Here's an interesting blog post comparing Peachtree to QuickBooks a friend of mine, Brian Tankersley, recently Tweeted about.
I don't disagree with anything David Chermak wrote. The problem is that the article is from the perspective of an accountant, not a businessperson. Some of the other items are just "par for the course" in any stable accounting package.
The items listed for comparison are interesting: prepayments, payroll accounting, depreciation, tax minimization and compliance, and useful, sensible reporting. My trouble with this list is that it doesn't address the key issues that businesses generally start to look for software to solve.
Here is a list of some things that small and mid-sized businesses need: cost control, costing (of jobs or manufacturing), inventory, order tracking, shipping, purchase controls, quotes, payroll checks, lot and serial number tracking, service billing, and recurring invoicing. The blog post below seems to focus more on what Accountants need from software than what businesses need from software. Accounting records should be the byproduct of a system that makes a business money by collecting and reporting the data the business needs.
