The Quickbooks range of small business finance software has had a revamp for 2005, with the introduction of three products: Quickbooks Regular, Pro and Accountant 2005. Here we look at the Pro version to see what new features have been added to ease the headache of bookkeeping for small businesses.

Quickbooks 2005 Pro is aimed at users with some IT knowledge running a small business. It can handle a staff ranging from just one employee to over 10, and cope with registered or unregistered companies based in a single location, be it an office or at home, or multiple locations. In fact, Pro covers the widest range of needs of any of the Quickbooks products.

It is worth noting that, following the demise of Intuit's personal finance software, Quicken, at the beginning of this year, there is also a simplified version of Quickbooks 2005 called Simplestart. This is targeted at individual users with little experience of accounting or technology, although it's designed for start-up businesses. For those who want to stick with Quicken, Intuit will support this until January 2006.

Although Quickbooks Pro demands some understanding of bookkeeping, it has been made as simple to use as possible and the interface has been redesigned to make it more intuitive.

The 'find' feature has been updated to make it easier to search for customers by name, date or amount, which is a welcome addition. Report navigation has also been enhanced and you can now easily search for the report you want by type and then search within it for the information you actually need.

All the core features are explained using interactive tutorials. These are full multimedia productions, with an English-accented voice-over and muzak-style soundtrack, which you can turn off. Once you have tackled these, there is also an easily accessible help window that takes you to support online.

A new offline 'Follow Me Help' feature can be accessed by clicking on the 'How do I?' button. It's context sensitive and changes as you change task and can be used to guide you through all the features, offering in-depth explanations of complex operations such as VAT returns and payroll.

If you are more familiar with the software you can skip straight to the Customer Centre, which provides an at-a-glance look at all your client details. This information can also be viewed in the Company Centre. Once you're used to working with the software, you can customise it to better meet your needs, swapping icons on the toolbar for those most frequently used.

While many of the changes made to Quickbooks 2005 Pro are operational, there are a few new functions to encourage users to upgrade too. The most important is support for electronic staff payments via Bacs, which is only found in the Pro and Accountant versions.

Using Bottomline's Bacstel-IP, users can carry out payments via the web. But any business wishing to use this service will have to pay £25 per month for up to 30 transactions and any further transactions cost more.

Another paid-for extra is the electronic filing of payroll returns, which is available in all but the Simplestart products. This costs £99.95 per year, but by filing returns via the internet companies are entitled to the Inland Revenue's incentive scheme. This pays out £825 over five years, more than covering the outlay.

The final new addition is the support for online card payments using Worldpay, which allows you to accept payment from all major credit and debit cards. This incurs a £100 setup fee, a £100 annual subscription and extra transaction fees.

Barclays Bank customers will be pleased to see that Quickbooks 2005 can now be fully integrated with its online banking services. This means that bank statements can be automatically reconciled, rather than having to be manually input.

Comprehensive yet easy to use, Quickbooks 2005 Pro is more than sufficient for managing the accounts needs of most small businesses. Professionals may also want to consider the Accountant version, which adds the option to work remotely on company files.

Contact:
Intuit 0845 450 7220
www.quickbooks.co.uk

System Requirements:

• Windows 98 or later
• 200MHz Pentium processor
• 64MB of Ram
• 230MB hard disk space
• Mapi-compliant email program
• Word, Excel and Outlook 97 or later
• ACT 3.08 or later for integration