Intuit QuickBooks Pro 2012 Review: The Perennial Leader Stays Strong

QuickBooks maintains its grip on the small-business accounting leadership year after year because it's relentless in its pursuit of small-business owners and managers who need help with the books but aren't versed in accounting. QuickBooks Pro 2012 is built on the same standard accounting structure as its competitors, but it does a pretty good job of minimizing the professional jargon--and adding features that help with chores that all businesses must tackle--from taxes and billing to rudimentary customer relationship management.

Like its higher-end sibling, QuickBooks Premier 2012, QuickBooks Pro 2012 lets you get started within a couple of minutes with an Express Setup routine involving just two screens. You need to provide a business name, basic contact info, a tax ID number, and industry type (from a preset list).

Intuit makes getting started with QuickBooks Pro very easy. After that, Intuit lets you enter information--say, a customer record or merchandise item--on the fly. You can, however, opt for a more systemic approach if you prefer. For example, you can download a free app that syncs Outlook contacts with customer, vendor, or employee lists, or you can import an inventory list from Excel. Like other accounting software packages, QuickBooks lets you edit the default accounts that it creates based on your industry type.

QuickBooks' home screen shows a flow chart of business processes that the software manages. Clicking one of the chart's component icons takes you to the appropriate ledger or form. On a narrow pane to the right, a small window shows key account balances, a list of to-do reminders, and links to add-on products and services such as payroll and checks. And regardless of what's on the center screen, a row of icons above it and the Windows menu bar offer you quick transportation to other areas both within and outside the software.

QuickBooks' flow chart feature can provide an at-a-glance depiction of your business's typical activities.For example, an App Center icon summons links to dozens of third-party add-ons, which can greatly enhance QuickBooks' usefulness. Indeed, the breadth of third-party support is one of QuickBooks' geatest strengths.

By the same token, however, the explosion in third-party support suggests that, on its own, QuickBooks has weaknesses. It still lacks the rock-solid inventory management features found in Sage 50 Complete Accounting 2013, and even Acclivity AccountEdge Pro 2012 does a better job.

QuickBooks Pro's 2012 goodies include a calendar view to give you a handle on upcoming events (for example, quarterly tax-filing deadlines or payment due dates); regrettably, it doesn't sync with any other calendar that you might be using. The software integrates well with Microsoft Office for everything from data exports to spreadsheets to canned letters for sending to customers with overdue bills.

QuickBooks has always been strong in customizable report creation, but this year it takes that feature to new heights by allowing its huge user base to share their customized report templates.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about QuickBooks is its ongoing policy of sunsetting online feature support for older versions, which means, among other things, that you can't automatically download transaction information from your bank. It's a way of strong-arming users who are perfectly happy with an older version (right now Intuit supports only the 2010 editions and later) into upgrading to a newer version.

And though a single copy of QuickBooks Pro 2012 is competitively priced (normally it's $230; but at this early August 2012 writing, with the annual upgrade approaching, you can find it for less), costs mount quickly if you want to add simultaneous users, because you don't get a price break for the additional licenses. QuickBooks' payroll service, while comprehensive, is also pretty pricey.

Intuit offers several Premier versions of QuickBooks that have everything the Pro edition contains and add industry-specific features. The Premier options are considerably more expensive than Pro--$400 for a new copy--and additional licenses cost only $50 less than the first one. Also, QuickBooks Pro and Premier support a maximum of five simultaneous users; Intuit does sell enterprise products, but they are considerably more complex and expensive. If you think you'll want to support more than five simultaneous users, you might want to look at a competitor such as Acclivity AccuEdge Pro.

Still, for small-businesses managers who prize ease of use and a focus on automating as many business chores as possible without getting into the minutiae of standard accounting practices, QuickBooks remains the product to beat.

This review is part of a roundup of accounting software. You can read the introduction to the story and find links to the other products we reviewed here.

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Firefox 10 Stays Competitive With a Multitude of Add-ons

Since its dramatic redesign in version 4.0, Firefox has undergone a few more aesthetic changes. The bulky toolbar is gone, replaced instead by a row of tabs on the top of the window, and the bookmark bar is hidden by default. Of course these can all be changed through the options, but the simplified interface works well--especially on smaller displays where space is at a premium.

