Accounting Unleashed!
Online QuickBooks Training…Accounting and Bookkeeping too!

Intuit is releasing QuickBooks 2009 tomorrow, September 29.  I should be receiving my ProAdvisor copy tomorrow since it was shipped late last week.  I will have some new videos up soon using the new version.

After reviewing the information available online, here is a brief summary of what’s new in QuickBooks 2009:

Client Data Review
This appears to be a collection of tools that will help you find errors in different accounts. It allows you to clean up A/R and A/P transactions such as when there are unapplied credits sitting in one of those accounts.  It also lets you work in payroll, undeposited funds and bank reconciliations.  This could be a useful feature for accountants who need to review and clean up their client’s QuickBooks files.

Multi-User
A built-in instant messenger is new this year, allowing users to communicate with each other from within the program.  You will be able to perform a back up of the data file while still in multi-user mode, which is a great feature.  In previous versions you had to switch to single-user, back up, then remember to switch back to multi-user mode.

Company Snapshot
This looks like another great new feature.  It gives you one screen packed with information such as an income and expense graph, customer balances and reminders.  Anything that makes it easier for small business owners to get a handle on their finances is a welcome addition.

Miscellaneous
Other improvements have been made in online banking and the downloading of transactions, the ability to handle multiple currencies, time tracker improvements, list management (now you can right-click to delete a list item – yes!), conversion tools to switch from other accounting programs to QuickBooks, better security and more.

All of these new things sound great, but with Intuit I am always a little skeptical about how well these features have been implemented.  Once I finally have QuickBooks 2009 installed and have had a chance to run it through its paces, I will give my honest review of it.

Click here if you want to check out the new features in QuickBooks 2009

I stumbled across a link to a new QuickBooks site today and at first I thought is was a mistake, but unfortunately it wasn’t.  You can find the Intuit QuickBooks Jingle Generator here:

http://www.thejinglegenerator.com/

I guess it’s their attempt at being “cool” and are hoping for a viral video kind of thing, but I think it’s just kind of weird. The site has a retro, 80s type music producer guy offering to record a jingle for your business.  You choose the type of business that you have, then you can enter some text that gets converted to speech and inserted into the jingle (using 1980s voice synthesizer technology!).  Then you get to hear your customized jingle and can email it, download it or copy the URL.

As lame as I think this is, it’s still better than anything that Microsoft is doing to convince everyone that Windows Vista is cool!

Here’s the URL for the jingle that I put together (I apologize in advance for what you are about to experience):

http://www.thejinglegenerator.com/index_recip.php?id=http://content.thejinglegenerator.com/userdata/flv/d46a956ec4ad3d78610f73b1e67aedc1e98e47ee_1218330334.flv