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REPRINTED FROM PC PRO JUNE 2001

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QuickBooks 2001 ProACCOUNTING verdict The latest edition of the best-selling

small business accounts software gets

slightly more sophisticated.

price £212 (£249 inc VAT)

supplier Intuit 0800 585058

internet www.quickbooks.co.uk

availability Now

requirements Pentium/166, 16Mb of RAM,

105Mb of hard disk space, Internet Explorer

5, MAPI-compliant email program, Windows

95, 98, ME, 2000 or NT 4.

Q uickBooks 2001 is the newest rendition of

the established small business accounting

software. It’s an integrated package,

meaning that you don’t need to buy extra

modules to carry out basic accounting. As

well as bookkeeping, you can run a sales

ledger, purchase ledger and nominal ledger,

produce invoices, look after stock control,

and administer your payroll. The latter is

subject to an annual subscription.

Previous incarnations of QuickBooks have

increased in its versatility year-on-year, with

the introduction of 40 new features in last

year’s version alone. It’s now one of the

better bargains in small-business

accounting packages, although it’s still calling

itself small-business management software.

QuickBooks’ competition comes principally

from MYOB, which offers two products, MYOB

Accounting and MYOB Accounting Plus,

closely matching the QuickBooks duo. There’s

also the TAS range, but this costs up to £800

for a similar set of features; it also offers its

TAS Books Accounting Plus at £244 to cover

most of QuickBooks’ facilities. To get a

comparable Sage product, you have to pay

£575 for Line 50 Accountant Plus and you’d

still miss out on payroll and quotations.

Target audienceQuickBooks is aimed at small businesses with,

say, up to 20 employees but can also be used

by sole traders or

partnerships. It caters

for all businesses –

goods, service, or

professional – with

accounts templates for

26 industry sectors like

retail, manufacturing,

consulting. It also offers

practical accounting

advice to people

starting up in those

sectors; plus useful

background detail to accounting activities

you’re engaged in every day but may not

be approaching as successfully as you’d like.

These include things like how, what and when

to depreciate assets, and how to operate

effective credit control. It doesn’t quite replace

your accountant but might

help to reduce your bill.

If you’re using

QuickBooks for the first

time, you’ll be interrogated

by the QuickBooks

‘EasyStep’ interview,

which elicits a few basic

details of the type of

business you intend to use

QuickBooks for. This is to

tailor its chart of accounts

to suit you better.

QuickBooks 2001 Pro is a full double-entry

system, though it largely shields you from that.

Almost all its entries are made on screens that

mimic paper-based systems, and hardly any

prior accounting knowledge is needed to

complete them. Its day-to-day activities include

invoicing, and you can also produce estimates

and quotations that, when you win the order,

can be converted to

invoices. You get a

progress invoicing

facility too, that lets

you invoice by date,

milestone or percentage

complete, and with

automatic VAT

calculation.

There are over 100

reports, invoices, and

other forms available to

you, with a Report

Finder that lets you browse

through them and, usefully,

preview their content to

make sure you pick the right

one. Most of them can be

customised. You can, for

example, create a delivery

note from an invoice template,

deleting or adding columns as

necessary. You can also alter

form layouts, and add your

logo. Having prepared your

invoices, credit memos,

estimates, and purchase

orders, you can now also

email them to your

customers and vendors

from within QuickBooks.

Created as attachments, your forms will

replicate your printed layout, complete with

logo, in Adobe Acrobat format.

If you supply goods, there’s stock control

and purchase-order processing. If you charge

your time, there’s a time and expense-tracking

facility with automatic

billing and an on-screen

timer programme for

every fee-earner you

employ.

If you do employ

others, there’s an

integrated payroll facility,

while practically everyone

will be able to make use

of job costing. If you run

Microsoft Word or Excel,

you can integrate

QuickBooks Pro with those programs. You can

also synchronise QuickBooks with your copies

of Microsoft Outlook or Symantec’s ACT! so

that when you add or make a change to

customer information in those programs you

can update QuickBooks too, saving time and

improving accuracy.

The default startup screen is the Company

Navigator which, apart from providing you with

housekeeping tools like checking and changing

your chart of accounts and backing up your

data, also lists the grisly details of who hasn’t

paid their bills yet and how much you owe your

suppliers, plus how much money you have yet

to deposit in your bank. This information is

summarised in the Company Centre as total

balances, complete with a nifty graph of

income and expenditure. Click on any of

these totals and you can drill down to the

detail again as far as individual entries. You

also have access to QuickBooks’ ‘Decision

� You can customise your startup screen to include crucial

information.

� Invoice layouts can accommodate three

different types of business.

� Navigator screens lead you step-by-

step, as shown here in payroll.

reviews softwarereviews software

REPRINTED FROM PC PRO JUNE 2001

Tools’: a collection of analyses of your

business’ profitability and financial

health, supplemented by general

advice on a variety of such management

considerations.

