I see, thank you for being a loyal Quicken customer. Shee Ann PSep 23, 2016, 10:30am. What we are going to do now is to copy the file information from one file to another, I suspect that the main issue here is the file, are you ready? NameSep 23, 2016, 10:31am. But we already did this a couple weeks ago. Shee Ann PSep 23, 2016, 10:31am. Quicken data files stored in a drive by going through Windows Explorer and navigating to the folder. This is normally in the folder C:/Program Files/Quicken/Data.This is the default location set in Quicken where data files are saved.
The coming of “” 32bit app usage in the fall 2018 macOS release finally forced my hand: I was going to have to update my single longest-used app, Quicken 2007. I’ve been using Quicken in some form since 1994, but stopped with Quicken 2007—I found the newer versions worse than Quicken 2007, so I never upgraded.
Yes, I was using an eleven-year-old app to track our family’s spending and investments. Basically because it worked (most of the time), and I didn’t like any of the alternatives, which I would occasionally test.
But Quicken 2007 was showing its age. In addition to its 32bitness, it had other issues: The UI was tiny and horrid, the windows never opened where I closed them (‘s saved layouts to the rescue!), and online access to my accounts was nearly non-existent. Worst of all, it would crash on occasion, necessitating rebuilding all my data files. It was finally time to find its replacement. After —and asking on Twitter—I focused on three apps:,. After looking at all three, I surprised myself by deciding that Quicken was the best tool for our use.
Going in, I was dead set against it, mainly due to its annual subscription structure. (I hate subscription software in general, but as it turns out, this one.) Read on for brief overviews of each of these three apps (with more detail on Quicken) and my rationale for deciding on Quicken. Getting started I was looking for an app that. Imported our historical Quicken data I didn’t want to lose 24+ years of our financial data. Felt like a Mac app I wasn’t interested in something that felt like a port from Windows, or lacked the specific “Macness” one gets in an app written for the Mac.M. Offered accurate investment tracking Our investments are in a few accounts, and I like to monitor them all in one spot. Included online account access I want to update our bank, credit card, and investment accounts from the source, instead of having to manually enter transactions.
Things I don’t really care about are bill pay (I use our bank), reports, budgets, and charts and graphs for anything outside the investments section of the app. As such, I can’t vouch for how well any of these three programs handle those tasks.
All three apps imported my Quicken data file, though with varying degrees of success. Moneydance ignored the “hidden” status of accounts, so a lot of old, closed accounts showed up. Banktivity won’t import reconciliations, so none of my accounts were reconciled. Still, these are relatively minor issues compared to successfully importing nearly 25 years worth of Quicken data.
Now, here’s a brief overview of each of the three apps 3 – Moneydance This was the first app I looked at, and I pretty quickly ruled it out. I found the interface not to my liking—there are icons next to each account, which makes the layout look busy, and I found its register view confusing: Notice that entries take up two rows, but the white/blue background alternates every other rowso if you’re glancing at the register, it’s nearly impossible to pick out one transaction unless you click on it to select it. (It’s easy to tell them apart in this four-line partial register, but in the full register with comments on the second line for many entries, everything blends together.) Moneydance is a Java app. And while that doesn’t inherently make it bad, Java’s generic “write once for many platforms” code shows itself in a few places: The Preferences window doesn’t look anything like a native Mac app window, and the buttons in the app are definitely not macOS-style buttons. Performance-wise, the app feels a bit slow; it takes a couple of seconds to open an account in a new window after double-clicking its entry in the account list. This is true even if it’s an account I just opened and then closed.
Due to these issues, I quickly decided that Moneydance was not for me. 2 – Banktivity Banktivity was a strong contender; it was neck and neck with Quicken until I got more into the transition and looked closely at all of our accounts. Its account list view is also laden with icons—folder icons, new activity count badges, and status badges. It looks very busy, but once you get into an account, the view is much cleaner than Moneydance: This view can also be infested with icons, but those can (thankfully) be disabled in the app’s preferences. In the register view, each entry is two rows, but the alternating background is also two rows, making it easy to see each transaction at a glance. Banktivity has two methods of data download: OFX (free) and Direct Access (subscription required). While many of our accounts offered free OFX support, there were a number that only worked with Direct Access, which is free during the generous 30 day trial period.
Outside of that, Direct Access is a $45 per year subscription. Banktivity doesn’t have any of the “non-native” issues I found in Moneydance; the app looks and feels like a traditional Mac app, and opening an account window from the account list is speedy. Unfortunately, you can’t do that with a double-click, as that brings up the account’s info panel; you need to right-click and choose Open in New Window from the contextual menu. That’s a big time waster for me. On the investment side, I had issues with two stocks that had had stock splits. Because I wasn’t downloading investment data in Quicken 2007, I had manually entered the splits using Quicken’s split tool. Banktivity didn’t handle this correctly, so our balances were way off in those two accounts.
