Mayer Consulting Services Ltd.

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At its core, QuickBooks Enterprise isn’t quite as powerful as Peachtree Quantum particularly in the area of inventory tracking. But it does offer much greater database and usage capacity than QuickBooks Pro and Premier: Those two can accommodate up to 14,500 customers and products, whereas Enterprise can handle more than 100,000. Pro and Premier allowed up to five simultaneous users, Enterprise welcomes up to 30. Peachtree’s mid-level accounting app Quantum, by comparison, allows up to 40, and Sage BusinessWorks 50 Accounting 2009, 48. Enterprise also goes beyond junior QuickBooks versions by tracking fixed assets, letting managers define advanced user roles and permissions, and connecting remote locations and employees using Windows Terminal Services.

If you’ve seen any QuickBooks apps (except Simple Start) in the last few years, you know what Enterprise looks like. It sports a home page that displays an interactive process map outlining the program’s main tasks, like Purchase Orders, Create Sales Receipts, and Pay Employees. Click the Company Snapshot icon, and QuickBooks displays an orderly window that highlights key data from your files in mini-spreadsheets and graphs, like your Income and Expense Trend, Account Balances, and Customers Who owe Money. It’s a highly informative page, and indicative of the great interface work that Intuit has done throughout the product (and throughout all their recent products).

You can use either the home page or the icon bar as your navigational tool. Both take you to central pages for your work with customers, vendors, and employees. In the Customer Center, for example, you’ll see a list of your customers and jobs in the left vertical pane; click a tab, and you can opt to see transactions. When you click on a customer, job, or transaction on the left, the right side of the screen changes to display related information. You can enter new records and transactions from here, as well as export data to Excel and create customer mailings in Word.

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Inventory tracking is basic. You can define inventory and non-inventory parts, services, and other charges, assigning units of measure and tracking average cost and quantity of hand, on purchase order, and on sales order. There are five additional custom fields. All in all, QuickBooks is less sophisticated in this area than Peachtree, and BusinessWorks outplays both: With BusinessWorks, you can specify substitute parts and track fractional quantities and serial numbers, assign warehouses and bins and locations, and track the transfer of parts; its job costing also goes into much more detail.

QuickBooks Enterprise takes the lead back again with its excellent reports. Intuit’s app offers over 150 customizable, industry-specific overviews in areas like Vendors & Payables, Company & Financial, Accountant & Taxes, and Sales. You can even run consolidated reports if you have multiple companies. Peachtree offers roughly 140 customizable built-in reports, and includes Crystal Report Designer, which lets you configure reports based on any of the information contained in your database. BusinessWorks offers more customizable reports than either, but they’re harder to use.

On its own, QuickBooks Enterprise cannot beat Peachtree Quantum in terms of sheer accounting acumen. BusinessWorks includes more of everything, but its outmoded, fragmented interface makes it too hard to use for the non-accountant. But the four powerful add-ons in the QuickBooks Enterprise Suite (ES)—along with the package’s usability—help put it over the top. Sales Management ES helps your sales team perform customer management tasks, assessing the status of each. Field Service Management ES gives you more control over work orders and scheduling, helping to streamline your mobile payments, billing, and cash flow. Business Analysis ES provides a series of interactive dashboards and reports that give you management-level views and sophisticated analysis of your company’s growth and profitability. And Warehouse Management ES picks up where Enterprise’s inventory tools leave off, tracking multi-warehouse inventory in real-time. One user license for each app is included with the cost of Enterprise and its Full Service Plan.

When used in conjunction with QuickBooks Enterprise Suite, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 9.0 is the most powerful, customizable, and usable accounting solution in this price range. It combines the intuitive design found in all QuickBooks products with exceptional customizability, powerful data tracking and accounting insight, and valuable extensibility. And you can very easily upgrade from junior QuickBooks programs, making this family affair the most successful in the accounting software universe, and our Editors’ Choice for midlevel accounting software.