Mac Quicken Gets New Features, Lower Price

Intuit has added a couple of useful new features to Quicken Essentials for Mac -- and has lowered the price at the same time.Quicken Essentials for Mac was released at the end of February and is the first new Quicken product for the Mac to see the light of day since 2007. It's designed as a personal finance tool, but it would be useful for any SOHO business -- and it's the only Mac option so far available from Intuit short of QuickBooks Pro at three times the price.

As with all Quicken products, Quicken Essentials for Mac keeps track of your income and outgo and gives you a current snapshot of your account balances. It also connects to more than 12,000 banks and other financial institutions to download transactions automatically. (By the end of the year, it is expected to let users enter investments manually from institutions that don't support downloading.)

The new features include the ability to password-protect files and to export data from Quicken to spreadsheets for further manipulation. Besides the manual entry of figures, other features expected by the end of the year include the ability to compare spending in different time periods and export business expenses to tax programs such as Intuit's own TurboTax.

Quicken Essentials is our first Mac-native Quicken product, and demonstrates our new commitment to the Mac platform, said Aaron Patzer, vice president and general manager of Intuits Personal Finance Group. Were glad customers took it seriously when we asked for their feedback. These are the first in a series of changes were planning to ensure Quicken Essentials users have the tools they need to manage their money easily and affordably. In addition to adding new features, Intuit lowered the price of Quicken Essentials from $70 to $50, and offered customers who've already purchased the product (before April 19) a $20 refund. The program is available via download or CD-ROM from the product page.

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