Firefox 10 is sleeker than its predecessors--although you can still pile on the add-ons.Firefox's biggest strength comes from its extensive library of add-ons. These add-ons can help you completely customize your Web browsing and make Firefox infinitely more useful. There is a downside: The more add-ons you have installed, the slower Firefox will be to start up and run. Some add-ons can turn Firefox into a memory hog, slowing down even the beefiest systems.

Firefox led the pack in our HTML5 tests. The browser came in third in handling JavaScript, but still beat out Opera, Internet Explorer 9, and Safari by a considerable amount. On our test machine, Firefox was the second slowest at loading Web pages, taking on average 9.67 seconds to fully load an image-heavy page, a lot longer than Opera, which only took 3.79 seconds to load the same Webpage.

Firefox is one of the more full-featured browsers in our 2012 browser round-up. You can save Web services you use constantly, such as Pandora and Gmail, as App tabs. App tabs are permanent tabs in Firefox that are saved in the browser. Think of them as bookmarks in tab form. If you are a power user with tons of tabs constantly open, Firefox will allow you to collect the tabs into manageable groups, a handy feature for keeping your entertainment tabs separate from your work ones, for instance. If you use Firefox at home and work, Firefox Sync will sync your history, bookmarks, and preferences across computers and will even sync with the Firefox Mobile app on Android. Firefox has a pop-up filter and supports private browsing. The browser includes malware protection that will warn you if you end up clicking on a fraudulent website, as well as an updater to ensure your plug-ins have the latest security patches. Firefox will also work with any security software you have installed on your computer, using the software to scan downloads for malware.

--Megan Geuss

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Sony's Glass-Plated TX200V Camera Stays Fashionable Even Underwater

Over the past few years, Sony's TX line of rugged cameras has distinguished itself from the rest of the durable pack by looking nothing like the everything-proof competition. The Cyber-shot TX cameras are slim, fashionable, and largely touchscreen-controlled--three traits that you rarely see in waterproof, dustproof, drop-proof, and freezeproof models.

Announced today, the new glass-fronted Cyber-shot DSC-TX200V takes a step forward on the aesthetics front, but a couple of steps back in terms of ruggedness: While the TX200V is waterproof (to a depth of 16 feet underwater) and dustproof, that fancy glass faceplate means that it's not drop-proof; the camera isn't rated as freezeproof, either. (And thank goodness it's waterproof, because dunking it in soapy water will likely be the best way to clear its front plate of all the fingerprints it's bound to collect.)

Sony Cyber-shot TX200V

Ruggedness aside, this camera has an iPhone-esque physical design. The glass-fronted TX200V's design might even be a visual riff on the fact that the Apple iPhone 4S's popular 8-megapixel camera is a module made by Sony.

Under its slick looks, the new camera contains some souped-up innards: an 18-megapixel backside-illuminated Exmor R CMOS sensor, a revamped autofocus system that Sony says can lock in on subjects within 0.1 second in bright lighting and within 0.2 second in dimmer environments, and an internal 5X-optical-zoom lens (25mm to 125mm) that extends to a simulated 250mm telephoto via the "by-pixel super resolution" digital-zoom technology first found in the Cyber-shot TX55 and several new Handycam camcorders announced at CES 2012. In its new Cyber-shot lineup, Sony bills the new digital-zoom technology as "Clear Image Zoom."

Sony Cyber-shot TX200V (back)In video mode, the TX200V records 1080i footage at 60 frames per second, and it can capture 13-megapixel still images while shooting video, without interrupting movie recording. Built-in GPS geotagging (just raw longitude and latitude information; no in-camera mapping) and a 3.3-inch-diagonal OLED touchscreen round out the Cyber-shot TX200V's array of features.

Due in March in three body colors (red, silver, and purple), the Cyber-shot TX200V will be priced at around $500.

Sony announced two other Cyber-shot cameras today, as well--both of them priced at around $200.

Sony Cyber-shot WX70The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX70 is a 3-inch-touchscreen-operated camera with a similar 5X-optical-zoom (25mm to 125mm)/10X-digital-zoom reach, 1080i video recording at 60 fps with the ability to simultaneously snap 12-megapixel stills, and a 16-megapixel backside-illuminated Exmor R CMOS sensor.

Sony Cyber-shot WX50A nontouchscreen version of the same camera, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX50, will also be available. The Cyber-shot WX70 will be priced at $230 starting in March, and the Cyber-shot WX50 will sell for $200 at the same time.

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