Microsoft Misfires: Small Business Accounting 2007
We have been working with SBA 2006 since its beta last year. Our company has 7 licenses where our 5 accountants connect a central SQL Server 2000 database that is shared. Knowing this isn’t the way SBA 2006 is supposed to work, we have been able to successfully accomplish this task. That’s where Microsoft made their first mistake. SBA’s big appeal to us was the fact that data wasn’t stored in a proprietary format. However, not being able to install it on a database server made it frustrating.
This year’s release of SBA 2007 will also include some major disappointments. Microsoft continually touts SBA as a competitor to QuickBooks and Peachtree when clearly it doesn’t size up. Instead of adding accounting features into SBA, Microsoft is “throwing money” at companies such as eBay to integrate eBay and PayPal into SBA. Instead, they should be adding in useful features for all businesses such as tracking budget numbers in SBA instead of a manual Excel spreadsheet. QuickBooks and Peachtree do it. Why can’t SBA? If you ask me, the eBay integration would probably benefit Microsoft Money customers the most. The response I received last year was, we’ll think about it for 2007. This year was the same. Being an MVP, I’m not receiving much love. Just the budget suggestion alone has been around on the Community newsgroups since October of 2005.