QuickBooks 2011 Now Available

Intuit's financial software adds features to save business owners and accountants time, including customer "snapshots," batch invoicing, new payment tools and mobile access.

-- QuickBooks Search lets users quickly locate any customer, account, report or invoice details within their QuickBooks repository with a simple keyword search. "Search is now much faster and more powerful," says Hood. "For example, you can now find related customer records, invoices and other information."

-- Customer and Vendor History provides at-a-glance views of important customer and vendor details, such as history, estimates and past orders, on a single screen.

-- Balance Sheet by Class provides a way for QuickBooks Premier users to separately track multiple funds, departments or locations in a single, easy-to-access report. "This is useful for businesses that need to report business by category, like retainers, or restricted versus non-restricted funds, or by apartment building," says Hood. "One non-profit administrator reported this specific feature will save their firm four to five hours per month."

-- Batch Invoicing lets small businesses owners who often bill many customers for the same service streamline the process by creating one template invoice to send to all related customers. "Batch invoicing makes it possible to create a batch of invoices for a group of customers in a few keystrokes," says Hood. According to Intuit, one storage unit manager, who previously needed to perform hundreds of mouse clicks to create invoices for overdue invoicing, reports, "I used the batch invoice feature and in just two minutes I had every invoice completed and applied!"

-- Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail Integration allows businesses to easily send invoices, estimates, and other emails from their preferred webmail service directly from QuickBooks.

-- Collections Center, in the Customer Center, helps users to quickly identify overdue and almost-due invoices, and then directly email collection notices from their Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail accounts. "One beta user said this saves them three to five hours per month in follow-up," says Hood.

-- New payment tools. "QuickBooks Merchant Services is a credit-card processing capability fully integrated into QuickBooks, and will also offer this as a mobile solution, GoPayment," says Hood. "Once a card is swiped, the payment is done, without having to touch the keyboard." Also, the new Intuit Payment Network (sold separately) provides a way for a small business’s customers to instantly pay their invoices, using clickable links -- this makes it easier for customers to pay and for companies to capture and record payments."