In the end, I decided against using Banktivity due to its cost ($65 up front, plus $45 per year), the overabundance of icons in the layouts, its inability to import reconciliations from Quicken, and its difficulties handling some investment data. 1 – Quicken 2018 When Quicken 2018 was released as a subscription product, I with the change, as I have a big issue with “software as a service.” But as I dug into the app, I discovered that their subscription: If you stop subscribing, you can still use the app to enter and track financial data; you just lose access to the online components and Quicken’s support services.
That allayed my fears of needing to subscribe forever, just so I wouldn’t lose access to my financial data. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial of Quicken, but they do offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so I paid and started testing. What I found is an app that, for the most part, takes everything I liked about Quicken 2007 and modernizes it. As I hoped, Quicken handled the import of my old data perfectly, bringing across the reconciliations and handling investments properly. It’s also speedy, opening new account windows promptly when double-clicked. I like the minimalist one-line register views—they’re clean and easy to read: (If you need to see the details, you can double-click to see an expanded view.) You can choose one of four levels of line spacing for the register—they include Comfortable, Cozy (pictured), Compact, and Tiny.
None of these affect the font size, just the row spacing. (I wish the font size were changeable, but it’s not.) Unique to Quicken among these three apps is the ability to change the visible columns, as well as the column order, on a per-register basis. As seen at right, there are a large number of columns you can choose to view—24 in total. I like that it’s just as easy to hide columns you don’t want to see. Once you’ve added and removed columns to your liking, you can drag the remaining visible columns into any order you wish. Quicken includes two methods of online access: Direct Connect and Quicken Connect.
Both are included in your annual subscription cost, and between the two, I was able to get all but one of my accounts working for online access. (Oddly, that one account did work with Banktivity.) Why I chose Quicken Certainly there’s some value to continuing with the app I had been using: The import went perfectly, and I felt immediately comfortable in the app. But given how horrid Quicken was for many years of Intuit’s onwership, I was prepared to be disappointed. But Quicken is no longer owned by Intuit—two years ago, they were. That’s both good and bad; it’s good that they’re out from under Intuit’s lack of interest in the Mac app.
But it’s possibly bad in that an investment group only buys a company for one reason: To later sell it at a big profit. But to get to the point where the company is worth a higher valuation, they have to offer things that customers want. And to me, it seems “new Quicken” is trying hard. After buying, I received an email thank-you from the CEO, explaining where they’ve been and where they’re trying to go, and thanking me for being a customer—sure, it’s a form letter, but it’s more than I ever got from Intuit. The in-app help options, as seen at right, are extensive and include a link to the community forums as well as an in-app screen sharing feature. The help file itself is detailed and well indexed, making it fairly easy to find what you want.
(Though it is a complex app, so there’s a lot to look through.) The app is a real Mac app, with none of the weirdness that comes from a Java app. Buttons look right, the prefs look right, shortcut keys work as expected, etc. Finally, there’s the issue of cost. Quicken for Mac comes in three versions: Starter ($35/year), Deluxe ($50/year), and Premier ($75/year). The lays out all the differences. For us, as we need to track loans and investments but don’t need bill pay, Deluxe was the obvious choice.
Right now—and probably for quite a while, I’d imagine—a two-year Deluxe subscription is $69.98, bringing the cost per year to $34.99, which is a bargain. By comparison, the first two years of Banktivity would cost us $155, or $77.50 per year. If there are no more discounts after the first two years, Quicken will then cost us $5 more per year than would Banktivity, which means it would take roughly 17 years to spend the $85 we save up front. Quicken 2018 isn’t perfect, but for us, at least, it’s a very nice upgrade from Quicken 2007, and its reasonable cost and “not-really-a-subscription subscription” model work well for our family. Wyn: I’d never heard of them, so thanks for the pointer. However I’m one of “those” people: I despise web apps, and can’t use them, and that seems to be what they are now? (Their prior version was a traditional Mac app, it appears.) Beyond that, if I’m reading the site correctly, all my data is stored on their server somewhere?
That’s also not for me—I want my financial data on my machine, away from the cloud. It may be the most amazing solution ever, but those two things will stop me from ever using it. Regards; -rob.
Hi Rob, thanks for the article. I’m in the same boat as you, needing to reluctantly transition out of 2007 but I DO need the reports function.
Like you, I track family spending and finances but depend on the “Income Statement” report every year to send to my accountant. It’s a terrific report and I count on it to bring all categorical expenses into one one handy report, and you can even click on each item to reveal the list of underlying individual expenses if necessary. I don’t think I could ever do without it.
But, I must change to something else, even if it means buying a cheap Windows computer just to run Quicken with all the bells and whistles again. It’s a very sad situation for sure. You are so right about that being a desperate move, to Windows. But what leads me to look for other options now is that I can’t get my new Discover card to download transactions, getting the dreaded OL-226 error. The Discover rep said downloads don’t work with a Quicken over 3 years old. Also, my Schwab stopped downloading a couple of years ago but I like Quicken so much that I’ve been doing that manually. I need for those to download.
