Peachtree 2010 was released to customers about May 19, 2009. Here is a quick rundown on the five most interesting new features of this edition of the product. 

Automated Backup – Peachtree will now include a routine to automatically back up your Peachtree database at a user-defined time of day, and it will make this backup for you automatically without any user intervention. It will not be necessary for Peachtree to even be running when the backup process starts. As a Quantum only feature, Peachtree will automatically log out any users who are still connected to the database when the scheduled backup begins. 

Customer Management Center – Expanding on the “Business Alerts” concept, Peachtree 2010 will offer an additional “dashboard”, focused on customer details. From this configurable interface users will be able to quickly retrieve comprehensive information on their customers, including open quotes, unpaid invoices, orders to ship, aged balances, open time tickets, specific inventory items purchased over some defined time period, and various other key business indicators relating to customer management. 

Inventory Management – With the release of the product users will be able to look up inventory items based on searches for key words in the various “memo” sized fields (Description for Sales, Description for Purchases, and Item Notes. This feature could lead to some very creative uses of these description fields for classifying and categorizing items. A new report has been added which shows item sales history by customer, to help spot trends in customer purchasing behavior. Inventory item type can now store a “default” value, rather than the previous “hard coded” default of Stock Item, which should lead to fewer item maintenance errors when entering new items. 

Record Transaction History – This feature allows the user to quickly see the entire “chain of events” related to a specific transaction, moving either forward or backward in the sales or purchasing process. Thus the vendor payment screen will offer a fast and easy method for viewing the underlying purchase order(s) which initiated this payment, without having to first pull up the vendor invoice and from there open the purchase order. The same functionality will be available for customer quotes, orders, invoices, and payments. 

Multiple Companies/Improved Security – Users will now be able to open multiple Peachtree databases at once, without having to close one to open another. In addition, security has been strengthened by adding additional security options (“strong” passwords, lockout after multiple failed access attempts, password expiration, user access to change their own passwords, etc.) 

The Quantum version of Peachtree 2010 offers some additional interesting features available only to Quantum users.

 Order Processing Workflow – You will now be able to “model” your company’s order processing workflow right in the software. Each step in the order process can be identified and annotated with detailed notes, and completion of a step in the process can send an automatic notification to the next person in the processing chain. A centralized “status” screen can also be configured to show all of the steps required for a specific order or orders, with notes, next steps, and scheduled tasks displayed.

 “My Personal Dashboard” – Users can create their own personal “dashboards”, with multiple “views” for different types of information recorded on the dashboard. These dashboards can provide a very visual indicator of business performance, and can allow managers to quickly pull together various accounting components into a comprehensive snapshot of the company. Track open quotes, orders to be filled, and customer open invoices on one tab, and inventory production runs, items below minimum quantities, and open purchase orders on a separate tab.

 Multi-User Management Tools – Need to make a backup, or run some database maintenance, but find that others are still logged in? In Peachtree Quantum 2010 you will be able to “broadcast” a message to all logged in users to alert them to log out, or if necessary you can manually log out other users yourself to complete that critical task that requires exclusive access, without having to chase down individual users.

 We expect the Peachtree “Sneak Preview” webinar on April 21 to show some or all of these new features, and we will be attending comprehensive training classes on Peachtree 2010 from May 11 to 14 in Nashville. Once we return from that trip we will have lots more to say about the new Peachtree 2010 product!