Peachtree by Sage 2010: Accounting Season in the Air Again What's Good in Peachtree by Sage 2010 Wayne Kawamoto
The Good
There's so much that's good in Peachtree. The program displays an intuitive snapshot summary that displays key business information such as balances, vendors with open balances, customers who owe money, graphs, and more. And from here, you can easily call up financial statements and generate reports.
A couple of areas stand above those found in other accounting programs. Peachtree's time and billing feature offers lots of flexibility to track billable time in detail and easily apply it to invoices.
Another traditional Peachtree strength lies with inventory. The program lets you track up to ten price levels and monitor bills of materials through assemblies. For businesses that manufacture goods, Peachtree is a clear choice among the accounting programs in its price range.
You can now search on inventory data in sales or purchase descriptions as well as note fields. Data entry has been streamlined to let you set default item classes that are based on common inventory types (stock, non-stock, service and more).
Peachtree thoroughly covers the business bases with online banking, as well as with payroll features that range from using the program to "do it yourself," or subscribing to Peachtree's payroll service that, in addition to printing checks, takes care of all of the complicated taxes and deposits (extra cost). The program does a great job of integrating data with Microsoft Office as well as Sage's own ACT.
Peachtree also does a great job of walking you through the initial setup. After installing the program, Peachtree asks you to choose a type of business from a generous selection, make a few choices — for example, select between accrual and cash, set sales tax, and more — and it automatically creates the detailed chart of accounts.
The Product Line
Peachtree offers a range of editions beginning with First Accounting, a good starting point for sole proprietorships in simple retail and service businesses. The Pro, Complete, and Premium versions go beyond with QuickBooks conversions, quotes, sales and purchase orders, payroll, Microsoft Office integration, and job and project tracking.
The Complete and Premium versions add Microsoft Outlook-based contact synchronization, online banking reconciliation, online bill paying, multi-level security, audit trails, ability to track inventory sub items, pricing levels, time and billing, and the fixed assets tracking module.
The Premium edition also offers unlimited budgets, serialized inventory tracking, departmentalized financial statements, and Crystal Reports. Peachtree by Sage - Quantum is the most comprehensive application in the Peachtree family. Designed to accommodate 10, 15, 20, or 30 licensed and named users, it's faster and comes with one year of unlimited support, updates and upgrades. Peachtree also offers industry specific versions for accountants, construction, distribution, manufacturing and non-profits.
A venerable accounting stalwart, Peachtree is a great program that offers lots of capabilities and features and is easy to use. It often lies in the shadow of Intuit's QuickBooks, but it has its advantages, particularly for manufacturing, and if you're in the market for accounting software, it's definitely worth considering.
As far as current customers go, though, whilte the new features are nice, they may not be enough to justify an upgrade.
The Pricing
Peachtree First Accounting lists for $99.99, Peachtree Pro Accounting sells for $199.99. Peachtree Complete Accounting costs $299.99, and bumping up to Peachtree Premium Accounting sets you back $499.99.
Peachtree Complete Accounting is available in a Multi-User Value Pack (five seat license) for $699.99. A Multi-User Value Pack (five seat license) for Peachtree Premium Accounting 2009 sells for $1,199.99.
Peachtree by Sage Quantum starts at $3,975 current customer upgrades. New customers pay $4,450. It's available in 10, 15, 20, 30, and 40 seat licenses.
Wayne Kawamoto has written more than 800 articles, columns and reviews about computers, new technologies, the Internet and small businesses. Wayne has also published three books about upgrading PCs, building office networks and troubleshooting notebook computers.
