The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Peachtree Offers a Step Up From Checkbook Software

Since the dawn of the personal computer era, the name Peachtree has been synonymous with small-business accounting software. Now, for the fifth time in its 19-year history, Peachtree and its five separate accounting packages have a new owner.

In early April, Automatic Data Processing Inc. acquired the Norcross, Ga.-based software publisher and plans soon to offer ADP electronic payroll and banking services to Peachtree users.

The most powerful member of the lineup is Peachtree Complete Accounting, version seven, a program that runs on IBM-compatible computers with the DOS operating system. It has a suggested price of $249 for a single user or $399 for a multi-user network version. Peachtree Complete is also the most difficult of the versions to set up and use, for a variety of reasons.

Peachtree Accounting for Windows (release 2.0, $169) is easier to use both because it is a Windows program and because it takes a less rigid approach to double-entry accounting than the DOS version.

A better buy, for people with a CD-ROM drive attached to their computers, is the just-released $169 CD-ROM version of Peachtree Accounting for Windows. You give up printed manuals for on-screen versions (which can be printed). But in return you get a collection of other software, including the complete text of 12 popular books in the Business Library by Allegro; Label Pro by Avery for label printing; WinCim, the Windows program for using CompuServe, and TaxCut, a program that probably became obsolete for everyone who filed their tax return on time earlier this month.

Macintosh users have not been ignored by Peachtree. The more powerful of its two Mac programs is Peachtree Insight for Macintosh, with a price of $395. The less powerful version is Peachtree Accounting for Macintosh ($169). Peachtree says its typical customer is a firm with seven employees, and all its versions are aimed at small to medium-sized businesses.

They offer a step up from checkbook management software, which many very small businesses start out using, because they are based on true double-entry accounting. In other words, every transaction is accounted for with offsetting entries in separate accounts so that the books are always balanced. You can’t spend money without the source of the funds and the financial consequence of the expenditure being accounted for in a double-entry system. The same is true for income.

The programs come with an excellent primer on accounting that explains these principles in simple terms. The programs already have the double-entry and offsetting accounts built in, although you have to supply the actual account names for your business. Charts of accounts for a dozen sample companies help you get started.

One feature of the Windows and lower-priced Macintosh versions is that they can be used in “real-time” mode, while the more powerful DOS and Macintosh Insight versions can run only in “batch” mode.

In real-time mode, transactions are posted to the general ledger as soon as they are entered. In batch mode, they are saved in a temporary journal and then posted as a group at the end of a reporting period. It is easier to change a transaction in real-time mode. Changing a transaction in the DOS version requires entering a separate reversing transaction, which ensures that the audit trail is more complete.

Another accounting difference is that the cheaper versions allow cash-basis accounting, whereas the more powerful versions allow only the more common accrual accounting method.

If you need to do job costing, the DOS version is the only one that fully implements that feature. What is called job costing in the Windows version is more of a job-tracking feature.

Other advanced features exclusive to the DOS version include tracking partial receipt of purchase orders; full order entry with support for back orders; picking and packing slips for orders, with printing in the shipping department on networked systems; custom discount rates for each customer; warning when sales exceed inventory; payroll commission and draw pay types in addition to the salary and hourly methods in the other versions, and five methods of computing cost of inventory.