Top 10 Small Business Financial Applications

Every small business owner wants to be on a road that’s paved with black ink. Here, in no particular order, is our top-ten small business financial applications and services list to help you navigate the ride and stay the course.

1. Intuit QuickBooks Pro 2010

A granddaddy among PC applications, Intuit QuickBooks is still an essential for entrepreneurs even 20 years after its debut. This accounting package is tailored for small businesses and offers a wealth of features, including the capability to track income sales and expenses; pay bills; print checks; manage payroll and payroll taxes; create professional-looking invoices and forms; and even accept credit and debit card payments.

New features in the 2010 version (priced at $159.95) include a customizable Company Snapshot view that lets you choose the at-a-glance reports that are most important to your business (including seven new reports) and document management features that let you store and share your business documents in QuickBooks.

You can even upload your signature and apply it to the checks you create in QuickBooks. But what makes QuickBooks truly one-of-a-kind is the integration it offers with thousands of other business applications and custom add-ins.

2. Intacct Winter 2010

For businesses that may have outgrown QuickBooks, Intacct Corp. offers a cloud-based solution that brings the power of mid-market accounting and financial management applications to businesses that otherwise couldn’t afford it. The company’s latest version, Intacct Winter 2010, enables both GAAP and operational reporting and analysis without the need for additional tools.

The core system includes modules for accounting, purchasing, order management, financial reporting and business intelligence. The company also offers optional modules that deliver multi-currency support, multi-entity support, sales-tax management, inventory management, contract and revenue management, and integration with the popular Salesforce.com CRM platform. Intacct's SaaS (software as a service) model provides anytime, anywhere access to all your financial data whether you use a PC, a Mac or a smartphone—all you need is a Web browser and an Internet connection.

Intacct provides CEO- and CFO-level dashboards, so you can monitor the health of your business at a glance. (Click for larger image).

And the company’s world-class datacenter (with backups on three continents, just to be safe) offers disaster-proof security for your crucial financial data. Intacct starts at $400 per month, and is available from many CPAs for as little as $60 per month when bundled with their services.

3. FreshBooks

Even if you decide not to handle your business’ accounting chores in-house, you still need a way to create invoices and get them to customers in a timely manner. FreshBooks lets you tackle billing chores and track you and your employees’ time so it can be billed to clients.

The online service can handle recurring invoices (say, billing monthly retainers), and you can choose to have it automatically follow up with customers and clients when a bill is past due. This combination of ease-of-use and automation not only saves you time, it means you’re less likely to put off your billing duties. Invoices go out sooner, and you have a better chance of getting paid faster.

FreshBooks is the simple way to create and track invoices and payments. (Click for larger image).

In fact, the company claims that using FreshBooks can cut payment time by an average of 14 days. A free version of the service lets you manage up to three clients, and for $19 a month you can manage up to 25 clients.

4. Intuit Online Payroll Plus

One of the more daunting tasks for small business owners is payroll. You can’t just write your employees each a check and be done with it (well, you could, if you didn’t mind an unfriendly visit from the IRS). There are state and federal taxes and regulations to track, deductions to calculate, and more minutiae than you can imagine. But paying hundreds of dollars per month to a traditional payroll service provider hurts.

Intuit Online Payroll (formerly PayCycle) takes the pain and guesswork out of payroll. An online wizard walks you through the setup process, and the automated system alerts you when tasks need to get done, calculates payroll taxes, warns you when they are due, and passes all the information to QuickBooks (or another accounting package) so that your books stay in sync. Plans start as low as $40 per month.

5. Mint

Sole proprietors and independent contractors might not have the payroll headaches of larger small businesses, but they still need to track their finances and know where the money is going. Mint Software’s online — and free — personal financial management service can help.

The user-friendly budgeting tools let you see how much you’re spending and on what, so you can set goals and balance your budget. Mint lets you budget monthly as well as irregular or one-time expenses, which is especially helpful for those non-recurring business purchases. You can even set up e-mail and SMS alerts to be automatically updated whenever there’s an important change in your finances.

