New York (Nov. 6, 2003) -- Intuit’s new line of QuickBooks products is on the way, with updated versions of their most popular products as well as industry-specific versions for retail, professional services, manufacturing and wholesale, retail, and accountants.
The company unveiled the latest versions and enhancements at a product preview event here. The products will be officially released next week.
The new products and improvements were designed to “save time, effort, and address major pain points for accountants and small to medium businesses,” said Scott Cook, Intuit’s co-founder and chairman of the company’s executive committee.
Dan Manack, vice president, Professional Products Group, said the company “isn’t interested in adding features for features’ sake. With our new 2004 line-up, and all of our products and services, we are focused on the customers’ needs first, adding in only features that will truly translate into benefits.”
All of the aforementioned products, along with the most recent versions of QuickBooks Pro 6.0 for Mac, Intuit Payroll Services, Complete Payroll HR Assistant, and Intuit QuickBase, offer a range of accounting and business management solutions for companies that range from one to 250 employees.
QuickBooks 2004 for accountants has over 30 new features specific to accountant's needs, including an enhanced reconcile feature which allows users to undo mistakes, track audit trails, choose which columns of data to show, and retain 10 years' worth of reconcile reports. Also, there is a feature that tracks items such as loans and mileage for automobile write-offs and the ability to work with all nine versions of QuickBooks.
In addition to products, Intuit revealed some of its latest research about accountants and their greatest “pain points” and challenges.
Intuit found that flawed source data, lack of practice management tools, and having to re-enter data were their greatest challenges. Moreover, 68 percent of accountants surveyed said they still receive data via paper, while 80 percent still re-key data from the paper they receive.
-- Seth Fineberg
