As the marketplace of QuickBooks add-ons continues to
grow, the quantity and quality of independent developers is blossoming. Not
only do we see new products coming to market each month, but several products
are now in their third, fourth or even fifth version.
The success of the QuickBooks “ecosystem” is benefiting
everyone from small business owners, to accountants and consultants, to
software companies, and Intuit. Each of these stakeholders is benefiting by the
increased breadth and depth of the solutions, and by the fact that both risks
and profits are shared by millions of companies who participate in the
ecosystem. The future looks bright for continued growth even as we see huge
technology changes on the horizon. With the explosive growth of the online
world, and with the Windows Vista conversion, software companies are racing to
both “webify” their applications and upgrade them for Vista compatibility.
At The Sleeter Group, we continually study the marketplace
of add-on solutions. And for several years now, we’ve spotlighted those
best-of-breed products that we refer to as “awesome add-ons.” Before awarding
the “awesome” label, we deep into each product to ask all the hard questions we
think consultants and business owners will eventually ask.
In order to qualify for our list, the product and/or
service must be developed and sold by a company with a reputation for
outstanding customer support, and the product must have the following
attributes:
- Show superior design, implementation and
features.
- Integrate with QuickBooks using best practices
of the QuickBooks SDK programming guidelines;
- Use appropriate transaction types and field
population for recording data into QuickBooks so as to preserve and/or enhance
the standard reporting features in QuickBooks; and
- Conform to good accounting principles and
operating standards.
Here is the list of “Awesome QuickBooks Add-ons” for 2008.
MISys Small Business Manufacturing (SBM) Software
(New Winner for
2008)
MISys, Inc.
www.misysinc.com
Pricing: $1,500
and up, depending on modules purchased. Yearly maintenance fees.
Target Customers: MISys SBM is a manufacturing
inventory control system designed to fit the needs of small to medium-sized
manufacturing firms.
MISys SBM consists of several modules, including Basic
Inventory Control (with multi-level bills of material and revision control);
Advanced Purchasing; Advanced Production; Bin Tracking; and Material
Requirement Planning (MRP). MISys SBM is a complete, rules-based system with
shop floor control, serial/lot tracking, bar-coding, and master production
scheduling. In addition to providing all of the needed inventory valuation
methods (LIFO, FIFO, Average Cost, Standard Costing), the system includes all
the features most small to medium-sized manufacturers will need. The most
significant feature is the MRP module, which allows creation of a “master
production schedule” with built-in alerts and forward-looking planning for
purchasing and production. This tool allows even small manufacturers to manage
“just-in-time (JIT)” material procurement and automate purchasing and
production schedules.
MISys SBM has extensive integration with QuickBooks. It
automatically updates QuickBooks inventory, vendor bills, and sales
transactions as material is purchased, received, manufactured and sold.
PDG Commerce
(New Winner for 2008)
PDG Software, Inc.
www.pdgsoft.com
Pricing: $999
lifetime license for v4; not hosted; no monthly fees.
Target Customers:
PDG Commerce is an e-commerce software solution for larger enterprise
e-commerce merchants.
A good web
storefront solution must provide easy to use, flexible design tools, robust
integration with the accounting, and a full range of features for marketing,
merchandising, credit card handling, security, shipping, and inventory control.
PDG Commerce scores high on all these areas and more. Not only does it provide
the most complete feature we’ve seen for QuickBooks-integrated web stores, it
is also one of the most affordable shopping cart solutions on the market.
For $999, you get a
lifetime software license, free installation, access to all minor version
upgrades, full documentation, access to PDG online forums, and 90 days of
premium support.
To quickly design
the look and feel of your web storefront, you can customize HTML templates
provided with the software or you can design your own templates from scratch. To
synchronize your QuickBooks (or QuickBooks Point of Sale) items with your web
storefront, PDG Commerce uses the QuickBooks Web Connector to import the entire
QuickBooks item list, allowing you to specify which products are available for
purchase online. As sales transactions occur online, the Web Connector enters
sales directly into QuickBooks and updates the web store with any new items
that have been added to QuickBooks. Product images are stored locally in a
specified folder, and uploaded as new items are added. This real-time
QuickBooks synchronization is exactly the kind of solution consultants want
when helping their clients integrate their in-store operation with an online
web store.
