Intuit, BestWare, Peachtree vie for a piece of the pie chart.
James Bradbury and Cheryl England
Money/
WHY DID MICROSOFT want to fork over $2 billion for Intuit? For a clue, take a look at the latest version of Quicken. The days when Intuit's flagship product just balanced your checkbook are long gone. But nipping at Intuit's heels are BestWare's M.Y.O.B. 6.0 and Peachtree Software's Peachtree Accounting for Macintosh 2.5, both of which offer full-featured accounting for home and office. Quicken 6. Quicken 6 is designed to serve as the front end for all of its users' financial transactions, from banking to investment management. To that end, Intuit has signed up 19 major banks that will work with the company to enable customers to perform financial tasks online, turning each Quicken-equipped personal computer into a home-based virtual automated-teller machine. Other notable features of Quicken 6 include a significant speed increase (it's now PowerPC-native), a completely new Apple Guide help system, and a much needed overhaul of the investment-management interface.
For the first time, Intuit is selling a deluxe CD-ROM edition of Quicken for Macintosh. The CD-ROM adds some multimedia razzle-dazzle in the form of QuickTime tips and financial advice, as well as an all-new home-inventory feature. $40; Quicken Deluxe 6, $59.99. 800-624-8742 or 415-322-0573. M.Y.O.B. 6.0. Hot on the heels of the release of QuickBooks Pro, from Intuit (see New on the Menu, September '95, page 32), comes BestWare's M.Y.O.B. 6.0. The product that set the stage for ease of use in accounting software, M.Y.O.B. has been updated to provide stronger job-management features, an expanded report writer, and more how-to information for more-experienced users. In addition, M.Y.O.B. is now PowerPC-native; BestWare claims that speed has increased as much as 40 percent over the older version. Some key job-management features include the ability to link reimbursables to particular customers, carry projects over to the next fiscal year, and the ability to analyze budgeted versus actual expenses. $70 without payroll; $140 with payroll; upgrade, $30; $15 rebate for Quicken users. 201-586-2200.
Peachtree Accounting for Macintosh 2.5. Rather than adding tons of new features, Peachtree Software has completely rewritten Peachtree Accounting for Macintosh so that the program now has a true graphical interface, a simplified setup process, new tutorials and online help, and more than 60 templates. It's now easier for users to access the different parts of the program, just by clicking on the file-folder tabs that line the bottom of the screen. The program still maintains the same basic feature set as the older version, including its double-entry accounting base and its multiuser capabilities. $99; upgrade, $79. 770-564-5700.
