38 Part I • Information Technology
financial statements, and customize forms, reports, and
screens. With the Comparative Budget Spreadsheet
Creator, the user can create several different versions of
budgets to better manage the business. New features in
Peachtree Premium Accounting 2010 include a Customer
Management Center to keep all customer details in one
place, Transaction History to view all the information related
to a transaction, and Business Analytics to enable small
businesses to benchmark their own performance compared
with other firms (Peachtree by Sage Web site, 2010a). All
these features and a reasonable price make Peachtree by
Sage Premium Accounting a good choice for a smaller
business.
Personal Productivity Software
From your personal standpoint as a manager, the category
of applications software that we have chosen to call
personal productivity softwareis probably the most
important of all. These are the applications that you and
your fellow managers will use on a regular basis: word
processing, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, electronic
mail, desktop publishing, microcomputer-based database
management systems, Web browsers, statistical products,
and other similar easy-to-use and extremely useful
products. These products are microcomputer based, and
they have been developed with a friendly, comfortable
graphical user interface (GUI).
Exciting things continue to happen in the personal
productivity software area. The true beginning of this area
came in 1979 with the introduction of VisiCalc, the first
electronic spreadsheet. With VisiCalc, microcomputers
became a valuable business tool, not just a toy or a hobby.
The financial success of VisiCalc convinced many enter-
prising developers that there was money to be made in
developing software products that individuals and compa-
nies would buy and use. Within a few years, a deluge of
products appeared that has not stopped flowing. The
results have been truly marvelous for the businessperson
with a willingness to experiment and a desire to become
more productive. Most of the microcomputer products are
quite reasonably priced (often a few hundred dollars),
because the successful products can expect to reap large
rewards on their volume of sales. Furthermore, a number
of excellent publications have developed (such as PC
MagazineandPC World), which carefully review the new
products to assist us in choosing the right ones. Hardly a
month goes by without the announcement of an exciting
new product that might become the new VisiCalc,
WordPerfect, or Microsoft Excel.WORD PROCESSING Word processing might be the
most ubiquitous of the personal productivity software
products. While secretaries were usually the first word-
processing users in an organization, today managers and
professional workers alike create their own documents at a
microcomputer keyboard. The first popular word-processing
product was WordStar, which was in turn supplanted by
WordPerfect in the 1980s and then by Microsoft Word in
the 1990s.
Today, Microsoft Word dominates the word-processing
market, with a market share over 90 percent. Among its
many features, Microsoft Word underlines words that
might be misspelled so that you can correct them as youDo Your Accounting on the Web!
Accounting for small businesses can now be done on the World Wide Web! Several companies, includ-
ing Sage Software (which includes the Peachtree line of accounting software), make accounting software
accessible via the Web so that the bookkeeper, small business owner, or other designated employee can
enter accounting data, check inventory levels or financial information, and create reports from anywhere
at anytime. Sage Software calls its online accounting service ePeachtree, and the fees are quite reason-
able. The ePeachtree basic accounting service—which includes general ledger, sales and receivables, pur-
chasing and payables, inventory, job and project tracking, and sales tax tracking—is $150 per year for a
single user (plus a single outside accountant at no additional fee), with an add-on fee of $102 per year
for each additional user. ePeachtree, which incorporates strong security measures, also has available a
payroll service add-on for an additional $96 per year. From a small business standpoint, a big plus for
using ePeachtree or a similar service is that the firm never again has to spend the money or take the time
to upgrade its accounting software—the vendor automatically handles all upgrades. The only software
the business needs is a Web browser!
[Based on Peachtree by Sage Web site, 2010b]