Tech Essentials | Paying Taxes Painlessly

With tax season approaching, Tech Essentials turns our eyes to that essential tool (also known as the bane of our existence), tax accounting software. Since national and provincial tax rules change constantly, tax accounting software must be kept up to date. That said, Sage’s Simply Accounting and Intuit’s QuickBooks have chosen very different approaches to their 2010 upgrades.

QuickBooks

Intuit is making a major push for the small business market. Its 2010 marketing highlights five new features, from its online forum to currency conversions to batch invoicing via email. It’s an attempt to integrate the accounting package with the rest of your computer’s resources, especially Internet connectivity.

Live Community, Intuit’s forum, has been in existence for over a year and has become a peer-to-peer network for business people. Intuit claims that more than 16,000 questions were answered through this forum during the last tax season, many about issues unrelated to their software. The change is that Live Community is now available from within QuickBooks and QuickTax.

Another Internet-exploiting feature is batch invoicing; instead of sending each invoice separately, all invoices for a given date can be sent at the same time via Outlook or Outlook Express. Working as advertised, this can be a major time-saver.

Other highlights:
• For import/export businesses, QuickBooks now uses international exchange rates (downloaded manually from wallstreet.com) to determine currency conversions. Invoicing can be done in available currencies
• Company Snapshots now gives an up-to-date (“real time”) financial picture
• GST is automatically tracked and can be filed online at www.intuit.ca

QuickBooks Pro 2010 from $199.99
QuickBooks Premier 2010 from $499.99

Simply Accounting
More properly an accounting program than a tax software package, Sage’s Simply Accounting is also marketed to Canada’s small businesses. Curiously, the company’s major message for 2010 is speed, speed and more speed. Faster installation, faster startup, faster data entry and, most importantly, faster reporting. According to the marketing, some of its report generation was cut from two hours to a mere two minutes. Considering the increase in report printing time for the 2009 version, this is an essential update.

Sage hosts a forum with a similar number of posts as Intuit’s, as well as a Live Chat. The 2009 Simply Accounting help menu has an outdated link to the forums, but the error page at the Sage site will still point you in the right direction.
Simply’s batch invoicing is handled by a third-party package called DocuFire. It’s based on Simply’s batch printing, and the DocuFire driver is used to divert the data to an email program.

Other features:
• Simply Pro can accommodate two exchange rates, while the Premium/Enterprise version is unlimited. Exchange rates can be downloaded according to user preferences.
• E-filing is available for T4s, RL-1s and ROEs.
www.sagenorthamerica.com

Simply Accounting Premium with Payroll Services 2010 $499.99

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