SEE Finance 2 syncs quite well between my wife’s and my Macs and my iPhone, using iCloud. That’s not direct WiFi of course but good enough for our purposes. Note though for the Mac to Mac sync I have to make a trivial file change (add/remove a tag) to force the sync.
However there are many like me who prefer to keep their sensitive data off sites like iClod for security reasons. ANY software that doesn’t have the capability for direct LOCAL sync to my Mac is DOA.
I also stuck with Quicken 2007 for years and finally made the leap to the new Quicken last year. I have noticed continual improvement so I am happy to pay the yearly subscription.
Regarding income and expenses older than a few years, my contention is not literally “You don’t need these records” but “You don’t need these records in Quicken”, coupled with “Keeping the historical records in plain text or Excel format (or even PDF, if the PDF has searchable text underlying it) is more reliable, safer, and easier to search than using Quicken for that”. Just look at the gymnastics people are going through in this thread alone to migrate their data through successive versions! Keeping the historical data in this particular database increases your risk of data loss for nearly no benefit.
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I wish I had pulled my MacMoney records into a text file back in 2002. I’m often curious when we bought an item, how much it cost at the time, and even who we bought it from. Not mission critical though. That said I’m glad I have everything since then in one database. I search prior years quite often and it’s more convenient than Excel or text. Nothing wrong with a text or Excel backup though.
After more than a year of successfully downloading checking, credit card, and financial transactions, Quicken Deluxe stopped downloading checking transactions in early November from the small local bank I deal with. (Other accounts worked.) It took me a while to discover the problem, and checking with the bank pointed to Quicken, which had issued an update near the end of October. My first attempt to get help from Quicken Chat was over an hour wasted trying and retrying things that did not work.
Last Wednesday I tried again, got a better chat person and gave them a more detailed account of my problem and the past failure. After over an hour of Chat he said he wanted to talk with me directly on the phone, and we worked through a series of tests, and I sent him files of the results. All told it took 2.5 hours and then silence for a week. I tested Quicken every day or two, and this morning it finally was able to download from my local bank.
No explanation yet, no new update from Quicken, and no request for me to change something, so there may have been some aberration in the interaction between the bank and Quicken. At least I’m getting some benefit from the subscription fee 
This topic is exactly my situation. I am going to post my experience here first and then go back and study the original topic and its comments:
Longtime Quicken for Mac user, since the 1990s when I moved from Mac Money.
I realized that Quicken Essentials was a stripped down version, so I kept with Quicken 2007.
First I because a semi-expert at Rosetta, then Snow Leopard (still using my Mac mini 2011 that has a Snow Leopard partition), then Snow Leopard in Parallels and finally the updated (for Lion and thereafter) Quicken for Mac 2007. I have stopped upgrading Mac OS X with High Sierra, but I am considering a new M1 Mac mini when the next upgrade becomes available.
So I continue with Quicken 2007.
A big problem was back about 6 years ago with my financial institutions and credit cards (Citibank and AmExp) stopped allowing QIF downloads from their websites (I have never used QFX).
I solved that problem with MoneyThumb’s CSV2QIF converter: all these websites allow for CSV download and their converter is an easy “one more step” from downloading to importing into Quicken 2007.
I saw some concerns about Reports and yes, I do use Quicken 2007’s canned “Business Reports” for their Income Statement each year to give to my accountant.
I also use the QuickReport… feature quite a bit, too.
Thanks you in advance of my read!
I’m months into my switch and I have only about two complaints. Otherwise, it’s a dream. I spend about 80% less time managing finances, can pull reports much more easily, and I almost look forward to launching the app.
Complaint #1: Quicken tries to make best guesses as to the category to assign downloaded transactions if there’s isn’t a matching rule set up. Because these guesses are pretty good, I often don’t notice they were made. I haven’t yet figured out how to disable this—it’s unclear that you can? It means I have to do a little review before doing quarterly and annual taxes. Since I try to look over accounts anyway when I do that, it’s not a horrific additional burden.
Complaint #2: Some sites require a second-factor authentication token every time you connect to download transactions. PayPal, notably. While Quicken handles this generally well, it turns into a sort of modal situation once the token prompt appears, so you can’t work in the app, which you can otherwise when it’s downloading other accounts that don’t require additional authentication. I’d like this to become non-modal and to have the option to set up a sync schedule: I don’t need to download PayPal every day, so it would be nice to either force it on demand or have it only download every seventh day.
That’s really my list of burrs so far!
That’s also my Complaint #1, but I find it far more frustrating. Quicken Deluxe no longer uses the same categories as Quicken 2007, so it breaks most categories I have established, which I have to correct. Fortunately, when I change the category, Quicken Deluxe gives me the option to make my new one a default. However, I get some rather odd defaults for some credit card purchases. One is “shopping” for Target, which does make a certain sense, but would make more sense to me if it gave the store name. Others have no obvious relation to the store; why is buying from an internet hat shop a “business expense”.
I now discovered a download failure with a credit card account with a credit union, separate from my bank account. The failures started on November 29, and after discovering it I checked with the credit union and Quicken’s web site. The credit union reported their staff is working with Quicken trying to get the connection to works, and Quicken Deluxe now has version 6.5 in the works, but so far they only are rolling it out for people who ask for early versions. I’m not that much of a masochist. In any case, more things are in the works there, and it looks to me like Quicken is struggling to get their software working with financial institutions.
