QuickBooks Premier 2009 offers improved online banking tools; Live Community user-assisted help; Company Snapshot screen for quick business overview; a free Web site for one year; support for international payments and most world currencies; better client data-review tools for accountants.
Intuit QuickBooks Premier 2009 keeps the program‘s well-designed, intuitive interface, while adding a few new features. It‘s a worthy upgrade for people serious about online banking, and it remains the best accounting program for small business owners. However, Intuit should be more generous with customer support, particularly for setup issues.
While earlier versions of QuickBooks had online banking, only a tiny percentage of people used the feature, according to Intuit. The redesigned Online Banking Center for 2009 makes it easier to set up your financial accounts, write online checks, and download and organize transactions. The enhanced banking tools, some borrowed from Intuit‘s Quicken personal finance application, are smarter and easier to manage. For instance, you can set up naming rules for downloaded bank transactions, allowing QuickBooks to automatically rename and categorize them. One rule, for instance, might instruct QuickBooks to rename any transaction with the text string "Staples" to "Staples Office Supplies." This prevents the program from adding new vendors to your payee list every time the bank adds a unique reference or store number to the vendor name, such as "A735Staples09128008."
Overall, the Banking Center‘s setup wizard is well designed, although not as seamless as it should be. In our tests, for instance, it wouldn‘t set up an account with Bank of America, suggesting we contact the bank for more information. Furthermore, your bank may require you to go to its Web site to complete the setup. With Wells Fargo, for instance, we needed to download our banking statement from Wells‘ CEO Basic Banking Site to finish the process. Overall, this was clunky.
