Most self-employed and small-business people see accounting and bookkeeping as a necessary evil, and this is where QuickBooks software comes in, now with around 3 million users worldwide and in its umpteenth version. Crucially, it won't simply provide ready-made information for the year-end figures. Instead, it will give you a continuous picture of how well your business is doing, and take care of those boring but essential hard-to-get-right and expensive-to-get-wrong tasks. That's why most businesses hand their books over to professional accountants to do the work for them.
But accountants aren't cheap, and if you can employ the office PC to do the job accurately and quickly yourself, why not take the plunge? It's reliable, and better still it isn't complicated--because the person entrusted with the company accounts is almost certainly not going to be an accountant. The EasyStep Interview pumps you for information about your enterprise, using the data to swiftly set up your business on QuickBooks. And the Navigator makes it simple to find your way around the program. You can create invoices, enter sales, track customer contacts, cost time spent on jobs, manage stock, handle payroll, track VAT, and prepare your year-end figures.
This new version is an attempt to make the program easier to use and more flexible. You can now customize reports, dragging and dropping columns to highlight the information you need; you can batch print reports; and the new Time & Basis Stamps avoid confusion by showing you how and when each report was created. Among other refinements and additions, Intuit has increased the ways of navigating the program, bringing back the old icon bar. And you can now e-mail and fax invoices and estimates direct from QuickBooks. Better still, Online Billing means your customers can now pay you online, via BACS or credit card. --John Rennie
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