The 2010 Top New Products

No one can deny the importance of good accounting software, and the next wave of innovative and cost-effective solutions is, and will be, 100-percent cloud-based. For what most small to midsized businesses and accounting firms need to do, Intacct's Accountant's Edition and recent offerings from NetSuite are our winners in the Accounting/ERP Category. Cloud accounting may be a relatively new concept, but these companies have been building their brand and services for over a decade. Their products have matured, and their newest offerings are among the most user-friendly and effective accounting solutions in the space.

What's more, unlike on-premise technologies, these Web-based offerings are essentially version-less - updated a couple of times a year. Both have clear differences in their approach to accounting, but the depth and breadth of their offerings are what makes them the top products in this field.

For Intacct's part, the company's main focus is on core accounting - for anything outside of that, it has a network of over 30 accounting-related service providers. The Intacct Accountant Edition is a set of cloud-based financial management and accounting applications that is currently in use by hundreds of accounting firms to support thousands of business clients. The company's endorsement by the American Institute of CPAs' marketing arm, CPA2Biz, via the Trusted Business Advisor Solutions program, has also helped its reach into the accounting community.

NetSuite's overall service offerings have matured since its days as the Oracle-born application service provider NetLedger. It currently has a partner network of over 200 ISVs, traditional VARs, and a growing number of accounting firms. Through one of the company's latest additions, NetSuite OneWorld, it can serve the needs of multinational businesses, while its newest offering, SuiteFlow, allows for customizable workflow management, allowing companies to go far beyond basic accounting.

There were also several products that we felt were worthy of honorable mention, whether for improvements to their features, or because they are representative of where accounting software and services are going. These include: FinancialForce.com (FinancialForce); Sage Peachtree Quantum (Sage North America); Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 (Microsoft Corp.); Outright.com (Outright); SaaS for Professional Suite (Thompson Reuters); and Power Practice System (AccountantsWorld).

AUDIT SOFTWARE

ProSystem FX Knowledge Coach

CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business

http://tax.cchgroup.com/knowledgecoach

Once viewed as one of the basic foundations of an accountant's services, audit and audit management have come under intense scrutiny over the past several years, courtesy of mega-billion-dollar frauds and the specter of increased government regulation. As a result, audit software has assumed a higher level of expectation and demand for functionality - factors that have earned ProSystem fx Knowledge Coach our nod as Top New Product in audit software.

Knowledge Coach wears a lot of audit-related hats - it's a planning tool, workpaper generator, audit workflow management app and risk overseer as it guides the auditor through each step - from the planning stage to its completion. Knowledge Coach associates specific program steps with each risk encountered. The results in each workpaper are flowed automatically to all of the impacted workpapers, and can then be rolled forward for the following year.