KELLNER: Quicken’s half-loaf for Mac needs work

One month ago — to the day — I noted the difficulty users have with handling personal finances on their Apple Macintosh computers. Unless a modern-day Mac user either is very patient with applications such as iBank or iFinance, or unless they are willing to trust an online service such as Mint.com, it is tough sledding.

Perhaps, I surmised, the new Quicken Essentials for Mac, a $69.99 product from Intuit, would be better. It is, and, oh brother, it isn’t.

Here’s the good news: For your money, you get a streamlined personal finance program that claims compatibility with 12,000 financial institutions. All I know is that Quicken Essentials was able to connect to both my credit union and my credit card company, and import all available transactions properly. Deposits were imported as deposits, debits as debits and payments as payments.

In fact, with some rules-based intelligence, the program was quite good as assigning categories to those transactions. It figured out, for the most part, what an expense was, and even, in some instances, whether or not it was tax deductible. That’s not a bad thing at all, since, come tax time, it’s good to have all those ducks in order.

However — and I am far from the only reviewer to note this — there are also some serious limitations in this new products. When Intuit said this offered “Quicken Essentials,” they were not kidding about the “essential” part. Forget about exporting the data you create in this program, since there’s no means to do so. That means — no linking your data to tax preparation software, including Intuits own TurboTax. Investment tracking is also very limited, and there’s no online bill paying component.

So, basically, for a not-inconsiderable sum of money, you don’t get much more than you can get for free from the Intuit-owned Mint.com. Indeed, with one click, you can export all your Mint.com transactions into a “comma-separated value,” or CSV, data file, which in turn can be read by spreadsheet and other programs, although some work might be required to carry the data into TurboTax.

This isn’t good for users, and right now, I’m hard pressed to see how this is good for Intuit. On the Windows side, there’s no question that Quicken rules the roost when it comes to personal finance applications; all the features missing from Quicken Essentials are there, and in abundance. Compatibility with TurboTax, again on the Windows platform, isn’t a question.

So the Mac user who wants to stay totally in tune with their finances is left with some of the same options mentioned here 30 days ago: Keep a PC on the side for family accounting, or struggle with a bunch of Mac software that isn’t yet up to the task.

I could leave things there, but for the presence of Aaron Patzer, the creative genius behind Mint.com who is now running Intuit’s personal finance software unit after Intuit bought Mint last year. Mr. Patzer, with whom I spoke last week, brought a fresh earnestness to getting a Quicken Essentials product out the door, and who made it look as good as it did. That there are improvements necessary is more than obvious; on March 1, I downloaded and installed a bunch of improvements and fixes for Quicken Essentials, and presumably more are coming.

Mr. Patzer’s representatives didn’t supply answers to my questions about the data-export issue by the deadline for this column. However, having observed Intuit in action for more than 20 years, I would be astonished if the firm waited too long before making Quicken Essentials into the kind of program its users will enjoy and truly benefit from using.

In summary: Much needs to be done before I can say Quicken Essentials for Mac really is an essential program, but hope springs eternal.

• E-mail mkellner@washingtontimes.com