Intuit recently announced that it plans to release an update to Quicken 2007 that will make it compatible with Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion. This news is a big relief to a number of my clients who have intentionally held off on updating to Lion. Those clients use Quicken 2007 and migrating to another application is not a simple task. Banktivity (formerly iBank) and Quicken Essentials are two applications that users could consider as a replacement, but an update to Quicken 2007 simplifies the entire situation.

[Update: Intuit released a Lion-compatible update of Quicken 2007. Quicken 2007 can import data files from Quicken 2005-2007 as well as Quicken Essentials.]

When Lion was released in July 2011, Tidbits had an article talking about finding a replacement for Quicken. One colleague switched to iBank but due to differences in how iBank handles investment accounts, he spent many hours cleaning up his Quicken data after it was imported into iBank and needed assistance repeatedly from iBank’s tech support staff. A few of my clients who used only the account registers and reporting features in Quicken were able to use Quicken Essentials. Quicken Essentials for Mac was released in 2010. It is not really an update for Quicken 2007 users. Instead, you could think of it as a successor to Quicken 2007, but one that lacks some of Quicken 2007’s features. As its name implies, it is a bare-bones financial management application. It is enough for some, but not for all, Quicken 2007 users. Thus, the announcement of this Quicken 2007 update is welcome news.

Intuit indicates that this Lion-compatible update will be available “soon.” Elsewhere, I’ve read that it’ll be early-spring 2012. Users will be able to update their Quicken 2005, 2006 and 2007 data files into this updated version of Quicken 2007. Please read  Tidbit’s article about this Quicken update if you’d like more information.

[Update October 2014: Quicken has recently introduced Quicken 2015 for Mac, which brought back some of the features left off in Quicken Essentials. Tidbits has an informative article about the new changes.]

[Update late 2016: Intuit sold Quicken to a private equity firm in Miami in early 2016. Quicken is now run as an independent company led by many long-time members of the Quicken team, when it was owned by Intuit. Quicken is now sold on a subscription model for both the Mac and PC.)

[Update March 2021: Check out this page for the latest news about Quicken 2007. I haven’t seen anybody actively using in several years, but this page has news from late 2019 so there must be a few people still using it. This page indicates that one can import Quicken 2007 data files into Quicken 2019 or Quicken 2020 on macOS Catalina.]