#MONEYDANCE FOR MAC AND SIMILAR PROGRAMS TRIAL#
In the course of my research, I came across another personal finance product that offers to do the same thing - import Quicken Essentials data, and export QIF - called CheckBook ($14.95, non-subscription, free trial a “Pro” version costs $19.95).
![moneydance for mac and similar programs moneydance for mac and similar programs](https://alternativebk.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5eca2ca5e5b89.jpg)
If you prefer to use current Quicken, or other personal finance software, you can export your data from Moneydance as a QIF file, and then import it into Quicken or another program.
![moneydance for mac and similar programs moneydance for mac and similar programs](https://mac-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/Moneydance_3.png)
Once you’ve got your Quicken Essentials data into Moneydance, you can either pay for Moneydance ($49.99, non-subscription, free trial) and simply use it as your personal finance software, if you like it. Happily, a couple of hours of poking around the internet revealed a solution: the developers of a competing personal finance product called Moneydance reverse engineered the Quicken Essentials for Mac data format (which is, of course, a different format than all other versions of Quicken), and it is able to import its data. If you went down that road, you found yourself at a dead end. And if you’re running macOS 10.12 Sierra or later, you can’t even open the app to see that data. Just because Quicken Essentials wasn’t popular doesn’t mean it’s ok to hold users’ data hostage. Intuit spun off Quicken several years ago, but this is still inexcusable in my view.
![moneydance for mac and similar programs moneydance for mac and similar programs](https://infinitekind.com/images/products/homepage.png)
Its support pages are, in fact, disturbingly straightforward about it: “Quicken Essentials files cannot be converted.” Recently I had a client who had been using the ill-fated Quicken Essentials for Mac, and I was surprised to discover that modern Quicken refuses to import its data. The product has always been second class compared to its Windows version. Mac users have a long and sordid history with Intuit, the original developers of Quicken.