Microsoft's Small Business Accounting Software 2006

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You'll learn that SBA has a much better interface than QB and a friendlier database to access externally. You'll also learn that SBA does not have all the bells-and-whistles (features) of QB nor anywhere near the variety of online banking accesses of QB.

The ability of SBA to work with the other Office products has been touted wildly in the SBA literature. What's really odd is the fact that most of the competition has had this ability for years. One of the reason's Microsoft's Office Suite has become the defacto standard is because it is open to other applications like QuickBooks. Microsoft has made all the tools required for this intergration available to one and all. Go ahead and see for yourself. Open up Quickbooks and export a report to Excel.

Thanks,

I was looking for somewhere to get more info.

GC

Historians believe that in newspost on Sun, 30 Oct 2005, HeyBub penned the following literary masterpiece:

Subject: Re: Microsoft's Small Business Accounting Software 2006 From: Barrnabas Collins Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:10:20 -0400 Message-ID:

Duncan

I was using the beta for about 5 months. Some feedback...

1. It's a very nice looking program. Fits in well with all the other MS desktop apps. Quickbooks looks a little cartoonish and old.
2. It is tightly integrated with Office. This is both good and bad. Becuase of the integration with Outlook, all incoming/outgoing emails are available and provide a means of tracking things you did with your customers. On the other hand, printing and sending quotes, invoices, etc. is painful because they all run through Word. Ugh.
3. The inventory list is horrible, just a single list, no hierarchy. Same for the customer list if I recall (but check that).
4. Anything more advanced than BASIC accounting is not supported or not supported very well.
5. It can sometimes be VERY slow.

1. It relies on Windows authentication and the dumbed down version of SQL Server. This gives you a "real" database under the covers, which is nice from the standpoint of managment/maintenance, but you also have to deal with all the junk that comes with integration..... users must be windows users, you must have the same user names on different computers across a network, etc.

2. It can sometime be VERY slow.

1. Security (i.e. feature access control) is weak and limited. Quickbooks is a little better.

2. It is very easily extendible. Applications written in newer MS languages (C#, VB.NET) are extremely easy to write, much simpler than for quickbooks.

1. VERY few banks are supported for online transactions. MS claims the list of banks will updated continuously, but it hasn't changed in 2 months. There are NO large banks supported at this time (Wells Fargo, BofA, Citi, etc.)

In summary, SBA currently appears to be targeted to small mom-and-pop shops. It does have good potential, but after commiting to it for 5 months, I switchd back to Quickbooks. My accounting needs are minimal.

-Greg

Oh, here's another thing... document templates (invoices, quotes, etc.) exist as separate files and need to be distributed to every machine on which they're used.

-Greg

Thank you Greg for your input. It was very helpful. I have been playing with it for a week or so and agree with your comments. Thanks again, Elaine