Quicken has updated Quicken Classic for Mac to version 8.4, enabling you to email invoices directly from Quicken and accept payments through Stripe. The financial management app now includes predefined Payment Terms when creating invoices; enables you to assign Business, Client, and Billable fields to scheduled transactions; allows you to edit Invoices and Clients using keyboard shortcuts; adds the ability to restore all dashboard cards and settings to their default state; improves biller search when adding a new Quick Pay payee; allows you to hide securities from the Securities list; improves performance when opening the Reconcile History window; addresses several issues that could result in broken transfers when downloading transactions; fixes a bug where selected register values were not always fully highlighted; and improves report data storage to help reduce Quicken data file size. ($71.88/$95.88/$131.88 annual subscriptions, free update for subscribers, 3.2 MB installer download, release notes, macOS 12+)
A warning if you’re using Quicken to keep track of income and expenses for tax purposes: the categories Quicken assigns to individual payments are assigned by the companies that provide the data to the banks and credit cards who provide you with the data. Those assignments may have no relation to whatever you purchased. That’s understandable if you buy from Amazon or Walmart, but other errors are more random. For example, a bill from a Dr. Kaplan was classed education, and payments to a local pharmacy were listed as mobile phone bills.
You can set Quicken to assign all payments to or from the same company to a particular counter, which we did to fix what we pay to the pharmacy. However, the process of correcting categories is a bit awkward, and if you accidentally double-quick Quicken may important income or outgo in the wrong category.
This can be an important issue if you use your Quicken data for filing tax returns especially if you are self-employed or have rental property. It’s worth scanning the in Quicken data to make sure it’s in the right place.
Originally Quicken defaulted transactions for new payees to be uncategorized. Now it makes its best guess, if it guesses wrong then you need to assign a category, just like before.
Are you expecting it to do something more? It can’t read your mind.
Well, yes, I do expect more. This is a home accounting system, which people use for preparing their tax returns. I expect the numbers to be correct and to be assigned to the right category for TurboTax to read and use for compiling my tax return. I’m self-employed, and most of my income reported on 1099s, so I can use those forms to file my income. However, we also own rental property, and I was disturbed to find one check to have wound up in a non-rent category, which we don’t get 1099s on.
I don’t know how that happened, but I have noticed that if I accidentally double-click the mouse to change categories, Quicken sometimes moves an entry to a different category.
I don’t think Quicken “guesses”. They use information that companies provide to banks and credit cards about what they sell, so it isn’t exactly their fault. On one level, that’s basically a minor annoyance; I don’t care if they class food as coming from a restaurant or a supermarket. But I care if it screws up my tax return, and discovering that it almost did last year left me rather grumpy. .