Sage Peachtree 2011 began shipping on Tuesday, May 18. At the Insights Conference this morning I had an opportunity to get a first hand look at the new release and explore some of the new features.

The overall focus of this release is to improve performance and simplify use. The developers attempted to answer three key questions which they believe need to be addressed by all businesses:

1. Is my business on track in terms of overall performance indicators?
2. Am I on schedule with overall financial indicators and with individual jobs/projects?
3. Am I within budget at both the company and the job/project levels?

Sage has taken a strong “dashboard” approach in addressing these key issues, expanding the dashboard functionality introduced in Peachtree 2010 for customer management to both the inventory/services management area and to job costing (for the Quantum version onl)y in the Peachtree 2011 edition.

New Features

Many of the new features in Sage Peachtree 2011 are concentrated in the Job/Services Management area. Service Billing functionality has been streamlined to permit “batch-oriented” service billing (a la Timeslips), with various filters available for selecting the group of time and expense tickets to be billed at once, across multiple customers. A new default in the Job Cost setup area allows the user to set a warning message for any transaction that does not have a job code assigned to it (critical for those users that assign job codes to virtually every transaction). A new Job Status field has been added, which is fully customizable and can be applied to all jobs, and can be used for filters and sorts on reports and list views. The Notes field on the job screen has been expanded to accommodate up to 2,000 characters of information (the old limit was only 200 characters). When entering transactions the job code entered on the first line of the transaction will “pre-populate” on each subsequent line of the transaction (but of course can be edited as needed), to speed data entry when the entire transaction applies to a specific job. The job lookup screen on transaction entry can be sorted by the user to speed the process of finding the correct code.

At the Quantum level, there is a whole new Job Management Center dashboard, with extensive customization capabilities to allow the user to review virtually every element of a job, from purchases to time tickets to payroll entries to billings.

A new Change Order capability has been added to Peachtree Premium and higher versions, with fields for tracking change order date, notes for the change order, and a detailed area for assigning/editing cost codes related to the change order. A Change Order form (which can be customized) has been added to the forms list to allow the change order to be sent to the customer for approval and signature.

The new Inventory/Services Management Center pulls together comprehensive information about a specific item, or group of items, in one screen, so that the user can easily review purchases, sales, stock levels and shortages, unit costs and pricing, customer purchase history, etc.

A much improved integration with the Sage ACT! Contact management product will be released in the fall of 2010. The new link will allow ACT! Users who do not have access to Peachtree to review detailed customer purchase history, open sales orders, invoice detail, and other customer and vendor related information. Inventory information stored in Peachtree should also be accessible in ACT! to non-Peachtree users, depending on security settings.  This should allow sales reps to create customer quotes from “live” Peachtree customer and inventory data without having to open Peachtree. Once accepted, the quote can then be converted to an order and/or invoice in Peachtree.

Sage Peachtree will officially support Windows 7 with this release, and will provide support for Office 2010 with the first Service Release of the 20111 edition (probably this fall).  Support for Terminal Services has now been extended to the Peachtree Complete product; this functionality was previously available only in Peachtree Premium and higher.

All in all, Peachtree 2011 appears to be a very compelling release for anyone who needs more extensive job/service management functionality, or is looking for stronger tools for managing inventory. Peachtree’s competitive advantage over QuickBooks has historically been in the inventory and job cost areas, and with these new capabilities this advantage has increased significantly. I suspect that the new functionality in job costing will lead to all kinds of clever and creative uses for this powerful tracking capability in a variety of “non-traditional” settings.

Give us a call if you would like to dive into this new release in greater detail. We expect to have a “Test Drive” edition of Peachtree 2011 available on our website shortly.