Simplify your laptop buying
CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 10/21/2008
Intuit QuickBooks dominates the small business accounting realm, largely because it does the best job of simplifying the arcane world of bookkeeping for nonaccountants. QuickBooks 2009 builds on the success of its predecessors--wisely it hasn't changed its excellent, flowchart-style interface--while adding a few new and improved features. These include enhanced online banking, a Company Snapshot page that provides a quick overview of your daily business operations, support for multiple currencies, a free (for a year) Web site, and easy access to the online community of QuickBooks users.
We tested the $400 QuickBooks Premier, which includes industry-specific versions for accountants, contractors, wholesalers, and other businesses. Unlike the $200 Pro version, Premier lets you create business plans, forecast sales and expenses, assign different billing rates for employees, and perform other advanced tasks. At the low end, the $100 Simple Start handles the basics well but lacks higher-end tools, such as the capability to create purchase orders and track inventory.
Setup and installation
As with earlier versions, QuickBooks Premier 2009 is easy to install. Setup took about 30 minutes, excluding the time required to enter company information, which may take several days if done manually. In terms of overall performance, QuickBooks 2009 ran sluggishly on our Vista PC with 1GB of memory. We recommend at least 2GB RAM for decent performance.
Features
While earlier versions of QuickBooks had online banking, only a tiny percentage of people used the feature, according to Intuit. The redesigned Online Banking Center for 2009 makes it easier to set up your financial accounts, write online checks, and download and organize transactions. The enhanced banking tools, some borrowed from Intuit's Quicken personal finance application, are smarter and easier to manage. For instance, you can set up naming rules for downloaded bank transactions, allowing QuickBooks to automatically rename and categorize them. One rule, for instance, might instruct QuickBooks to rename any transaction with the text string "Staples" to "Staples Office Supplies." This prevents the program from adding new vendors to your payee list every time the bank adds a unique reference or store number to the vendor name, such as "A735Staples09128008."
Overall, the Banking Center's setup wizard is well designed, although not as seamless as it should be. In our tests, for instance, it wouldn't set up an account with Bank of America, suggesting we contact the bank for more information. Furthermore, your bank may require you to go to its Web site to complete the setup. With Wells Fargo, for instance, we needed to download our banking statement from Wells' CEO Basic Banking Site to finish the process. Overall, this was clunky.
Another Quicken-style feature is Company Snapshot, a single-screen overview of your business's vital stats. To access it from the home page, you click Company Snapshot on the Icon Bar. What follows is a screen with information to help business owners better manage their daily cash flow. The list headers avoid accountant gibberish and give it to you straight: customers who owe money, vendors to pay, and so on. This 30,000-foot view is handy for users who get lost in the minutiae of daily bookkeeping.
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