The slump in the accounting software market since the heady days leading up to the introduction of GST has seen the major players completely revamp their products. For example, QuickBooks Pro once sold for less than half its current price and was designed for small business. Today it is aimed at medium-sized enterprises and comes with five licences and an integrated full payroll function. Small businesses are now offered a choice of QuickBooks or QuickBooks Plus but have lost some of the features they once had, such as job costing.
 
There have been several changes made to QuickBooks this year apart from the integration of the payroll. Transaction auditing has been improved; you can now create assembly items; report templates can be customised and reconciliation reporting has been enhanced. Journals are now automatically numbered and are easier to reverse, and you can create multiple estimates for a single job.

There is one other unfathomable change. For some unknown reason Quicken has dropped the Remittance Advice option from the bottom of its invoice templates and if you upgrade to the current version you will suddenly find it missing.

But it is the payroll feature and five licences that Quicken is relying on to sell the product. The idea is that if you set up the payroll during the Easy Step interview, you will be able to run payroll from navigator or menu options within QuickBooks allowing simultaneous updating of your accounts with the payroll data. The payroll allows for tracking of leave, superannuation, deductions and allowances, the printing of pay slips, cheques and ATO payment advices. However, if you have not set up a payroll before, this can be quite a tough job and even experienced users have found the new QuickBooks payroll a bit tricky, which is a pity because most of the rest of the program is fairly intuitive.

Overall, it stands up well against MYOB Premier, which offers three licences instead of five, but has a multi currency option that's not found in QuickBooks Pro.