If you’re looking for ease of use, Intuit’s QuickBooks Pro 2006 is the least-intimidating Mac accounting application on the market. For example, there’s no simple way to create a drop shadow beneath a graphic or text box, which should be relatively simple given OS X’s graphics architecture. But compared to the type of drawing and layout tools that Mac users are accustomed to, MYOB’s form tools are downright awkward to use. True, it’s now easier to create customized reports, forms, and invoices. (FirstEdge, reviewed below, is not as detailed as AccountEdge, so it doesn’t suffer from the same terminology problem-although it’s still not as easy to set up as QuickBooks.)Īlso, while AccountEdge and FirstEdge both sport improved form-customization tools, they’re not exactly simple. While I was able to link accounts, I wasn’t 100-percent positive that I did this properly, and the program provided little guidance as to what items should link to which accounts. For example, during the setup process, it asked me to create “linked accounts” for specialized income, expense, and asset accounts. Whereas QuickBooks uses a minimal amount of accounting jargon when walking you through its setup, AccountEdge will at times throw around some head-scratching terminology. Unfortunately, AccountEdge suffers from what can be an intimidating setup process. The combination of new features and minor tweaks make it a worthwhile upgrade. Also, since it shares a similar data file format with its more-sophisticated sibling AccountEdge, FirstEdge provides an easy upgrade path should your business accounting needs grow.Īfter a four-year drought, FirstEdge 2.0 is an excellent update. The latest release also contains dozens of enhancements, including pop-up calculators and calendars in numeric and date fields, as well as support for scroll wheels on input devices. July 2002 ) include integrated payroll via MYOB’s SurePay service and the ability to process customer credit-card payments or pay vendors electronically from directly within the application. Major upgrades from the previous version of four years ago ( Other existing users may be underwhelmed. QuickBooks users who need a better payroll service-and whose financial institution supports QuickBooks’ file formats-should find this new version to be a compelling upgrade. By contrast, both AccountEdge and FirstEdge handle. qbo is a better data format and less prone to errors, but to ignore a banking data format that Intuit essentially pioneered is problematic. Intuit says the reason for the omission is that. qif-formatted files (which, ironically, is the format that Intuit encouraged most banks to support several years ago). Meanwhile, the application is unable to import the more-common. More egregious is the fact that you have to enter your bank statements manually if your financial institution doesn’t support QuickBooks’. (Intuit says that it excluded this feature because it doesn’t think Mac users want it.) Intuit continues to omit the ability to process credit-card payments-a feature that’s present even in MYOB’s basic application, FirstEdge, and one that many Mac-based businesses can’t live without. Unfortunately, QuickBooks Pro 2006 falls short in the one area you’d expect it to shine: electronic banking. Also, as with previous versions of the program, QuickBooks can use iCal for scheduling as well as back up data files straight to iDisk, provided you have a. That means that if you add new customers within QuickBooks, their information will automatically appear in a special Address Book group you can then access those contacts from Sync-savvy applications and devices such as certain cell phones or PDAs. For instance, using OS X’s Sync services, QuickBooks can store company, customer, and vendor information in Address Book. QuickBooks 2006 also includes several small but useful new features to help ease data entry.
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