I’ve been dying lately without having access to MS Money. Microsoft has conceded the personal finance software market to Intuit and decided to stop supporting MS Money. I was pretty heart broken since MS Money helped me turn my finances around. I went down to Office Max yesterday and finally bought a copy of Quicken 2007 for the iMac. Intuit is releasing Quicken 2010 for Mac in February but I couldn’t wait. I haven’t been feeling so hot without knowing my bottom line for the last few weeks. I tried to use the old checkbook register but I still like to see forecasts and play with the charts and graphs. I’m still getting used to my gigantic California mortgage and use the forecasts as a crutch to see what the consequences of my spending are. I know you can do this in Excel or Numbers but I didn’t want to spend the hours to get a temporary system up and running.

Like our printer, it looks like Quicken 2007 doesn’t work out of the box with Snow Leopard. It wasn’t immediately obvious either since everything installed correctly. I was getting frustrated when I couldn’t get a single one of my accounts to load. I would follow the recommended instructions and let Quicken try and set them up over the web and would constantly get an OL-249 error. I thought I was doing everything right too and was about to start calling Chase, ING, and Charles Schwab for the, “key” it kept asking for.

I searched a few Apple forums, did some Googling and it looks like I’m not the only one perturbed by the incompatibility with Snow Leopard. I felt like I threw $70.00 out the window and was getting really mad. I was about to go 0 for 2 on the new iMac!! First the printer was incompatible, now my personal finance software doesn’t work. So much for, “it just works”. After scrounging around on Intuit’s Quicken page, I found two patches: R2 and R3. They fix the OL-249 error. I downloaded them both, installed them and now I can now incorporate most of my accounts into Quicken. At first glance it seems as if MS Money supports/supported more financial institutions then Quicken does. I don’t see Banana Republic, GE Money Bank, or my 401k provider in the list. I guess I have to play with it some more. For those of you looking for the Snow Leopard patches for Quicken 2007 for Mac, go here:

http://quicken.intuit.com/support/articles/using-quicken/patches-and-updates/4366.html

These aren’t easy to find on Intuit’s page either. Let me know if this works for you since it did for me. What I’m really not liking about the iMac is that I have to research the software I want to buy before I buy it to make sure it’s compatible with Snow Leopard. Just because the box says, “compatible with OS v10.3.9 or later” doesn’t necessarily mean 10.6.2.