QuickBooks has formidable competition when it comes to interface and navigation. These menus offer voluminous options for activities like editing and deleting items, creating forms and receiving items, running reports, and interacting with Excel. Standards menus and a customizable toolbar also lead you to your destinations, offering a more comprehensive guide to the program's features.Ī window containing a list view of your items and services lets you both open records and use menus to work with individual entries. And links in the Banking group trigger processes like check-writing and account-reconciliation.
The Employee group, of course, helps you manage your payroll. Customer links take you to forms like sales orders and invoices, related charges, and payments. Vendors' icons represent purchase orders, bills, and inventory. The Company group, for example, offers links to screens that help you view your Chart of Accounts, peruse your items and services, and work with your inventory.
These tools can be accessed through icons on the program's opening page. You can create databases of people, products, and services process numerous types of transactions and get constant, real-time views of your business through reports and interactive snapshots.
It facilitates sales and purchases, payroll, inventory, and banking. QuickBooks provides the tools required to manage your money and analyze your company's financial health quite competently. QuickBooks 2011 hasn't introduced any major new accounting or interface conventions nor did it need to. Many QuickBooks user problems could be easily resolved by changing a Preference or two.Ĭompetitors offer similar conventions for setup, but AccountEdge's (optional) Easy Setup Assistant is the most thorough and inclusive. These tools and related guidance lay a good foundation for daily work, but I've often wondered why Intuit doesn't direct QuickBooks beginners to the Preferences window. The QuickBooks Learning Center, a clearinghouse for tutorials, is still available. Here, as in other steps, QuickBooks offers short videos that provide guidance. Another step in the new startup focuses on common processes that beginning users might undertake, like bill-paying. This can all be done later, but upfront assistance may be helpful for new users. Wizards walk you through the process of adding products, services, and bank accounts. You can designate contacts as customers, vendors, or employees-or skip them. QuickBooks now also adds an option for more comprehensive setup, walking you through contact imports from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, or Excel. It asks about your company's makeup, needs, and activities, and it then creates a backbone for your data and transactions. The beginning of QuickBooks 2011's startup process is similar to that of past iterations.
#INTUIT QUICKBOOKS PREMIER 2011 WINDOWS#
Both Peachtree by Sage Premium Accounting 2010 ($349, 4 stars) and AccountEdge 2010 for Windows ($299, 3.5 stars) offer tremendously competent programs, but QuickBooks more skillfully hits the sweet spot with its blend of accounting muscle, usability, and extensibility. QuickBooks Premier Edition 2011 doesn't represent as big a change as some previous editions have, but the upgrades will help you hone in on your company's financial standing, improve the speed of your collections, save time completing transactions, and access your data remotely.
Intuit's QuickBooks remains the best small business accounting product available today.