it easy to enter a new transaction and suspect that merging/pairing transactions will be a simple click, though I have none to do today. Bill Pay, once connected, was easy to figure out as well, though I will have to reenter addresses for Payees. That is a small price to pay for the overall ease of use improvements. Reports are extremely fast and make sense. In particular I like the one titled "Spending Cloud". Imagine a picture of all of the words used in your expenses where the more you used the word the larger the word appears, with all of the words forming the shape of a cloud....That's what it's like. It gives an immediate idea of where your money is going without the details of dollar amounts or dates. I can't comment on the Budget function, as I have never set up one. :/ There is a Bill Reminders section where you can handle all of your bills on time or in advance, like paying them, deleting reminders that aren't needed, reporting on the particular payee, and scheduling future transactions. It's pretty straight forward and easy. The Calendar is essentially a report in graphic form. You can pick which accounts to show, expenses and/or income, payees, etc. This should really help with planning cash flow. Finally are Alerts. These are pretty customizable. Think 'low balance', 'big purchase', 'credit balance'. That kind of thing where you really need to know right away. You can even have them sent to you via email. Included is a free iPhone app that syncs with the desktop and gives you all of the information you need for all of your accounts, just one, or any number in-between. Fingerprint authentication makes it easy to get in on the iPhone, and it also provides you with all of the numbers as well as graphs for your accounts. Instantly you can see where you are spending money, Cash Flow, investing, and more. There is also a feature to snap a picture of your receipt to add to transactions in the app. It then syncs back to the desktop for later viewing. I wonder if I can get this to work with my Amex...... Complaints...I've had a few.... (I had Queen: We are the Champions playing in my head as I wrote this). So far they are pretty minor and are related to the bugs I reported above. On the main screen I find the font too small and there is at this time no means by which to increase the size. As I get older it means that I have to sit about 8 inches from my iMac to see clearly. Not good. The only other problem I see is that unless you filter the register by "Any Status" there is no running balance. So, when I select "Uncleared" to see what is coming up I can't see what the expected balance is on any given day. This could be a problem if someone holds a check for several weeks. If that happens you could potentially have many, many transactions between the held check and current checks and the reported balances would not be accurate. If not accurate, they aren't useful. Overall, I am thrilled to have another option for Mac financial software. There is still some development to be done, but it appears that most bases are covered and quality of usefulness is high. I would recommend this product and will report back in the future. [...]