6. Quosal

In many businesses, a polished, professional quote is the key to landing new business. But creating proposals can be tedious and time-consuming for you and your staff, and tracking where a potential deal stands once the quote goes out is usually a manual process. Quosal aims to streamline the process of preparing and managing sales documents, from inception to resolution.

Quosal makes creating quotes and RFPs easy — and the interface is slick. (Click for larger image).

The solution is available as either a software application that you load on a PC or as a SaaS offering you access via a Web browser. Both feature a slick, user-friendly interface that lets you create proposals (a number of professional-looking templates are included), track their status, source products and see their prices and more.

Quosal integrates with leading CRM applications such as Act and Salesforce.com, so if you’ve already made the switch to such a platform, your existing customer data is just a click away. Quosal costs $299 for a single license or $1,099 for a three-user license pack.

7. Microsoft Dynamics GP

If you think of Microsoft only for your productivity app and server-software needs, think again. The software giant offers a range of financial applications tailored to small businesses. Microsoft Dynamics GP is a comprehensive solution for managing and integrating finances, e-commerce, supply-chain, manufacturing, project accounting, field service, customer relationships and human resources.

The platform offers a range of customizable analytics, plus reporting and budgeting options. With Microsoft Dynamics GP you can investigate your financial data, run “what if?” forecasts for your budgets, spot trends and be alerted when something looks wrong or action is required.

Naturally, it integrates with other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office and SQL Server. The solution is available through by local Microsoft partner resellers, who design, price and deploy the right system for your business.

8. Peachtree Pro Accounting 2010

QuickBooks may now be the most popular accounting software for small businesses, but it isn’t the oldest: Peachtree’s software pre-dates it by more than five years. Now part of the Sage Software stable of products, Peachtree Pro Accounting 2010 ($199.99) delivers standard accounting features that can automate invoices and checks, track employee payroll, record customer payments and create budgets.

You can also easily track sales, inventory and expenses, and the program offers more than 100 built-in reports and financial statements. Peachtree is based on accepted double-entry accounting principles and offers module-level security and automatic accounting checks as you go, so your books are always right. And imagine that: The company even makes it easy to import QuickBooks data so newcomers can make the switch.

9. Concur Expense

Expense reports are a necessary evil, but the process doesn’t have to be a living hell. Concur Technologies offers Concur Expense, an on-demand Web service, to automate the workflow. Expense-report automation can not only make things easier on you (saving valuable time, and hence money), it can increase compliance with your expense policies and reduce the reimbursement time for your employees.

Concur Expense can let you eliminate paper receipts, set up an automated approval workflow, and analyze expense data. Setup fees and monthly pricing varies according to the size of your organization.

Xactly takes the guesswork out of building sales-compensation plans. (Click for larger image).

10. Xactly Incent Express

Sales compensation can sometimes be a black art, but Xactly Corp. is trying to make it easier with Xactly Incent Express. This add-on for Salesforce.com’s online CRM platform lets a business manager rapidly create sales compensation plans, calculate commissions and even export payments to payroll from a single application that is integrated with their existing Salesforce.com database.

Importantly, Incent Express provides guidance to the executive creating the plan as well as a cost analysis that shows the total cost of a proposed plan in advance, so there are no surprises after the plan is rolled out to employees. Designed for businesses with 100 payees or fewer, the program offers pre-built plans and examples to help clients get started, and managers can tailor plans on custom criteria, such as deal amount, product margin, product mix and discount percent.

Automated reporting and real-time dashboards let you more accurately gauge business performance. Incent Express costs $29.95 per subscriber per month, and there is a one-time setup fee of $499 for businesses tracking 50 payees or fewer.

Jamie Bsales is an award-winning technology writer and editor with more than 15 years of experience covering the latest hardware, software and Internet products and services.