I hate Intuit.  I think they’re products and business philosophy sucks so badly that I’m in support of ANY startup wiling to take them on.  And yes, hate is a strong word, but here’s why:

• On April 30th, my version of Quicken (2007) stops working.  I’m FORCED to upgrade.  REALLY?  FORCED?  Who does this?
• I use Quickbooks 2007 too.  As of May, it will no longer work.  I’m FORCED to upgrade.
• I have a client that upgraded to Quickbooks 2008 a while ago.  Then she tried to send me the QB file.  Turns out QB2007 couldn’t open QB2008 files.  WTF?  I don’t even begin to understand the philosophy behind this.  It’s gouging.
• Both programs make life much more difficult than they need to be.  Workflow in QB sucks.  Workflow in Quicken is decent, but the reports suck.
• I’m on a Mac, I run Windows in a virtual environment for the sole purpose of running Intuit products.
• TurboTax isn’t available for the Mac.
• Quicken for the Mac isn’t available to try.  You have to buy it and return it if you aren’t happy.

Their general philosophy is to trap you into their products then force you to continue using them, instead of just keeping their users happy by creating good products that work are better than the competition.

So given my Quicken expires tomorrow, I’ve been frantically looking for a Mac compatible product to replace Intuit.  The thought of paying them for anything else literally makes me sick.  Sad to say I’ve not found a decent replacement, and I’m probably going to continue using the upgraded versions of the products in the windows environment on my Mac.  But I figured I can’t be the only one going through this nightmare that I’ve pumped too many hours into now.  So for the sake of anyone else looking for a replacement, or for entrepreneurs looking to unseat Inuit, here’s my ultra-short descriptions of what I need and what the competition lacks.  Calling all entrepreneurs – if you a) improve your product to match my needs or b) create a product to match my needs, I’ll be your first customer.

Mandatory Product Requirements (from my perspective)

• Classes or Tags – I track my spending and my husband’s spending.  I want to know how much he spent on bike crap compared to me.
• Download all transactions at once – some products make you go to the bank’s website to download the transactions.  There should be one button within the program that lets me download all institution’s data at once.
• Customize Reports – I have a couple of ultra small businesses that I don’t want to run Quickbooks for (rental property, consulting).  I need to use tags/classes to adequately categorize those transactions (see first requirement), but also to run a report to give to my CPA during tax time.
• Export reports to Excel or .csv or whatever.
• Budget – I want to budget items and know when I’ve gone over my budget
• Split transactions

Nice to haves:

• Easily enter transactions by just tabbing through fields and not having to use my mouse.
• Subcategories
• Sync with iPhone
• Wouldn’t THIS be cool – take a picture of the receipt with my iPhone, and it would automatically enter that transaction in my register and ask me for a category right then/there.  I love this concept so much – b/c now I have a record of my receipt, I can throw it out and reprint it later if I need it.  Reconciling will automatically compare my entered transactions to my downloaded transactions – so I know what I’ve missed.  Also have the ability for two people to snap a photo of the receipts and sync both of those people’s transactions with the software.
• I also think it would be cool to have a widget that could display the budget/spending/income overview on both my computer and my husband’s computer.
• I could go on, I have more ideas here.

Competition overview (very very brief!):

I probably haven’t seen all available software.  I’m open to suggestions.