This usually happens because the financial institution makes a change and doesn’t work with the many different companies that sync data! Not the other way around. For instance, my credit union, BECU, is one of the largest in the country, and they rolled out a transition to a new business banking portal without being ready to sync transactions with Quicken or any other major financial software. They fixed it within a few weeks, but it was entirely on them.
I’ve got “try new features” enabled in Quicken, but I don’t think that gives you a beta release, just access to lab features. The latest release a couple days ago is 6.5.0.
I don’t need to defend a company, but I think that it’s hard to generalize that from a single case, particularly when I went through something nearly identical with my credit union not long ago that was the credit union’s fault?
I don’t know what’s going on inside the financial institutions and the software vendors, but it may be that both parties see each other as moving targets. Your comments do remind me that the credit union did change vendors a few weeks back, so they may have started this round. Quicken did do a good job when I finally got the right support person at Quicken in November, they realized there was a problem and worked with me to get enough data so they could eventually solve the problem. I found that encouraging.
My reading of the Quicken site was that 6.5.0 is in limited release, which is what I meant by “in the works”. From the discussion on the page I stumbled across, they’re still working on some minor issues, and may not want to do a full roll-out until after the New Year holidays.
(Replying four months later) I’ve been using gnucash happily since (checks…) 1995. AMA!
Hoping someone can help with this. I have decided it’s time to move on from Quicken 2007. I have no interest in a subscription service.
The main reason being is that I cannot keep up with the little things and account downloads would help a lot.
Does GNU do downloads?
SEE does, but does not from my credit union. That’s not such a big deal, but it appears it also does not from the Chase or Verizon (Synchrony Bank) credit cards. THOSE are a big deal.
Any ideas? I went through this 5 years ago and ended up keeping Quicken but it’s time to reevaluate.
Thanks
Diane
I use both iCompta & iFinance as backups to my primary financial software, PocketMoney which hasn’t been updated since 2014; that isn’t a problem since I’m limited to MacOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra). Looks like iFinance is 50% off until January 9th.
Nadja: “Does anyone have any experience updating quicken 2004 or 2005 ?”
I am just now studying the comments to Glenn’s excellent post about upgrading Quicken (which I have not yet attempted). But I came across your post and question and here is the answer (hopefully still helpful for you):
Quicken for Mac 2006 has the capability to upgrade earlier versions of Quicken for Mac, including your Quicken 2004 or 2005 and the Quicken 2006 data file is compatible with Quicken 2007 (so should work with the Import functions of the new Quicken Deluxe versions). Here are the problems:
Intuit used to have a link to download Quicken 2006, but it is probably long gone now. I have Quicken 2006 and am happy to provide you a copy if you email me at my screen name at AOL dot COM
The 2nd problem is that Quicken 2006 must be run on a PowerPC Mac or an Intel Mac that is running a version of OS X not later than Snow Leopard, so that Rosetta can do the proper translation.
If you find these problems too daunting, I would be happy to translate your data file for you as a courtesy. I recognize that most of us are sensitive about our personal finance files and you may be reluctant to do that.
If you look over at MacRumors you will see that I have been helping those who need to run Snow Leopard on a modern Mac since Lion was introduced. on the thread, still entitled: Installing Snow Leopard (and Rosetta) into Parallels 7 and Lion
Your problem was probably because you tried to use exported CSV or QIF data. Follow these instructions:
In Quicken 2007, go to Activities: Reports & Graphs.
In the Standard Reports Tab, select Transaction Detail and for Date, select the time period, such as Last Year or All Transactions
Click the Customize button at the bottom and in the next screen in Layouts, check the box for Show Split Detail and click OK at the bottom right.
These steps should now give you a complete report of all of your transactions for the time period you selected.
Now go to File: Export: Report…
And a dialog box will appear that gives you the options to name your file and where to save it.
NOTE: there are two file types available to you: MS Excel (xls-type file) or Plain Text (txt-type file).
If you have MS Excel or a compatible spreadsheet program, save as MS Excel. If you will be using a word processor or other similar program, such as TextEdit, use Plain Text. If in doubt, save it twice in both formats.
My annual file took about 10 minutes on my 2011 MacMini in High Sierra to export in MS Excel and about 20 minutes in Plain Text format. I easily imported the xls file into my copy of MS Excel 2011 and when I open the txt file in MS Excel, I just follow the defaults to get it to import.
I note that using the xls file, MS Excel reported that 29 lines did not import, but comparing this file to the Text file, I do not see any information missing. I do not know why this happens.
After opened in a spreadsheet, you probably want to change the Format of the Amount Column to Currency, especially if you will be doing calculations in Excel.
“I wish I had pulled my MacMoney records into a text file back in 2002.”
There is a HyperCard stack from 1994 that is a MacMoney to QIF translator:
About the MM to Quicken Stack
This stack is designed to ease the movement of information from a system created with Survivor
Software’s MacMoney accounting application to a format usable by Intuit’s Quicken accounting application.
It does this by converting MacMoney reports to equivalent files in Quicken’s QIF format. These files can then be used by Quicken via its Import… function.
The following procedure assumes you are familiar with MacMoney and that you have read enough of the Quicken manual(s) to be able to create:
• a new Quicken file
• accounts
• categories
• classes…
I made the switch to SEE. To be specific, I’m still working on it, but I paid for it once my trial was nearly run out.
Chase claims they don’t allow for downloads with third party services so I may never find that.
The imports are easy, just an extra step.
I definitely find some things “clunky” compared what I’ve been used to in Quicken since 1991 but I don’t think there was much way around with anything else either.
Diane
Does this article, How to Export Chase Bank Statements into Excel and Google Sheets help you with your Chase downloads?