QuickBooks vs. Peachtree

This is the personal opinion of one who used PeachTree alone for years before there was a QuickBooks vs. PeachTree issue and has since retested QuickBooks vs. PeachTree  many times. It also is the opinion of many (not all) who often use both.

Peachtree and BPI were once the most popular small business accounting packages. They targeted accountants with capabilities and terminology. In 1980 the wife of Scott Cook, the obsessive founder of Intuit (Inside Intuit book page 78), complained about difficulties with bill paying and bank reconciling at their kitchen table. He decided many might share her frustration and invented the usability tests that became industry standard. He found it then took PC experts up to 5 hours to install small business accounting programs and use them to print a check (Inside Intuit page 22). Scott is always intent on ease of use, so he kept getting Quicken refined until even novices could do this in 15 minutes. He often refers to the kitchen table that inspired this, so it ended up in the Smithsonian Institution.

Quicken soon had up 90% of the home checkbook market. Many used it as small businesses accounting software so Intuit introduced QuickBooks. It quickly got up to 90% of the small business accounting software market, so Intuit gradually added the increasingly powerful QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise with equally good QuickBooks vs. PeachTree results. Only as competitors adopted similar approaches did Quicken,  TurboTax and QuickBooks sales stabilize at around 70%, 70% and 85% of their markets.

The Intuit (for intuitive) mission is revolutionizing how people and small businesses manage financial activities. Their goal is to create new ways to manage finances and small businesses that are so profound and simple users cannot imagine going back to old ways. Products are incomparably easy to use, easy to correct, powerful and inexpensive. Intuit programs were the first:

• Designed for non-accountants, who far outnumber accountants;

• To let users correct transactions, instead of making extra entries to do so;

• That used adopt a business forms approach;

• That did not close months or tax years to changes;

• To let users drill down from financial statements to ledgers and then to easily changed individual entries.

Intuit later added an audit trail and ways for users to limit and trace prior period entries. Some CPA critics base QuickBooks opinions on weaknesses fixed long ago, while many thousands of CPAs pass annual tests to be QuickBooks Professional Advisors. QuickBooks vs PeachTree development speed always seems to favor QuickBooks, with PeachTree only recently getting important drill down capability. PeachTree killed a buggy 2000 program it bought for bigger companies, which was incompatible with other PT versions. Peachtree was substantially failing when sold to ADP, which had little use for PT and never mentioned it on its website or financials. Sage (Best) bought PT to try upgrading users to the $8,000 MAS90 program (documented in SEC filings). It soon killed the PT Office program that fans called its best hope for the future This program integrated with Microsoft Office and third party add-ons. Add-on developers threatened suit after spending tens of thousands on a single user version because a multi-user version was due soon. Sage also killed developer web pages by increasing annual fees from $1,000 to $10,000 in a year,

About then QuickBooks fans like me began pushing for a QB developer version, though Intuit then seemed hostile to it.  After a  1998 beta test appeal we began the fast growing World's largest list of QuickBooks Add-ons (now Small Business Accounting Software: QuickBooks Add-ons). Intuit made developers its #1 priority in 2001. 3,500 paid $1,000 for seminars,  support and a free XML (eXtensible Markup Language) Software Development Kit. The SDK now works with all U.S. and Canadian QuickBooks Windows versions except Basic. It also works with QB for the Web and the QuickBase web database. It, the Microsoft .NET transparent XML interface in Windows XP, and related third party developer programming tools make it rather easy to integrate new programs with QuickBooks. Programs interfaced with the XML SDK tend to work even if users upgrade QuickBooks and Intuit upgrades the SDK.

As with Microsoft Office, QuickBooks add-on integrated products have become powerful and varied. This relates to leading industry XML integration efforts by Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Intuit, BEA Systems, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and the American Institute of CPAs. A U.N. Commissions projects annual world savings, from XML add-ons and standard forms, at $1.8 trillion a year. CPAs recently discussed our write-up and financial statement programs. Many were so committed to fast import of accounting data from QuickBooks into tax programs that we would not consider tax programs that did not do this, regardless of price and features.  PT has no tax program. Many use it use it with Turbo Tax or TurboTax Pro Series. If there were still a QuickBooks vs. Peachtree issue Intuit could easily make PT not use TurboTax. However, there is ample evidence that Intuit is not trying to improve its products to the extent they destroy competitors like PT. They are instead going into web and other areas, where they are not so at risk of an anti-trust attack. They also buy small add-on companies and turn them into supporting players.

There were 60 QuickBooks add-ons at http://www.marketplace.intuit.com/ when QuickBooks 2002 launched. This grew to 350 by mid-2004. However, the World's Largest List now has more than 10,000 QB add-on links in 50 categories, with custom searches, custom newsletters and more coming soon. This means QuickBooks vs. Peachtree alone no longer matters, , as hundreds of companies now share 15% of small business accounting program sales.