Walt
How did you upgrade from Quicken 1999 to the current version. Need to do the same. Old Mac version been using for years. Any advice?
Thanks!
Mac or PC? They're different, and not in a good way.
Assuming Mac, Quicken 2007 is the latest version with the functionality you have in Quicken 1999. The upgrade is trivial, as Quicken 2007 will read in and use your existing Quicken data files. Gotchas: Quicken 2007 is a PowerPC program, which means that it will run on PowerPC Macs, as well as newer Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.6.8 or older software (via a PowerPC emulator Apple included).
As of Mac OS X 10.7, Apple no longer ships the old PowerPC emulator that Intel-based Macs (2005 and later machines) to run PowerPC programs. Why Intuit would ship a program in 2007 that only ran on hardware from 2 years before or earlier without (slow) emulation software is a fascinating tale of corporate mismanagement...
Quicken is selling Quicken Essentials for Mac, which will run on all Intel-based Macs. There are a few gotchas involving importing old data, as well as with functionality that's missing from Quicken Essentials compared to your Quicken 1999 or 2007.
The software will not read in your older Quicken Data files. A separate conversion program, which only runs on PowerPC Macs (or Intel Macs with 10.6.8 or older system software) must be run to convert your data to a proprietary interchange format Quicken Essentials can read. If you are planning to use Quicken Essentials as part of an upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7, you MUST convert your old data and get it into Quicken Essentials before upgrading to 10.7.
The good news is that the conversion and import works well, if slowly. I was able to convert 14 years of data in a dozen different accounts, a 15 MB data file. The conversion to the interchange format took about a half hour, and the import into Quicken Essentials took another half hour, with some interaction needed during the import process for some of the accounts. On completing the import, all the balances and transfers between accounts were correct (a problem I've had with other software).
The bad news is that the software support for various investment accounts, to put it charitably, is lacking. The software can be used to log into online investment accounts, and from there capture the names and ticker symbols of each investment, and shares held. Then, the software can tell you the net worth in each account after grabbing current quotes from their online quote service (Yahoo, I think). You can type in your basis by hand and it will tell you how far up or down you are.
That's it. No tracking of buys or sells, no commission record, no computed basis of all lots (what's a lot?
), and so no support for helping you with your tax returns. That's what you're supposed to save all that paper from the brokerage for...
The best alternative I've found so far is
iBank, but that had serious problems importing my admittedly complex backlog in their 3.x version. I'm going to try again with iBank 4 to see how that goes. If nothing else, I can just enter the buy orders and cash balance by hand to set up my current investment history, and start fresh for my other accounts as of January 1 2012.