Review by Robert Stinnett

As someone who has used Peachtree for my small business accounting needs for years I always felt that while Peachtree was a good program, it was far too comlicated and bloated for the average small business user. I wanted something that, quite frankly, made doing my books a snap – as easy as writing a letter – and I found it with Microsoft Accounting Professional 2008.

First off, let me state this – if you are an average user of the Microsoft Office suite of products then Accounting 2008 is going to be a snap for you to use. They have went to great lengths to make sure you don’t need an Accounting degree to understand it. A lot of the features not only integrate extremely well with Office 2007, but will remind you a lot of using Office (minus the ribbon interface).

One of the really nice features of Accounting is the ability to add third-party add-ins. Out of the box you get an integration module for Paypal, so your invoices can automatically generate Paypal requests and Accounting can automatically classify and deduct the fees for it from the appropriate accounts. As your business grows, and you decide that you need to do direct credit card processing, Accounting 2008 lets you integrate with CC processors directly – again, handling managing the costs and fees for you.

Dashboards are another strong feature of this product. How is my business doing? What is my accounts payable looking like? How much cash do I have on hand? All that information and more is available through quick, convenient dashboards. You can drill down into the dashboards to pull up reports to see more detailed data.

If you use Business Contact Manager for Outlook then you are in for a treat – it integrates directly with Accounting to help you track not only customer information, but also communications and marketing camapaigns! No more having to hunt and search for emails sent months ago or wondering if your marketing campaigns via e-mail are working.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with the product. I think it has been a welcome upgrade from Peachtree and thanks to its integration with other products really brings my business into a 360-view. I know immediately how well things are doing, what my customers are up to, and what needs my attention.

If you own a small business then do yourself a favor and give this a try. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.