by Cheryl L. True

QuickBooks is one of the most widely used and loved business accounting programs. It has garnered an immense following by being one of the easiest accounting programs to use. QuickBooks has an interface that can be understood by the average business owner even if that person has no accounting background.

QuickBooks 2009 keeps the standard QuickBooks’ well-designed, intuitive interface and ease of installation, and adds some new features. The new features are well done and they improve the product without adding complexity. This is a good model for other software manufacturers. I especially wish that Microsoft would take note of it.

For me, the most valuable part of these new QuickBooks features is the Company Snapshot which gives an overview of all your business’s vital statistics on a single-screen. It’s a useful tool to get a quick look at the overall health of the company without getting lost in the daily bookkeeping details.

Online banking tools have also been improved. Depending on your bank setting, this may be simple or a bit of a pain. The best part, however, is that QuickBooks is so ubiquitous that all banks work hard at working well with the QuickBooks program.

QuickBooks 2009 has added a Live Community feature that can be accessed right from the program. This allows you to ask questions and get answers as you work. The value of this feature is debatable though. I asked four questions. Two were answered fairly promptly. Two were totally unanswered.

This year’s QuickBooks also has support for international payments. It supports most of the world currencies. It also has better client data review tools for accountants. Another added feature is that QuickBooks now comes with a free Web site for one year. After that Intuit charges $4.99 a month. Although you only get a few pages, Intuit has made the Web site easy to set up and you can easily make it very professional looking using their built-in templates and tools.

QuickBooks 2009 remains the best accounting program for small businesses, but it has a few drawbacks. The biggest is that there is no free support for setup issues although it can installed on several computers with no problem.

For quick and easy accounting solutions to manage your business, use quickbook web connector receipts.

About the Author:
Cheryl L. True is a Manila-based freelance writer who writes on a variety of topics.