ANTenna Blog -- Apple

Mac-using small businesses who rely on Quicken have been eagerly awaiting the 2009 version of the basic financial and accounting package, which was supposed to be out this summer. Intuit has recently scrubbed mention of the new version from its website, however, raising questions about when and if the software will ever ship.

While primarily personal financial software, Quicken is capable enough to be used as a basic accounting package by many small businesses--around 3 million, according to an interview in bMighty with Kevin Reeth, CEO of SaaS accounting vendor Outright. Quicken 2009 for Windows was released last August, and Mac Quicken users have been looking forward to their own version since at least January 2008, when it was sighted at Macworld Expo. The upgrade, to be named Quicken Financial Life for Mac, was first supposed to ship in the winter of 2008-2009.

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The product was back at Macworld Expo in January 2009. Intuit was still talking about "taking the time to get it right," with a new target release date of summer 2009. Well, here it is, summer 2009, and there's been some action on the Quicken front, but not what Mac-based business owners might have hoped for. The good folks at Ars Technica have noticed that the Quicken website has been scrubbed of any reference to Quicken for the Mac 2009 or Quicken Financial Life for Mac. Links that used to lead to the product now go to the Quicken Mac 2007 page.

Ars got in touch with Intuit, and a spokesperson offered assurance that the product was still in beta testing but still on track. "Quicken's perspective is that taking a bit more time than anticipated is a worthy trade-off for a great product our customers told us they wanted to see a certain way," they said.

It's hard to see why that requires taking down any mention of the product, but it's probably not worth jumping to conclusions. The Ars folks say they "remain suspicious," but certainly companies have made the mistake of posting product pages early; it wouldn't be a surprise if one took them down early. And it was just last April that Intuit released Quicken Online Mobile for the iPhone--perhaps integrating that with the desktop version added some development time.

In any case, Mac-based small businesses should keep an eye peeled for the reappearance of Quicken Financial Life for Mac. We'll just have to hope it's on the Intuit product pages rather than in the vaporware hall of fame.