There’s a Customer Centre to collect

your customers’ open balances, as well

as overdue balances, and you can drill

down to a single customer. The Vendor

Detail Centre does the same for your

suppliers’ records.

So what’s new?You could, of course, do all of the above

in QuickBooks version 8 as well. So

what’s new in this version? Well, a

numerically small number of accounting extras,

some additional customisation, and some

tinkering with navigation and displays.

The publishers claim over 25 new features

and improvements, though many of them are

relatively minor. Among the general

improvements is easier report customisation,

including the ability to resize and sort on any

column, in detail as well as list reports, using

drag and drop to re-order them.

In addition, every report printed can be

automatically time-stamped to identify the

most recent copy, and basis-stamped to

indicate whether the report used the cash or

accrual accounting basis. You can now also

pick and print groups of your most frequently

used reports in batches.

If you prepare accounts

for more than one

company, you can

print header information,

including company

name, on your

reconciliation reports

for easier identification.

Another useful touch is

that QuickBooks 2001

offers a choice of the

traditional UK balance-

sheet layout in addition

to the previous QuickBooks format.

One minor enhancement is that you can now

keep your place in reports after using

QuickZoom, being returned to the exact

position previously held in the report and

removing the need for scrolling down to get

back to the same place. That will avoid a lot

of frustration when using longer lists. Finally,

but usefully, there’s a spell checker for

invoices, estimates, cash sales, purchase

orders and cheques among others. You can

also add your own words to the dictionary.

The new ‘Go To’ bill feature from the Pay Bills

window lets you check bill details, and a longer

reference number field lets you use up to 20

characters.

The accounting enhancements include

differential pricing – the ability to set upto 20n

price levels for the same

product, allowing you to sell

into different markets without

always having to remember

discounts or special deals. You

can create names for different

price levels (for example,

wholesale price, non-profit

price or loyal customer price)

and assign these to your customers as default

price levels so that their price is automatically

entered on invoices and other sales forms,

saving time and reducing data entry errors.

QuickBooks 2001 Pro also allows trading in

a range of currencies, including, of course, the

Euro. You can now apply specific credits to

specific invoices from

Receive Payments,

and specific credits to

specific bills from Pay

Bills (you have always

been able to do this for

payments), which will

ensure that your

payment history and

ageing is always

correct.

As before, there are

two editions of

QuickBooks available.

These are QuickBooks 2001 and the more fully

featured QuickBooks 2001 Pro being reviewed

here. The basic QuickBooks 2001 is some

£128 cheaper than the Pro edition but leaves

out multicurrency and multi-user facilities; the

integration with ACT! and elements of

Microsoft Office; progress invoicing and the

ability to create estimates and quotations; time

and job costing; and differential price levels. On

the other hand, payroll is now available in the

basic edition as well as the Pro.

On the payrollFully-integrated with QuickBooks, the payroll

facility automatically calculates all the

appropriate deductions from your employees’

pay, prints pay slips, cheques and giros, plus

year-end reports such as P60, P11, and

P35CS. It also updates your accounts

automatically. You’ll need to pay Intuit an

annual subscription for the tax table new

issues.

There’s a new multimedia tutorial, covering

navigation, setting up a new customer, setting

up a new item, selling an item, getting paid and

depositing the money.

Both previous editions organised all your

activities into an Outlook-like frame at the side

of the screen,

grouping

linked

activities

together – all

sales-related

or all

purchase-

related. From

here you

could

navigate to

the features

that you used

most

frequently. What’s more, you could customise

the frame to include the areas and tasks you

use the most. It took the place of other

programs’ button bar. In what some might

regard as a retrograde step, QuickBooks has

abandoned this organisation and put most,

though not all, of these subsidiary functions

back on the button bar. The frame is still there,

sporting the general categories that lead you

to QuickBooks’ flowchart navigator, including

the overview information previously available

in its ‘business information centres’. Altogether

you now have three navigational options plus

a list of windows open, to allow for easier

switching between them.

When you consider that ad-hoc support

costs £25 per call, it would be prudent to buy

prepaid support from Intuit. This costs from

£49 to £149 per annum depending on your

requirements.

The accounting capability is sound, as you’d

expect from a product of this pedigree, which

means that the choice for most small

businesses will be made on price and ancillary

features. You can’t get as wide a range of

features for the money anywhere else – the

closest is MYOB Accounting, which includes

payroll but not time billing or multicurrency. If

you need these at a keen price, it has to be

QuickBooks 2001 Pro. If, on the other hand,

you already have QuickBooks Pro 8, look at

the new features – there may not be compelling

reasons for your business to upgrade.

James Taylor

� Impress your bank manager and

shareholders with these glossy graphs.

� You can get industry-specific advice as

well as compatible charts of accounts.

� Report Finder keeps lists by function and

shows you a preview.

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