Peachtree

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 8:00 pm

	QuickBooks Pro 2012 List Price: ~~$229.99~~ Sale Price: $131.00 You save: $98.99 (43%)

	QuickBooks Pro 2012 [Download] List Price: ~~$229.95~~ Sale Price: $133.19 You save: $96.76 (42%)

The tax man’s exacted his pound of flesh and spring is in the air, which can mean only one thing. It’s accounting software season. Peachtree 2010 represents Sage’s annual embellishment, and while it comes with a few welcome tweaks and adjustments, it’s pretty much the same, reliable Peachtree program of the last few years.

If 2010 were a new model car, it would feature improved wheel bearings. Of course, bearings are important to a vehicle, but their addition won’t rev you up with excitement. This criticism isn’t solely leveled at Peachtree. The company’s competitors, including Intuit’s Quickbooks, have also been running on empty in recent yearly upgrades
Peachtree 2010

This year, Peachtree offers “expanded capabilities around customization, access and control.” And there are new features that help you refer to industry and company information, better track inventory and customers and to apply stronger security.

There’s so much that’s good in Peachtree. The program displays an intuitive snapshot summary that displays key business information such as balances, vendors with open balances, customers who owe money, graphs and more. And from here, you can easily call up financial statements and generate reports.

A couple of areas stand above those found in other accounting programs. Peachtree’s time and billing feature offers lots of flexibility to track billable time in detail and easily apply it to invoices.

Another traditional Peachtree strength lies with inventory. The program lets you track up to ten price levels and monitor bills of materials through assemblies. For businesses that manufacture goods, Peachtree is a clear choice among the accounting programs in its price range. You can now search on inventory data in sales or purchase descriptions as well as note fields. Data entry has been streamlined to let you set default item classes that are based on common inventory types (stock, non-stock, service and more).

Peachtree thoroughly covers the business bases with online banking, as well as with payroll features that range from using the program to “do it yourself,” or subscribing to Peachtree’s payroll service that, in addition to printing checks, takes care of all of the complicated taxes and deposits (extra cost). The program does a great job of integrating data with Microsoft Office as well as Sage’s own ACT.

Peachtree does a great job of walking you through the initial setup. After installing the program, Peachtree asks you to choose a type of business from a generous selection, make a few choices, for example, select between accrual and cash, set sales tax and more, and it automatically creates the detailed chart of accounts.