PDG Commerce also
integrates with MYOB. It supports over 15 payment gateways for real-time
payment processing.
The product handles
gift certificates, discount coupon codes, multiple shipping locations, UPS and
USPS labeling, UPS Worldship integration, affiliate tracking, digital delivery
(downloadable products), and several security features to ensure protection of
customer data.
InsynQ (e-Accounting) CPAASP
(New Winner for 2008)
InsynQ Online Accounting Solutions
www.cpaasp.com
Pricing: Entry-level QuickBooks hosting is $54.95 per user
per month. Advanced
application hosting service starts at $64.95 per user per month. Custom hosting
environments start at $399 per month for 10 users.
Target Customers: InsynQ e-Accounting services are
targeted to accounting professionals and their clients who wish to have secure
remote access to business applications and data.
InsynQ paved the road to adoption of online accounting
applications by being one of the first Application Service Providers (ASPs).
The company has been offering hosted accounting and business applications for
over 10 years and is one of only two companies licensed by Intuit to host
QuickBooks. InsynQ offers application hosting for all QuickBooks versions,
including Pro, Premier and Enterprise edition. In addition, InsynQ is also
licensed to host Microsoft products, ACT! from Sage, and a number of other
applications. Features of the Virtual Desktop service include the ability to
have a variety of applications hosted, providing the integration and
functionality you get when running those applications in a native Windows
environment. Accountants, bookkeepers and their clients are all able to work
online simultaneously, whether they run Windows, Linux or Mac OS. InsynQ offers
a broad range of hosting services for accounting, productivity, time &
billing, tax preparation, messaging, document management, and other
line-of-business and specialty applications. Optional services include e-mail
filtering and virus scanning, data encryption solutions, and Internet-based
file sharing and backup.
QuickBooks Point of
Sale 
(New Winner for 2008)
Intuit
www.quickbooks.com
Pricing: $799.95 Basic, $1,049.95 Pro, $1,399.95
Multi-store.
Target Customers: QuickBooks Point of Sale is best for
small retail stores that use QuickBooks to manage their finances.
Everyone knows that cash registers are mission critical
for retailers. But until relatively recently, most small businesses could not
afford the costs of implementing a full Point of Sale (POS) system that
provides real-time inventory management and integration with the rest of the
business operation. So most small
retailers have been getting by with simple electronic cash registers that
simply ring up sales and provide a daily z-report that must be manually entered
into the accounting system. But this lack of integration can be a huge problem
for even the small retailer. Consider the task of tracking inventory in a
typical small sporting goods or clothing store. Even small stores can have
10,000 or more items in stock, all that need to be ordered, received, priced,
labeled, put on sale, rung up at the cash register, and finally reordered
again. Tracking inventory in these small stores without a real-time inventory
system is the most time-consuming tasks for the business. And of course, having
too much or too little inventory is extremely costly.
Intuit has been working on this problem for several years
now with QuickBooks Point of Sale (QBPOS), and version 7 is definitely an
Awesome QuickBooks Add-on. QBPOS has a real-time, departmentalized inventory
management (multi-store available), merchandising tools, pricing and margin
management tools, reports, and superior integration with QuickBooks Financial
software.
The product is sold as software-only, or with an optional
hardware bundle that includes the cash drawer, receipt printer, bar code
scanner, and credit card reader.
There are over 75,000 customers using QBPOS, and there are
hundreds of consultants in the field who focus entirely on selling, installing,
and supporting the product.
UniResMan – Hospitality Industry Reservation Systems
(New Winner for 2008)
UniResMan Inc.
www.uniresman.com
Pricing: $100 to $400 per room, depending on modules added.
Target Customers: Small hotels, resorts, motels, villas,
and apartments with between 20 and 300 rooms.
Another first year winner is a product that focuses on the
hotel industry. It might seem at first that this is a small niche market, but
the hospitality industry is quite large and growing steadily. The smaller hotels
and motels often use QuickBooks, but until UniResMan entered the market, there
was no integrated software solution for running the reservations and booking
(front office) part of the hotel.
UniResMan is a full-featured Hotel Property Management
System. UniResMan manages all reservation scheduling, deposits, check-ins,
check-outs, guest folios, payments, housekeeping, maintenance and reporting. It
handles multiple properties, and links to CRM systems to track repeat guests.
