Peachtree - High End Accounting Software Without the High End Price

Your daily accounting functions such as paying vendors, invoicing customers, paying employees, collecting money, is like your business's heartbeat. If it stops working, your business will come to a grinding halt. Fortunately you can purchase software which can take on these day to day accounting functions and allow you to run your business instead of spending time being a bookkeeper.

As someone who has spent a lot of time "in the trenches", I know how important it is to have the right software. Big businesses with big budgets can spend literally millions on accounting software, and hire IT people to make it work for them. But let's face it, most of us run small to medium size businesses, and we do not have the six and seven figure budgets nor the personnel resources to devote to such a system. We want something inexpensive that we can get up and running quickly, and we want something that we can manage and operate ourselves with our current staff.

I recently helped a client install and set up Peachtree Pro accounting, and I must say, I am quite impressed. Peachtree has quite an impressive history, and has recently undergone some changes which make it the ideal solution for small to medium size businesses.

Peachtree verses Quickbooks

You have to hand it to Quickbooks, they have a huge market. Most startups pick up a copy of Quickbooks because it is cheap and easy to use. In most cases however, Peachtree is a much better choice. Not only in terms of functionality, but the security and internal control architecture is tighter. Peachtree has many features only found in high end software.

Ease of Use

Installation and setup are very easy using wizards which ask you a series of questions about your business. There are template chart of accounts which will work for you 90% of the time, and default settings in each of the modules which make using the software extremely efficient. I found the layout very intuitive, although the look and feel is more like a large enterprise package than a small business application.

On the left side of the screen is a view of groups of tasks: customers and sales, vendors and purchases, inventory and services, employees and payroll, banking, and company. Clicking on one of these brings up a task pane arranged in flowchart style set of task as well as a listing of the main database you are working with. This is a very intuitive way to get to know how the program handles processes, but there is a task menu at the top of the screen where you can jump to any task at any time. Experienced users will appreciate this.

Reporting

No accounting software would be worth much if it could not give you information you can use to run your business. Peachtree really shines here with each segment containing multiple reports. I won't list them all, but the AR section has over 20, the AP section has 15, the inventory has 15, and so on. Each report allows you to customize the design and in most cases the data. I especially liked the Excel and PDF buttons on the reports. One click and your report is in a format you can send to interested parties. And with PDFs you no longer need filing cabinets full of paper documents. If that is not enough, with some versions you can even use Crystal Reports to pull data out of the system and present it in an endless number of ways.

Integration

Software these days needs to interact and communicate with other other software. The days of isolation are coming to and end. As mentioned above, your reports can be exported to Excel or PDF format with a click of a button. In addition there are a number of third party add-ons endorsed by Peachtree which adds functionality in such areas as point-of-sale, manufacturing, project management, sales management, human resources, and many others.

Support

You have a number of options here, from business care to an online knowledgebase where you can find an answer to your problem most of the time. Peachtree also has an accountants network, so if your accountant is in the network, they can help you with some of your issues.

A word about Payroll You're covered here. You can do everything yourself, including entering tax formulas (ugh!), or you can subscribe to a tax service which keeps everything up do date. Or, if you really want the royal treatment, you can get Peachtree to do your payroll for you.

Price/Performance

As a numbers guy, this is one area that is of special interest to me. Bottom line, you get a lot for your money with Peachtree. I don't know of any other accounting software that has this kind of bang for your dollar.

There are several different versions of Peachtree, and not all the features mentioned here are found across the board. Fortunately you can upgrade as your business grows and your needs change. But no matter how you evaluate it, the features found in Peachtree's products represent a true value to the business owner.