These are the current versions of Quicken available for sale for the PC:
- Starter Edition 2013
- Deluxe 2013
- Premier 2013
- Home & Business 2013
- Rental Property Manager 2013
- And these for the Mac:
- Quicken Essentials for Mac
- Quicken Mac 2007 OS X Lion compatible
Intuit has 16 versions that are still supported and equally as many that are retired. With that many versions it can be difficult to determine what to do when you are trying to switch from a PC to a Mac. The first thing to understand is that you can maintain the same experience on your Mac by setting up a virtual machine running Windows and your choice of Quicken.
If you do decide to migrate from a Windows version of Quicken to a Mac, Intuit does provide some knowledge base articles that can help with the process. First, it may be necessary to upgrade your version of Quicken on the PC. In the event that your version of Quicken is rather antiquated, you can download a fully functional version of Quicken (up to 2004) for free here: Quicken 2004.
With two versions of Quicken for the Mac to migrate to, it’s important to understand what might be gained or lost. If you’re coming from Windows to Quicken 2007 for Mac, check out this guide: Quicken 2007 Guide.
If you’re coming from Windows to Quicken Essentials: Quicken Essentials.
Quicken Essentials does have some limitations, namely:
- Investment account transactions
- Custom reports
- Online banking passwords (Quicken for Mac and Windows)
- Data from the more advanced features in Quicken for Mac and Windows
For example, the following data is not imported: business data, rental property data, lifetime planner data, cash flow forecast data, budget data, spending plan data, debt reduction data, emergency tax records data, tax planner data, and home inventory manager data.
For most users, I would recommend Quicken Mac 2007 for $15, available here: Quicken Mac 2007 Download.
In the event that you are migrating data and experience an invalid QIF header error, follow this: Invalid QIF Header Error.
For a recent client, I ended up having an error related to “tags” which I resolved by opening the QIF file and deleting the first several lines of the file beginning with !Type:Tag and ending just before !Type:Cat. This allowed me to continue the import process, even though I did have to click “Stop” during the process but from what it looked like, the majority of the data was preserved.