The integration with QuickBooks provides automatic entries into the General
Ledger for all revenue and payment transactions. It creates invoices for
corporate accounts, and bills for paying agent commissions.
UniResMan integrates with QuickBooks, Sage Accpac, Adagio
Ledger and Sage Simply Accounting, as well as with many other CRM, POS and
hotel software products.
TrueCommerce Transaction Manager – EDI Integration for QuickBooks
(New Winner for 2008)
TrueCommerce
www.truecommerce.com
Pricing: $795 and up
Target Customers: TrueCommerce Transaction Manager is for
businesses that need to use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for purchasing
and invoicing with their business trading partners.
EDI is a set of ANSI standards for sending and receiving
electronic financial transactions. It is an entrenched technology, known for
being costly and complicated for a small business to set up and administer.
Many larger companies such as Wal-Mart require their suppliers to accept EDI
purchase orders and other transactions, so this requirement leaves the small
business suppliers no choice in the matter. They must implement an EDI solution
or forego many business opportunities. TrueCommerce set out to simplify and
cost reduce the EDI process for small business owners (most of whom use
QuickBooks), and they’ve hit a home run with Transaction Manager.
Transaction Manager enables the sending and receiving of
EDI transactions with a trading partner via an electronic private gateway
(TC.Net). Transactions travel electronically between partners and are processed
with an e-mail-like software product on a local PC. Transaction Manager
translates incoming EDI transactions into a traditional purchase order format.
The purchase order may be viewed on-screen, printed to paper, and/or exported
to the user’s accounting system where it creates a Sales Order to be fulfilled.
When invoices are created in the accounting system, Transaction Manager can
translate those invoices into EDI transactions, which are sent electronically to
the trading partner.
TrueCommerce integrates with QuickBooks, Fishbowl
Inventory, Acctivate, Peachtree, MAS 90/200/500, Microsoft Dynamics GP,
Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics SL, and SAP Business One.
Fishbowl Inventory –Inventory Solutions for Wholesalers, Distributors,
& Light Manufacturers 
(Third Year Winner)
Fishbowl Inventory
www.fishbowlinventory.com
Pricing: $1,795 single user, $5,795 5-user
Target Customers: Fishbowl is targeted to companies with
inventory needs that are not met by QuickBooks alone, including mid-range
distributors, wholesalers and small manufacturing firms.
Fishbowl continues to impress us in nearly every area.
They’ve built a substantial company with dedicated development, support,
marketing, and sales, and they’ve continued to improve their product. This
year, Fishbowl and The Sleeter Group teamed up to develop a VAR channel to
provide professional, localized sales and support for their growing customer
base. We did this because we see that Fishbowl takes the entire business
process design and implementation into account when designing solutions and
they’ve consistently delivered great solutions for their customers.
Fishbowl Inventory is a comprehensive inventory solution
that integrates tightly with QuickBooks. It takes over the entire item-level
inventory process so customers no longer have the constraints of the QuickBooks
item list. Inventory-intensive companies need much more tracking capabilities
than can be achieved with the QuickBooks item list. However, even though
Fishbowl takes over the entire inventory tracking process, it synchronizes all
financial transactions with QuickBooks so that the accounting reports are kept
current as business transactions occur.
The new version 5, released in July 2007 supports FIFO,
LIFO, and Standard Costing methods in addition to average cost. These new
valuation methods resolved some very important functions for some customers. In
addition, Fishbowl supports multiple locations, provides serialized inventory,
lot tracking, revision levels, and expiration date tracking. The program
provides extensive bill of materials definitions, unit of measure conversions,
and complete purchase and sales order management.
BillQuick – Time and Billing Done Right
(Third Year Winner)
BillQuick Software
www.billquick.com
Pricing: Desktop:
$495 for 2 users (Basic) & $895 for 5 users (Pro); Web Suite Pro: $675 for
5 users.
Target Customers:
BillQuick is good for professional service companies that track time and
expenses and bill for their services in a variety of ways: hourly, fixed,
percentage complete, recurring, etc. It is most appropriate for architects,
engineers, accounting professionals, consultants and attorneys.
