quicken equivalent

I used Quicken before , now I use IBank , works great and you can import your bank accounts

iBank -- like most other financial programs not made by Intuit -- are not designed to look like or work like Quicken. They perform many of the same functions but in their own way (sort of like comparing Microsoft Word to Pages, for example). So it takes a little time and effort to get used to the way the given program works.

There may certainly be some areas where iBank simply cannot do something Quicken used to do. I've never heard from anyone using iBank for investment accounts (other than bank ones) so I can't say how well it might perform in that area. As I say, however, there are lots of alternatives and all of them that I know of have free trials.

OK. I now have some experience with iBank. After hours of trying to get it to import all of my Quicken accounts and getting it hooked up to my various investment houses, I have given up on it. I give iBank chat help high marks. They were just unable to solve my problem.

The first problem is when you import the Quicken Essentials file, none of the investments are included. The meaning of this is, if your investment firm supports Direct Connection, you can hook up to the institution with login and password and download your portfolio into iBank. If it doesn't you're likely out of luck. I have an account with TIAA-CREF. They only support the export of a .qfx file for update to Quicken. This is a 120 day file of transactions, but it does not contain (or cannot be successfully imported into iBank) the current holdings, so there is not way short of entering every single stock and mutual fund and bond into iBank manually.

I finally gave up after two weeks. I am going to attack one of the other programs. I previously gave up on SEE and Money Financial, but I'll revisit. I can't even recall why I gave up. Already for the time I put into iBank I would have been better off sticking with Quicken Essentials. It's crippled compared to Quicken for Windows, but it's not bad and it does support category classes, something iBank does not.

Now that iBank 5 is out, I thought I'd give their 30-day trial a spin. Would like to switch from Quicken for Windows (running in Parallels) to iBank in Apple's OS. Pleasantly surprised. Export to QIF was a snap, as was importing that QIF file into iBank. Investment data (my main concern) seems intact including cost basis and history, with no post-import fiddling by me. Even automatically downloaded most of my Canadian securities. Not having much difficulty taking care of the minor adjustments, like renaming a couple of the security ticker symbols that did not update, and setting all the transactions I had reconciled in Quicken to reconciled in iBank (that's not automatic, but took me five minutes). Judging by forum posts of the past here and elsewhere, seems like the iBank people have done a nice job of smoothing the pathway for Canadian users. I just might have found my solution.

I've been using iBank for 3 years and it meets all of my needs...

My only problem with iBank is that it refuses to spell cheque correctly. In the UK 'check' is a cloth pattern

Running my old Quicken for Windows and new iBank 5 side by side for a couple of months to be sure iBank will work for me (chequing, savings and investments). So far so good. In fact iBank is better in some ways. I prefer iBank's reports functions, and its way of handling scheduled transactions and forecasting is growing on me. Still a couple of wrinkles to sort out, but no deal-breakers yet. Quicken for Windows is darned nice, but I am really tired of maintaining clunky old Windows on my iMac.