As much as I dislike Quicken, I’ve always felt very comfortable with the fact that I was trusting my financial data to a company - Intuit - that’s going to be around for a while, even if they do rather abuse me as a customer. I’ve been unhappy with Quicken for some time, but it took me a long while to get to this point. I count myself lucky that I was born into the age of digital tools, because I’m sure that balancing a checkbook by hand would have driven me into the poor house and/or the mad house. Still, using Quicken has been the secret to my continued financial solvency (such as it is), and I need something like it, if not Quicken itself, to help me keep track of where all these dollar bills disappear to. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions. To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of. Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion.

It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering - for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive.

For more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances.

Quickbooks desktop app for mac sucks