One of the really lousy things that Intuit (or Quicken) did to Canadians, is they stopped having a version of Mac Quicken that worked in Canada for about the past 10 years. Mac Quicken 2007 is the last supported version of Quicken that runs on a Mac. This means works with Canadian banks, as well. I have read that Mac Quicken 2007 no longer works with either the current Mac OS, or the Canadian Banks.
There is a very good article about how you can use VMWare to run a PC version of Quicken on your Mac. The article outlines the steps needed, and is an excellent resource for those that feel they are nerdy enough to get it to work (thanks to InvestorJunkie).
The Mac Quicken Challenge
As my regular readers know, I am that nerdy, so I tried this out, and it worked, but, not the way I wanted.
The Mac I used was a MacBook Pro with 8 GB of memory running, Mac OS Sierra.
Download a trial version of VMware (which will give you 30 days to try things out). You will need to either have a spare Windows 7, 8 or 10 license hanging around. It can run on a trial Windows license as well.
The VMware Fusion documentation is really straight forward (IMHO) so setting up your PC environment while time consuming is straight forward. The hard part is figuring out how much memory and disk space you want your VM to use. On my system I gave it 4 GB of memory and 60 GB of disk space (which was on an external USB hard drive)). This seemed to be sufficient to get it all running.
You will also need to have a Quicken for PC license (click here to buy from Quicken). I had a license, so this cost me nothing, if you don’t have a spare license, I would think about whether you want to spend that much money on an experiment.
I installed Quicken, and then restored an old Quicken image and gave it a try out.
This hybrid Mac Quicken worked, no problem, however, I found VMFusion as being a cumbersome process on my laptop (it might work better if you were running on a Mac Mini or a desktop system, which might have more processing power or memory). I was also comparing run my Hybrid Mac Quicken to running Quicken on an older PC Laptop (Dell) that I had lying around.
Mac Quicken Findings
Both versions of Quicken worked fine (both PC remote and Mac VM). The advantage the VMWare version has is that I can run it on your Mac wherever you are. The PC Quicken, I had to have the PC available (using Remote Desktop) to make it work.
In the end I found the VMFusion idea a little too cumbersome for my liking. The system kept slowing my Mac laptop down. Unfortunately, bringing up Mac Quicken was slow to begin with.
I have stuck with running Quicken on my old PC laptop. This was a very interesting experiment. I am not saying this is a bad idea, it just didn’t work the way I wanted it to work.
“…they stopped having a version of Mac Quicken that worked in Canada for about the past 10 years. Mac Quicken 2007 is the last supported version of Quicken that runs on a Mac. This means works with Canadian banks, as well. I have read that Mac Quicken 2007 no longer works with either the current Mac OS, or the Canadian Banks.”
This is not true. I continue to use QM2007 with all my Canadian FIs/Banks (RBC, CIBC, TD, etc…I use over 20) just to name a few. And BTW, Qm2007 still runs on macOS 10.14 (Mojave), those this will probably be the last macOS that can run it. QM2019 Subscription still does not meet my needs (lacks too many features still, in terms of ease of data entry, reliability and validations, report customizations, etc).