We wanted to love the new Quicken Essentials for the Mac, truly we did. Bites of Apple and several other small businesses here are run on Intuit products, from the business-worthy QuickBooks 2010 to the pocket-sized Quicken 2005. There was never much reason here to upgrade to Quicken 2007 for Mac. By then, the Mac community was feeling well and truly overlooked by Intuit.

Quicken Essentials has a chance to change that perception that is not hard to spot in the marketplace. But the release rolled out this week to the Mac community won’t be confused with a business tool soon, even though some people will still be stubborn enough to run a business using it. When we heard that Essentials was based on the new blood from Mint.com, acquired by Intuit last year, Essentials was at least worth a look.

The look of the software is one of the biggest changes from the Quicken Mac 2007 and 2005 releases. Seeing your major expenditures in a cloud presentation is cool, but only useful if there’s a wide range of spending levels. Reporting and planning tools got an update, with a nifty feature to help you plan for savings by tracking your spending. We’d use it as a cash flow estimator, but we’re full of imagination here. That’s not usually something that a finance tool inspires.

Unfortunately, Essentials has stripped away some things that worked well enough to call Quicken for Mac a very small business solution. Rapid data entry is an essential all by itself to keep your books, but Essentials reduced the number of keyboard shortcuts and added clicks. This did not quicken the financial chore for us.

Then there’s the issue of data conversion. Nobody would be caught dead re-entering data to move to a new tool, and there’s a two-step process to bring your old data forward. But in our testing, the existing Quicken for 2005 file got orphaned and unusable during our conversion. It’s a simple save-as, but Intuit hasn’t understood simple, sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »