QuickBooks 2001 Pro · Accounting and MYOB Accounting Plus, closely matching the QuickBooks duo....
Transcript of QuickBooks 2001 Pro · Accounting and MYOB Accounting Plus, closely matching the QuickBooks duo....
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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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