Another three-time winner is BillQuick from BQE Software. I
have studied this company for several years now, and in my opinion BQE is a
perfect example of what success means in the small business accounting
marketplace. By focusing on top quality product development, sales, marketing,
and support, BQE had become one of the leaders in the market. Not only do they
push the technology envelope, they have developed a high class, customer
focused company and they invest heavily in research and development efforts to
ensure their long term success.
The BillQuick Family of Time and Billing software is the
most comprehensive set of time and billing tools on the market today. From
BillQuick Lite, to the BillQuick Desktop version, to BillQuick Mobile, to the
BillQuick Web Suite, this product line can handle virtually every aspect of the
time and billing function. All of the products work together so you can mix and
match the tools to work with any organizational structure.
Features include appointment scheduling integrated with
Outlook, project management, time tracking, job costing, web-based time entry,
retainer tracking, electronic and paper-based invoicing, flexible reporting and
analysis, and complete, smartly designed integration with QuickBooks. This
product is simply the best choice for professionals. BillQuick integrates with
QuickBooks, Microsoft Office Accounting, Microsoft Outlook, Peachtree, and
MYOB. It is also compatible with Windows Vista.
Adagio FX – Professional Financial Statements and Data Analysis tools
(Third Year Winner)
Softrak Systems, Inc
www.softrak.com
Pricing: $199 for Standard edition; $475 for Pro edition.
Target Customers: Adagio FX is a tool for accountants who
need to present professional financial statements.
The next third-year winner is Adagio FX from Softrak
Systems. This financial statement design and presentation tool is truly
awesome. Unlike most generic reporting writing tools, Adagio FX “understands”
how financial statements should be formatted, plus it allows accountants to
customize reports in just about any way imaginable.
Adagio FX integrates directly
with QuickBooks and several other accounting software products. It provides
flexible tools that allow you to create presentable financial statements and
detailed analysis reports based on the underlying general ledger data. The
tool provides all the power and flexibility of a spreadsheet to create whatever
format is needed for presentation. You can easily change titles, column data,
date range, and level of detail. Rows and columns can be marked “hide when
printed” to store comments or notes to the statements. You can drilldown from
an amount in the statement all the way to the posted transaction detail to
confirm entries. You can also export your completed statements to Excel. Adagio FX supports Adagio Ledger, QuickBooks, Accpac and
Simply Accounting.
Acctivate! – Advanced Inventory & Distribution Management 
(Second Year Winner)
Alterity, Inc.
www.acctivate.com
Pricing: $2,995 for 3 users for base system. Add-on
modules range from $795 to $895 per module.
Target Customers: Acctivate is targeted to wholesalers,
distributors and light-assembly companies with complex inventory management
requirements.
Acctivate! provides comprehensive tools for managing
inventory-intensive businesses that are happy with QuickBooks, but need better
control of purchasing, selling, inventory control, and customer relationship
management. This all-in-one system is for wholesalers, distributors and
light-assembly companies that handle large data sets with thousands of items in
inventory, thousands of customers, and multiple locations. The product is very
mature, owing to the company’s 25-year history of working with customers to
perfect its system. Based on Microsoft’s SQL server, it is scalable for the
growing company. The product integrates well with QuickBooks and completely
takes over the inventory management, purchasing, sales, invoicing and vendor bills.
It uses QuickBooks for all of the general ledger, payroll, bill paying, and
banking functions. Acctivate! provides shopping cart integration; EDI
(electronic data interchange between trading partners); CRM; location
management; serialized inventory; lot numbering; shipping modules that
interface to UPS, FedEx, etc.; scheduling; service billing; and credit card
integration with the QuickBooks Merchant Account Solutions.
In addition to the LAN-based software, Acctivate! has
Windows Mobile Applications for Order Management, Warehouse Management and
Route Management.
Legrand CRM 5.0 – Customer Relationship Management for Small Businesses
(Second Year Winner)
Legrand Software
www.legrandsoftware.com
Pricing: $490 single user, down to $370 per user for
multi-user bundles
Target Customers: Legrand CRM is for small businesses that
need to track their customer activities.