And, there’s no longer any support, even chat forums, for Quicken Mac 2007. Nail after nail in that coffin, sadly.:-(. Just to be clear, Quicken is a personal finance tool, not a business tool, so the tools are basic. While there’s no balance sheet, there is a net worth report to see assets vs.
You can also see loan amortization info, though not in as much detail as you could in 2007. Anyway, make sure the moneyback guarantee is still in place, and if so, give it a try with an import from 2007.
I wasn’t expecting great things, and while it’s still not 2007, it’s more than met my personal needs so far.
Hey everyone! To start I would save a back up of the complete file for reference. The transactions would have to be deleted, there isn't a way to partition out the file to remove certain information from the file. You can mass highlight transaction and delete them all at once, to mass highlight: - Select the first transaction that you want delete and scroll to the last transaction you want to delete and hold the SHIFT key and select it to highlight everything between these two points.Right click and select delete the highlighted transactions. This would have to be preformed for each account. If this is too invasive you can you the filters at the top of the page to filter the information out.Hope this helps! Cary, how much of your data file space is used by scanned image attachments?
Please provide more details about your Quicken data file. I'd like to know if you have account registers with 10,000 transactions. And I'd also like to see the 'File Information' window (See below) I'd also like to know what else is going on in parallel with you running Quicken: any other applications that use a lot of CPU cycles, memory or disk I/O? Any cloud backup software actively accessing your Quicken data file while Quicken is running? About file size and number of transactions: You can find out how many transactions you have in your data file by doing this: - Click Tools / Account List.
This should tell you how many transactions you have in each of your accounts in an optional column, '# of Transactions'. If this column is not shown in the Account List, click the Options button at the bottom of the Account List window, then click 'Number of Transactions' to add the column. Click Help in the Menu Bar. CTRL+click About Quicken and it'll give you a File Information box.
Please capture an image snapshot of this File Information box and attach it here. The Windows Snipping Tool (available with Windows 7 and newer) can be used to capture a partial screen image and save it to a file of file type PNG, JPG, or BMP. To attach the image here, start composing your response. At the bottom of the text entry window you'll see a row of icons beginning with B I U S Click the camera icon (not the video camera icon).
It will allow you to select and upload the captured image file from your computer. The captured image will be inserted at wherever the cursor is located in the text. Cary, thanks for sending the File Information. I'd be very careful with relying on Quicken for managing your paperless office. Working with attached images is not an industrial-strength application. If something were to go wrong, you could potentially lose attachments, a few or all.
Please keep plenty of backups of your data file. Over the next few minutes I'll be posting more information about managing memorized payees and a possible way to get a handle on your performance. Where is your current Quicken data file located?
On an internal SSD drive? On an internal hard drive? In the default Documents Quicken folder or elsewhere?
On an external USB device? On a NAS server disk? In a folder that is accessed by cloud backup software? To trim the Memorized Payee List and keep it in shape please do this: In Edit / Preferences / Data Entry and Quickfill make sure you have a checkmark at 'Remove memorized payees not used in xx months' and set xx to something like '18'. Do not set it to zero.
IMHO, you should set the number to 12 or higher for best results, so that once-a-year payees don't vanish. Restart Quicken for the change to take effect and housekeeping to clean up the Memorized Payee List. Check the File Information box again to see the reduced count. When downloading and accepting transactions, please make sure that you standardize your Payee Names. For example, one entry 'Starbucks' is good. Dozens or hundreds of entries with 'POS TRANS 070116 STARBU', 'POS TRANS 070216 STARBU', etc., each with a different date in the text is not good. To try and get a handle on your performance issues, please do this: Validate your Quicken data file.
It may have become damaged over time or if you ever had crashes, hang-ups or loops while running Quicken. Repeated crashes may eventually render a data file 'broken beyond repair'. Please run this procedure, skipping no steps: - Make a copy of your data file: Click File / File Operations / Copy. Do not change any Copy Option settings. Save file under a new name in same folder as current Quicken data file. (The Copy process appears to be performing a record-by-record copy of the data file and not just a simple binary image copy.
This has been reported as recovering some otherwise not repairable files) - Open the copied file in Quicken. Click File / File Operations / Validate and Repair. Click 'Validate File' and 'Rebuild investing lots', check to make sure the copied file is being validated, click OK. Fix any errors logged as not repaired by Quicken.
Click File / File Operations. Press and hold SHIFT+CTRL as you click Validate and Repair. The next popup should show 'Supervalidate' somewhere in header or text. Click 'Supervalidate File', check to make sure the copied file is being validated, click OK. It might run for a while. Again fix any errors logged as not repaired by Quicken. Now close and restart Quicken using this new file and see if your performance issue is gone.
If it works, keep using the new file and abandon the old one.