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New Features in QuickBooks 2009 Save Time, Provide Better Insights for Small Business Owners and Accountantsby Janet Attard Are your accounting records always up-to-date? Or do you spend hours when you get your bank statement typing in all the credit card transactions that came into your account during the month? Do you have a bird’s eye view every day of how cash is flowing into and out of your business? Of who owes you money and what bills you need to pay? Can you quickly link incoming checks or ACH payments to outstanding bills? Small business owner sand accountants who have wished 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 Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU). More Productivity, More Insights 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 website (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 multi-user 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. Free Website Setup, Global Payments and more Because small businesses need to function in a global economy, Intuit’s added the ability to process wire transfers and drafts for more than 100 foreign currencies – right from QuickBooks Premier. A multi-currency feature lets you easily create invoices in the correct amount in foreign currencies or convert incoming foreign currencies to US 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 website. The software will be available in retail stores on October 8, 2008. If you’ve just recently purchased QuickBooks 2008, look for upgrade pricing. Small businesses that purchase(d) QuickBook 2008 betweem July 1, 2008 January 31, 2009 can easily upgrade to Quickbooks 2009 for a fee of $14.95. Get Up To 20% Off QuickBooks Accounting Software Products + Free Shipping © 2008 Attard Communications, Inc. About the author |
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