Intuit Unveils QuickBooks 2005 Lineup

Few products are as universally embraced as Intuit’s QuickBooks. Whether you’re talking about an autobody shop, a print shop, a real estate firm or any other type of small business you can imagine, there’s a good chance the back office is running QuickBooks.

Of course, Intuit has hardly sat on its laurels and has expanded the line recently to include point of sales, payroll, enterprise, vertical industry editions and more. And, of course, each year it continues to unveil new features designed to make the QuickBooks flagship product more valuable for running your business.

Yesterday the company announced that when the QuickBooks 2005 lineup ships on November 22, it will offer 22 new and enhanced products and services as well as more than 400 new customer-driven enhancements.

Intuit officials say the enhancements to QuickBooks Premier 2005, Pro 2005 and Basic 2005 are the direct result of feedback from small businesses. The new additions cover three areas of running a business: getting started, getting paid and getting information.

According to Intuit, QuickBooks 2005 now uses terms the average small business person will readily understand. For example, rather needing to know what an “aging report” is, a user could select “get paid” to see who has outstanding invoices.

The new Learning Center also helps users understand the basic concepts of accounting. The interactive tutorial even features a practice area of sorts where a new user can experiment with the application without actually going into the books and touching live data.

Intuit also reports that it has added better integration with Microsoft Word, allowing you to pull data from QuickBooks — a useful feature for the businesses that have, for example, invoices created as Word templates.

A Pay Day for QuickBooks Users
Who is the largest payroll service provider in U.S.? If you guessed ADP, you’d be wrong. Intuit reports that its payroll product has 800,000 customers. QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll Plus, also announced yesterday, is designed to offer automatic completion of state and federal forms, workers’ compensation tracking, automatic upgrades of QuickBooks financial software and up-to-date tax tables.

Intuit also announced Enhanced Payroll Plus for Accountants, which offers all the features of Enhanced Payroll Plus, but allows accountants to process payroll for up to 50 clients

Dan Muse is executive editor of internet.com’s Small Business Channel and EarthWeb’s Networking & Communications Channel.