Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

Intuit’s QuickBooks has long been an Office Letter favorite for managing a small business’s books. In QuickBooks 2007, there’s little that is radically new. Instead, you’ll find refinements that make it even easier to preview forms (such as invoices and statements) as you customize them, create a chart of accounts for the first time, process payroll, manage sales taxes (including collection and payment), create custom price levels per customer or job, and work with your accountant. The program also dips its toes into helping your business get noticed and sell more products. We looked at the Premier Edition ($399.95 for one user, $1499.95 for a 5-user license).

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Figure 3 - Click to enlarge

QuickBooks has long had the accounting chores under control. You could always select which fields you wanted displayed on your invoice; in 2007, a preview panel lets you instantly see the results of your choices (see Figure 1). Simple choices (do you want your company’s Web page or fax number printed on a statement) are on the main screen, and advanced options let you precisely position fields (as you’ll find with any good drag-and-drop report designer) or specify fields for the headers and footers, specify field names (you can replace “Client” with “Customer” on an invoice, for example, and define which columns are shown in an online form and which appear on the printed version of that form.

Payroll processing has been another strong suit of the QuickBooks Premier edition, and for a small company with just a few employees, it’s been all you needed. However, in previous versions you had to set your own reminders to remember to pay your payroll liabilities (so you pay Uncle Sam the money you withheld from paychecks, for example), and you had to mark individual employees to be paid, a sometimes tedious process. In 2007, you organize payroll by placing employees into groups so you’ll define a “paid monthly” group and a “paid biweekly” group, for example. During payroll setup, employees are automatically grouped by their pay frequency for your convenience (these assignments can be overridden, of course). Then, with just a couple of keystrokes, you can select and pay all employees in a group, vastly simplifying payroll and cutting down your work. Best of all, checks can be printed in a single batch. It may sound like a small change, but it’s typical of Premier 2007’s focus on streamlining processes. (See Figure 2 for the new Payroll Center.)

This version also notifies you about payroll processing due dates, and the schedule is adjusted for bank holidays, too. That gives you one less thing to think about.

Handling sales taxes has been consolidated into a single interface, where you can set preferences, view reports, and see sales tax payment options. (See Figure 3.)

To help prevent entry mistakes, QuickBooks remembers how you assign accounts to transactions for a customer. After the first use, the program will “learn” the account and auto-fill it in the future.

The Search function has been improved -- assuming you install the Google Desktop software that ships with the product (which is completely optional). QuickBooks 2007’s new search interface allows you to enter a term (a customer name, for example), and search QuickBooks data only or QuickBooks and all documents on your hard drive -- which can be a boon if you want to create a single view of customer communication, orders, and projects. We’re not fans of Google Desktop -- we’ve found it to be a resource pig. However, for combining QuickBooks data and hard drive files, you may find it useful.

Speaking of Google, earlier this year Intuit partnered with the company so it could offer tools to promote your business with the search powerhouse. The package includes a $50 credit to the Google AdWords service, the pay-per-click service that ties your key words to links to your site that help your company get noticed on Google’s search pages. QuickBooks Premier 2007 also includes a link to put your company on the map, literally -- there’s a tool that helps you add your company listing so Google Maps will show potential customers where you are. There’s also a link to add your company and selected products so Google users can find them -- the QuickBooks Product Listing Service takes products from your item list, lets you add descriptions and images, and uploads them to Google’s database, Google Base.

Intuit also offers QuickBooks Simple Start Edition designed for any small business moving from paper and pencil (or spreadsheets) into computerized accounting. It truly simplifies many of the features -- there’s no payroll or inventory support, for example -- and is perfect for a beginning entrepreneur who wants simple financial management such as tracking customer invoices and paying bills on time. As we went to press, Microsoft had announced a new Simple Start challenger, called Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007, which we’ll test shortly.

If there’s one annoyance that Intuit hasn’t cleared up, it’s the program’s insistence on checking the Web for updates before loading -- which slows it down considerably. I’d prefer to have a faster-loading program that I can load, update with an invoice, and unload; with its check-the-Web approach, it’s simply not nimble as it should be.

From the QuickBooks Centers that put all key details (customer lists, for example) right up front to the ability to sync contacts with Outlook with a free add-on (from http://www.quickbooks.com/contact_sync), from Google tools to ease payroll and sales tax processing, QuickBooks Premier Edition 2007 (which is Vista compatible) moves beyond accounting to help you manage and grow your business. There’s more information at http://www.quickbooks.com.

-- James E. Powell

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