Welcome to our inaugural Top New Products report!

Technology has always been crucial to accounting - the abacus and the double-entry ledger were both, in their days, cutting-edge tech - so we've created this new annual feature to highlight some of the best new tools available to help you make your firm or your clients more efficient and more profitable.

While Accounting Today has built quite a stable of annual features, the Top New Products is a little different from, say, our Top 100 Firms or Top 100 People lists. To start, there aren't 100 of them - only 17, in 16 categories (we start off with a tie), along with 16 honorable mentions.

More important, it isn't comprehensive. There are plenty of excellent accounting software applications, for instance, that aren't mentioned here. That's because these are Top New Products - brand-new or significantly updated offerings that were released within the last year. Also, in many technology areas, we found that while there were numerous products and services released in the past year, there simply weren't any products that represented big-enough advances to qualify as a Top New Product.

With that said, we're proud to present our first-ever Top New Products - we feel sure they'll not only improve your practice, but also give you an insight into some of the major trends shaping the technology of tomorrow.

The 2010 Top New Products