Peachtree by Sage 2010: Accounting Season in the Air Again What's New and Improved in Peachtree 2010 Wayne Kawamoto
With memories of the tax man having exacted his pound of flesh still fresh on our minds and summer just starting to heat up, it can mean only one thing — it's accounting software season. Peachtree 2010 represents Sage's annual embellishment, and while it comes with a few welcome tweaks and adjustments, it's pretty much the same reliable Peachtree program of the last few years.
If 2010 were a new model car, it would feature improved wheel bearings. Of course, bearings are important to a vehicle, but their addition won't exactly rev you up with excitement. This criticism isn't solely leveled at Peachtree. The company's competitors, including Intuit's QuickBooks, have also been running on empty in recent yearly upgrades
This year, Peachtree offers "expanded capabilities around customization, access and control." And there are new features that help you refer to industry and company information, better track inventory and customers, and apply stronger security.
Will these new features make your business life easier? Probably. But the bigger question is: Are you getting a lot for your upgrade money? That's more of a perhaps.
The New Features
Business analytics in Pearchtree 2010 offer a great new feature that lets you view current financial trends and compare how your company is performing against others by weighing total revenue, gross margin, and more. The tool can potentially provide you with key data to assist in your decision making.
A new transaction history lets you see just about everything that's related to a particular customer or vendor at any point in the sales or purchase process, even letting you view forward from a quote to a receipt or backward from a payment to a purchase order. The convenient Customer Management Center compiles and displays client information in a single place and lets you look up customers by any shard of contact information and filter the results by date.
An intuitive, customizable dashboard displays key customer information such as invoices, converted and unconverted quotes, receipts, time tickets, aged balances, items sold, and more. And you can drill down and view underlying data as well as export customer information to Excel for further analysis. A new "Item Sales History by Customer" report helps you analyze what customers are buying.
You can now store an unlimited number of contacts per company and a handy new Contacts tab tracks details on multiple contacts within a company. There's also a new field for recording notes to track unique information about each contact. Peachtree now lets you open multiple companies at the same time and toggle back and forth between them — a great feature for larger organizations.
This Peachtree upgrade accommodates additional employee data that includes: emergency contact information, performance reviews, hiring dates, and more. You can also set alerts to remind you of key events such as reviews.
Password security has been improved with customizable options that include automatic password expiration and lock-outs after multiple incorrect password attempts. It's easier now for people to change passwords without bothering IT. There's also a convenient new backup feature that lets you create a schedule and automatically backup data. And Peachtree doesn't even need to be running to accomplish this.
