Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting (beta)

Jeff Bertolucci CNET

Published: 15 Feb 2005

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Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting (SBA) is the software giant's first foray into the low-end book-keeping market, having already infiltrated the high end with its enterprise-oriented Great Plains software. Built for businesses with 25 or fewer employees, SBA will launch in the US towards the end 2005, as part of Office for Small Business Management: it will compete primarily with Intuit's QuickBooks Pro and MYOB Plus. Microsoft has not yet provided a release date for SBA in the UK and Europe.

SBA promises tight links with existing Microsoft Office applications, specifically Word, Excel and Outlook. For instance, SBA will let you export invoices from SBA to Microsoft Word for editing and printing and funnel profit-and-loss statements to Excel for number crunching. Users running Outlook with Business Contact Manager (another component of Microsoft Office Small Business Edition) will be able to link sales leads stored in Outlook with client accounts in SBA.

Like any good, small-business accounting application, SBA is designed for non-accountants. The beta interface is well-structured and simple to navigate, and manages to keep accounting jargon to a minimum. Microsoft has given SBA an Office-friendly look with the familiar menus and toolbars motif. And like QuickBooks and other accounting competitors, SBA offers a start-up wizard that steps you through the process of inputting company data. SBA also borrows a few of QuickBooks' best features, such as a flowchart screen that outlines customer data entry (entering quotes, sales orders, invoices and so on), and a left-side Customer column -- similar to the one in QuickBooks Navigator -- that makes it easy to jump to other accounting tools, such as Excel.

SBA imports data from Excel and QuickBooks, but not from competing accounting applications. And while SBA's integration with Office is impressive, QuickBooks Pro performs many of the same tricks. Take Word integration, for instance. Both programs allow you to export invoice data to Word for easy editing and printing. And both make it simple to send reports to Excel: simply click a button, and your accounting data loads in an Excel worksheet. Furthermore, although both programs let you synchronise Outlook contacts with company clients, QuickBooks also supports the popular ACT! contact manager, whereas SBA doesn’t. On the other hand, SBA (when teamed with Outlook for Business Contact Manager) exchanges customer balances, sales and payments in real time with other Office applications, whereas QuickBooks doesn’t.

Small Business Accounting’s strong feature set and intuitive interface should make it a serious contender for small-business accounting market share. Microsoft will undoubtedly price SBA competitively with QuickBooks Pro, and the program’s inclusion in Office Small Business Edition will introduce it to businesses that currently use Word and Excel to run the company. Although Microsoft has yet to announce SBA’s price, we’re guessing it’ll be similar to QuickBooks Pro (£299.95 inc. VAT in the UK). What remains to be seen is how well SBA’s accounting tools perform in the real world.

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