Product Reviews

QuickBooks Pro has been around long enough to establish itself as a leading contender for the small-business accounting crown. It offers almost every function likely to be needed by most small enterprises. As well as basic three-ledger bookkeeping, you get bank, cash and credit card accounting, invoicing, VAT management, stock control and purchase orders. More sophisticated features include time tracking, job costing, estimate and quotation production, and integration with elements of Microsoft Office and some contact managers such as ACT! and Outlook. We looked at QuickBooks 2001 Pro (version 9) in some detail (see Reviews, issue 80, p179), concluding that the improvements then were relatively minor and probably not significant enough to tempt upgraders from version 8.

QuickBooks 2002 Pro (version 10) could well change all that, as the catalogue of new and improved features is far more substantial. Chief of these is the facility to process credit card payments online - unique at this level, so far, to QuickBooks. To use this facility you'll need to set up a QuickBooks Merchant Account to process your credit card payments online directly from QuickBooks 2002.

Intuit says there are no application fees and no deposit is required, and that you'll need only one merchant account - without the usual extra hardware and dedicated phone lines. Credit Card Data will be saved in QuickBooks in a secure encrypted format. Not being traders, we were unable to test-drive this particular feature, but if it operates smoothly it will give you a considerable advantage and may change the way you do business.

Credit card payments also feature in QuickBooks' new payment option, whereby you can email invoices in PDF format to your customers, which they can print out. They can pay immediately, and electronically, using their credit card, and payment is made within the credit card company's usual time. To apply the payment, you'll have to wait for your bank statement. Given the payment culture in the UK, where firms regularly exceed your credit periods, you may find this feature of limited interest.

QuickBooks Pro is also multicurrency, as are its competitors, allowing you to trade in a range of currencies, including, of course, the euro. If you deal exclusively in euros, you can convert your QuickBooks

Like its major competitors, QuickBooks can offer an integrated payroll facility at an extra annual subscription, and now adds the ability to print P45 forms for your leavers. It's worth noting that it does require a blank paper P45 to be loaded into your printer first, and it's only really useful if you have a high staff turnover.

One of the real conveniences of QuickBooks is its ability to find transaction details by filtering entries for amounts, dates, names and so on. This feature has now been promoted to advanced level, while a new, simpler search has been introduced that offers drop-down menus and allows multiple criteria. You could, and can, do this at advanced level too, but the new form does make it clearer.

The accounting enhancements include differential pricing - the ability to set up multiple price levels for the same product to allow you to sell into different markets. You can 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.

A particular irritation with previous versions has been the inability to split incoming payments over more than one job (for the same customer). This meant you had to calculate and apply individual sums separately. This has now been automated, making the process easier. The Payments window layout has been improved too, though the data shown is unchanged.

Among the other new, but minor, features and improvements for 2002, are automatically marking customer invoices with a PAID stamp; automatic numbering of Journal Entries; and archiving of old data to remove closed or deleted transactions. Another is the ability for QuickBooks 2002 to use Automatic Update for piggybacking your Internet connection to download and install program updates in the background, without, says Intuit, disturbing current tasks or slowing down your computer.

One of QuickBooks' less endearing features is its greediness for resources, putting up messages suggesting you close open windows - which you can sometimes overcome by closing windows within QuickBooks, but it usually means closing down other programs. This has not improved in 2002, although it might not affect dedicated accounts systems.

Although QuickBooks has previously held its own against its major competition - TAS, Sage and MYOB - it has been possible for existing QuickBooks users to ignore the small incremental changes in previous versions and to resist upgrading. This has probably changed with version 2002's credit card facility, which alone will be a reason for many smaller firms to go out and buy it.