Every fiscal year brings new versions of the popular accounting programs, and first out of the chute for 2004 is the venerable Peachtree. While vendor Best Software touts new product positioning and features, there's little that will be groundbreaking to most small businesses. Still, for the umpteenth year in a row, Peachtree maintains its past strengths, including strong inventory and reporting features.
In addition to First, Standard, and Complete versions, Peachtree now comes in a more-than-Complete edition -- Peachtree Premium Accounting, available in both civilian and Accountant's Editions. Generally, Peachtree First Accounting ($100) and Standard Accounting ($200) are aimed at small firms that are weaning themselves from paper-based accounting systems and outgrowing the capabilities of personal finance managers like Intuit's Quicken or Microsoft Money.
First Accounting is optimized for one- or two-person shops, while Standard -- which should suit companies with up to 25 employees -- adds inventory, payroll, purchase orders, and customizable reports to the mix. Neither offer multiuser options. Peachtree Complete Accounting ($300) adds strong inventory tracking that should appeal to manufacturing companies and some retail firms, and is available in a multiuser version ($700); Best Software says it supports companies with up to 50 employees.
The new Premium package ($500) offers even more reports than Complete Accounting, plus Crystal Decisions' powerful Crystal Reports program to customize reports and a module that tracks and analyzes employee compensation. If you have multiple businesses under a single umbrella company, there's a useful new consolidation feature that combines and summarizes financials (balance sheets, income statements, budgets, and more). The Accountant's Edition is designed for bookkeepers who want to work with their clients' Peachtree files; a multiuser edition of either is $1,000.
While Peachtree Premium includes some impressive new features, it's also priced $200 above the popular Complete, which is considerable money. Before buying Premium, be sure that you really need these features.
What's New?
While there are no new must-haves, we found Premium's employee-compensation module a helpful way to track pay and withholding information, raises, and other data to analyze labor expenses. New budgeting tools let businesses set up and maintain budgets for up to three years and compare actual performance against planned expenses.
Peachtree has always offered friendly and thorough setup, and the new Setup Guide and Guided Tour do an even better job of assisting novices with the daunting job of getting started and setting up charts of accounts. A new wizard walks businesses through the process of moving from Intuit's QuickBooks.
The bulk of the remaining new features consist of fine-tuning for Peachtree's intuitive, flowchart-based interface. You can now create your own toolbar -- a plus for power users -- and there's automatic spell checking, as well as more intuitive reconciliation and range filtering. Finally, you can e-mail forms such as invoices, sales orders, and credit memos from within the program, which is a convenience.
While accounting novices may still find the going somewhat rough, Peachtree makes getting started as painless as possible. Along with some 75 charts-of-accounts templates, for businesses ranging from farms to funeral homes, the software provides helpful tutorials that explain how to perform such tasks as entering data and working with vendors and employees.
Adding It Up
If your company manufactures the goods it sells, Peachtree has the strongest inventory features of any program in its class. You'll find tools for tracking assemblies, accepting partial shipments, handling drop shipments, assigning multiple pricing levels, defining preferred vendors, creating master items and assigning related sub-stock items, and more.
Retail and service businesses, while not quite as pampered, will appreciate Peachtree's intuitive, powerful payroll features. The latter can account for salaried, hourly, and tipped employees; distribute pay using up to 20 levels; configure a 401(k) plan; and track vacation and sick time. A helpful Payroll Tax Update Service can maintain compliance at additional cost, and Peachtree also offers a useful direct-deposit service subscription. On the downside, there's no full payroll service, though the company says that capability is under development.
Other useful services available at extra cost include a link between the accounting package and the popular Act contact manager, letting sales departments view customer and vendor information from within Act, and Peachtree WebsiteCreator Pro and Website Trader for putting your business online. The former creates an online catalog based on inventory information stored in Peachtree, while the latter imports orders into the accounting program.
Overall, Peachtree continues to offer a strong alternative to Intuit's offerings without replacing that firm as the 800-pound gorilla of the accounting world. Manufacturing businesses should strongly consider Peachtree, though service and retail firms will want to weigh pros and cons and look at the competition, and existing users will find only nominal reasons to upgrade to the 2004 edition.
