I recommend Quickbooks 2009 for accountants and bookkeepers, and small businesses needing support for multiple currencies.
If your business doesn't need to track foreign currencies, I find Quickbooks 2008 a much better value.
Company Snapshot: Best New Feature in Quickbooks 2009
The biggest improvement to Quickbooks is the new Company Snapshot. This is a separate screen view in Quickbooks that provides users with an at-a-glance review of their finances. The screen is divided into five sections showing income and expenses as a graph, reminders of things you need to do in Quickbooks, current account balances, customers with outstanding balances, and bills that need to be paid.The company snapshot is a great idea. Peachtree Accounting has been offering a similar business status page on their program, and this year Quickbooks has finally caught up. Especially nice: users can change the time period being displayed on the income and expense graph to review yearly, quarterly, monthly or daily reports. The company snapshot module isn't as useful as it first appears. For example, clicking on a bill to pay brings up a report showing my open balances for that vendor. I expected Quickbooks to launch its pay bills module, which is the logical next action for me to take. Similarly, clicking on a customer with an outstanding balance generates a report; whereas I really would like to view the customer's contact information so I can send an email or make a phone call.
Support for Multiple Currencies
Quickbooks users can now send invoices and set up bank accounts that are denominated in currencies other than US Dollars. This feature is going to be useful for my clients who have customers and bank accounts in other countries. Quickbooks also allows users to download exchange rates or manually enter the exchange rates. Default currencies can be assigned to particular clients and particular bank or credit card accounts. The only drawback, is that users can change the currency setting only for customers with no transactions (no invoices, no payments). For my clients who already have customers and bank accounts, we'll need to figure out a work-around for this limitation.Integrated Live Community Toolbar
Quickbooks 2009 has added an always-on help toolbar. This toolbar displays the most relevant questions and answers from the Quickbooks Live Community, an online community of Quickbooks users sharing answers to their common questions. The toolbar also provides access to the help documents found inside the software. I was skeptical of having data from what's essentially a message board appear inside my Quickbooks. But when I ran into problems trying to reconcile a check, I quickly discovered that other users were having similar problems. The only downside is the toolbar takes up valuable screen real estate. Personally, I prefer having the toolbar turned off, but it is always accessible at the press of the F1 button.Online Banking Features Need Improvement
Quickbooks redesigned its online banking functions. The ability to download financial data from a bank Web site and reconcile it with your data has long been one of Quickbooks' core strengths. But this year, the online banking module suffers from two huge design flaws. First, Quickbooks '09 automatically matches bank data with transactions in the register. I encountered several problems with the matching functionality in Quickbooks 2009, such as not matching checks that I knew were recorded.By now, I am used to the fact that not every downloaded transaction will match up. But Quickbooks has compounded the problem in the 2009 version. The problem is that Quickbooks 2009 has completely eliminated the ability to view the register when you are working with the downloaded bank data, which is the second big design flaw here. Users also cannot add new payees, add new accounts, or even look at other sections of Quickbooks while working with the downloaded data.
Earlier versions of Quickbooks didn't always match transactions perfectly either, but users still had the full ability to match transactions manually to the register. That usefulness is completely missing in 2009 version.
Not a Must Have Upgrade
I hope Quickbooks fixes these functionality issues. In the meantime, the only compelling reason to upgrade from Quickbooks 2008 would be to take advantage of the multiple currency feature.
