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New Features In QuickBooks 2009 Save Time, Provide Better Insights For Small Business Owners

Posted by Janet Attard, Courtesy of Business Know-How Thursday, Oct 2, 2008, 10:00 AM ET

Small business owners who have longed for ways to save time and gain quick insights into their businesses are in for a treat with the new version of QuickBooks small business financial software from Intuit.

Among the new and improved features in QuickBooks 2009 are several designed to save time and make business owners (and their accountants) more productive.

  • Online banking is one of the key enhancements in QuickBooks 2009. Online banking gives you the ability to transfer information between QuickBooks and your online bank account without having to copy and paste or retype information.

    If you've ever spent much time copying and pasting incoming merchant account transactions from your bank's Web site (or worse, typing them all in at the end of the month when you get a printed statement), this feature can save you significant time. One of the top requested features, online banking saves also increases accuracy by downloading transactions from their participating financial institution directly into QuickBooks. Small businesses can gain control of their cash flow by seeing which checks have cleared their accounts, which transactions are pending, and get up-to-date account balances, all in one place.

    A renaming rule makes it easy to associate the odd names that are sometimes associated with an ACH payment to the correct payee name or open bill, too.

  • Client Data Review is another major new feature in QuickBooks 2009. Client Data Review is designed to increase accountants' productivity by helping them find and correct their clients' errors. Accountants can review and fix errors in account balances, charts of accounts and several other categories, all from a single screen. Intuit reports that this feature saves accountants more than 30 percent of time spent on each client, resulting in hundreds of hours saved per year.

  • Company Snapshot is a feature small business owners will want to use often. It shows you a graph of your company income and expense for the year, lets you view customers that owe you money, and bills you need to pay. One-click access from this screen to key tasks related to the information saves you time, too. It provides a real-time business snapshot so that companies can stay on top of their finances and performance without shuffling through endless reports.

  • Connectivity is built into QuickBooks 2009, too. Among the connectivity tools is a messenger feature that will make life easier for companies with multiuser accounts. Now, business owners with multiuser versions can easily see who else is using QuickBooks right now -- and send them an instant message. This is handy if you have some important piece of information to tell the person entering invoices, for instance. As the administrator, you can also log anyone (or everyone) off the software if need be.

  • Live Community comes with QuickBooks 2009, too. As the name suggests, Live Community, which is built into the accounting software, is an online networking environment where you can find answers to routine questions about QuickBooks and other business issue, and get and share information with other small businesses and experts.

    If all of those features weren't enough, Intuit's packed a couple of additional features in, too, designed to help you build your business. One is the ability to set up a free Web site for 12 months from the date of purchase on its Homestead.com site.

    Because small businesses need to function in a global economy, Intuit has added the ability to process wire transfers and drafts for more than 100 foreign currencies -- right from QuickBooks Premier. A multicurrency feature lets you easily create invoices in the correct amount in foreign currencies or convert incoming foreign currencies to U.S. dollars.

    Intuit's International Payments service makes it easy to process wire transfers and drafts in more than 100 foreign currencies right from within the QuickBooks 2009 accounting software.

    QuickBooks Premier 2009 (and other editions of QuickBooks) can be downloaded now from the QuickBooks Web site. The software will be available in retail stores on Oct. 8, 2008. If you've just recently purchased QuickBooks 2008, look for upgrade pricing. Small businesses that purchase(d) QuickBook 2008 between July 1, 2008, and Jan. 31, 2009, can easily upgrade to Quickbooks 2009 for a fee of $14.95.

    Business Know-How




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