Great article on the SBA 2007 Beta

Kathy Yakal from PC magazine reviewed the first version of Small Business Accounting and now she's done it again for 2007. Here are a couple of interesting quotes from the article:

"I found Office Accounting 2007's Office-like interface to be more intuitive and aesthetically pleasing than the QuickBooks interface. Each program area (such as Customers and Banking) is represented by a tab, which opens a related menu and flow chart for navigation."

This is an interesting note. Wasn't the whole point of the Quickbooks redesign to make the navigation easier? Apparently Kathy likes it broken out as it is in Small Business Accounting.

"The program's greatest selling point, however, is its tight connection with with eBay and PayPal. You can create, list, and track your items in Office Accounting, and then import sales information. You can also import PayPal sales information into Office Accounting. The feature, facilitated by step-by-step instructions (which make the potentially convoluted process less complex), is best suited for power sellers, but should also prove helpful to anyone who already uses eBay or PayPal. This feature worked well in my testing."

I couldn't agree more on this point. I really like the eBay feature and only wish I had a real need to use it. Perhaps I need to start yet another side business.

"Microsoft's Office Accounting 2007 beta is a vast improvement over last year's edition. It should prove an effective tool for small businesses that don't have large-scale inventory requirements, and for those users who want to track eBay and PayPal transactions better. I'm interested in seeing what fine-tuning Microsoft does—adding more reports and support for more banks, for example—between now and the app's final release date, and whether this already very good app becomes a great one."

It'll be interesting to see what the rest of the community thinks of the improvements. I've said a few times before that I really think that Microsoft is on to something here. One thing is for sure, both with SBA and QB: they are both adding more and more features that have some online aspects to them. Both the SBA - eBay/Paypal work and the QB - Google work are adding new dimensions to accounting software. I wonder how long before Peachtree follows suit.