Every business has employees who are constantly in touch
with prospects, customers, vendors, and partners. And if the employees work
smart, they keep a database of the contacts. The problem is most small
businesses use simple tools like Outlook or something similar and each employee
keeps their own contacts separately from all the other employees with no
sharing of data across the organization. So a common question any employee
might have is “when was the last time anyone in our company dealt with this
customer, and what was it about”? And of course, that’s hard to answer when
each employee has their own notes in their own database. Legrand solves this
problem well, and it provides hundreds of features that are great for
QuickBooks users.
Legrand CRM is intended to be the central repository for
all customer data, not just names and addresses. You can track phone calls,
meetings, notes, documents, e-mails, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns,
customer service jobs and sales histories. Nearly every customer contact or
activity can be tracked in Legrand CRM and shared with every member of the team.
In addition, Legrand CRM includes group calendaring/scheduling, Outlook
integration, automated processing of website leads, Vista compliance and tight
two-way integration with QuickBooks (Pro, Premier or Enterprise Edition - 2003
or higher). The bi-directional transfer of information between QuickBooks and
Legrand CRM eliminates double-entry and provides real-time access to a
Customer’s key financial summaries. Most importantly, this occurs while
preventing non-authorized users from gaining direct access to sensitive
accounting information.
PayCycle
– Online Payroll Service 
(Second Year Winner)
PayCycle
www.paycycle.com
Pricing: $24.99 to $42.99/month direct to end
users; accountant’s pay $14.99 per client (first 5 employees).
Target Customers: PayCycle is targeted to
accountants who need a back-office solution for their payroll services, and to
business owners who want a powerful, low-cost online payroll solution.
Founded in 1999, PayCycle was one of the pioneer
companies in the online applications business. With eight years of continual
product improvement, PayCycle has become the price/value leader in the online
payroll services market.
In addition to providing a complete payroll
solution for employers who want to do their own payroll using an online
solution, PayCycle also provides accountants with a branded service that allows
them to act as the payroll service provider for their clients.
This impressive online payroll solution includes
everything you need to automatically manage client payroll, from paychecks to
W-2s, for an all-inclusive price of $14.99 per client (first 5 employees) per
month.
The company has more than 50,000 customers and
is well-known in the industry for making client payroll easy and profitable for
accounting professionals. In addition to selling payroll services directly to
small businesses, PayCycle provides back-end services that allow accountants to
provide web-based branded payroll service solutions. PayCycle also sells it
offering online through other reseller channels including financial services
firms. PayCycle integrates with QuickBooks
(using *.IIF importing) and QuickBooks Online Edition.
Cabinet NG – CNG Books – Automated Electronic Document Management
(Second Year Winner)
Cabinet NG, Inc.
www.cabinetng.com
Pricing: $995 per user
Target Customers: Cabinet NG’s products are targeted to
small to mid-sized businesses that desire a comprehensive paperless document
storage and retrieval system.
CNG-Books is a fantastic paperless document
management solution for larger clients,
as well as for accounting firms that provide outsourced accounting services.
This product streamlines QuickBooks data entry by providing a single point of
entry interface that allows you to enter QuickBooks transaction data and file
the scanned document image simultaneously. CNG-Books stores electronic
versions of vendor bills, customer payments, and credit card receipts in a wide
variety of formats, including PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, text, and
several scanned image formats. CNG-Books also links electronic
documents to existing transactions and vendor or customer records.
This allows instant access to supporting documents directly from within
QuickBooks.
This product is especially suited for clients who want to
improve the efficiency of data entry in high-volume transaction environments.
About QuickBooks Add-ons
In 2003, Intuit released its Application Programming
Interface (API), which is provided to developers in a Software Developer Kit
(SDK). This SDK opens up the 3 million plus small business customer base to
software developers who add value to QuickBooks by creating specific add-on
products that integrate with the popular financial management system. Even a
casual programmer using Microsoft Office and Visual Basic for Applications
(VBA) can develop an application to read from and write to a QuickBooks data
file.
Intuit makes extensive use of the SDK to extend the
functionality of QuickBooks. For example, QuickBooks Point of Sale and the
Fixed Asset Manager (included with QuickBooks Premier: Accountant Edition and
QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions) both use the SDK to integrate with QuickBooks.
Check out our 2007 winners at 2007 Awesome Add On Award Winners
To search for QuickBooks add-ons, visit the Intuit marketplace
site (http://marketplace.intuit.com). For more information about developing add-ons for
QuickBooks visit http://developer.intuit.com.
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