Ed Stoffel

It’s not just a Mac problem anymore. Microsoft has announced the end of Microsoft Money - sales of the current version ended June 30th, and will be supported for two years. Microsoft claims that there are many online financial solutions provided by banks, brokerages and others. I’m unaware of any banks or brokerages that allow you to manage all of your financial accounts on their site (unless all your banking is with them).

Trying to use a Mac computer exclusively in April, I found the lack of good financial software for the Mac a serious problem. Quicken 2007 for Mac is the “current” version, and I found it won’t work with any of 12 financial institutions I need it for. Quicken Financial Life for Mac is in beta, but I found it failed to connect to more than half of the same. (I was in the beta program but uninstalled the product and forgot to save the original installer to try it again later.) QFL was to be released this summer, but they now say it will be released in the fall.

I’ve tried two online services - Quicken Online and Mint. Both Quicken Online and Mint offer iPhone apps to check into their services. In April, these services were rough going - failing to connect to many financial institutions. Today, I’m still using both, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Mint is good at connecting because of the way you setup each account. With financial institutions requiring security questions and answers when you login, Mint has you save the answers in your account there so the service can get past those Q&As for you. Quicken Online’s approach is to have you manually step through those Q&As. Both services seem to get stuck when they encounter websites with new, unexpected steps to get by (announcements, updates, etc.).

Both services have greatly improved their ability to connect, but still aren’t 100%. For example, both fail to connect to PNC Bank’s Virtual Wallet service. This could be PNC Bank’s fault - I find their whole website layout very strange. The concept of a register isn’t prominent on the site - instead, they display amounts in different colored boxes on a calendar. But it’s unclear what all the different colors mean, or how much is in the account. To transfer money between accounts, they display a slider to move whole dollar amounts (cents not allowed here). PNC plans to release a redesigned site this summer - perhaps fixing some of these things.

Mint does not allow you to post pending transactions or registers for offline accounts (accounts payable, accounts receivable, or accounts which they fail to connect to). Quicken Online does allow you to post transactions which haven’t yet cleared, but does not allow registers of offline accounts.

Don’t people make lists of bills due in order of due date, to know how much they add up to, for planning purposes? I’d like the option of an accounts payable register for this. I’d like to enter each bill, it’s minimum due, balance, due date, etc. Then on bill paying day, I can look over the list, and decide how much to pay on each account, by assigning an account to pay it with, and observing its effect on my account balances. I was able to do this with Microsoft Money, but neither Quicken Online nor Mint currently allow this. I don’t wish to post bills directly into actual accounts because it’s important to know what those account balances really are.

Quicken Online has one feature that can be dangerous and costly if you’re not careful. QO analyzes your patterns of deposits and withdrawls, and creates predictive transactions. After working with the system for a few weeks, I looked to check my balance and believed it. Unfortunately, QO had included deposits I never made - QO just predicted that I would make them. There is no way to tell the difference between posts you have made and predictive transactions QO has made, since they appear in the same place on the register - above the line between cleared and uncleared transactions. I want transactions I post clearly distinguished from those which QO predicts.

You are able to manually delete each one of these predicted transactions, and can tell QO not to repeat the same prediction (for that exact payee name), but QO continues to post predictive transactions for each payee name until individually told to stop for every last one of them. There should be a way to tell QO to STOP inserting predictive transactions into the register, so that I can trust what I see, knowing that I put it there. Otherwise, I can only trust cleared transactions, and my pile of uncleared receipts.