Office Accounting 2009 (US) launched as a free upgrade for existing users

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Whether you are using Small Business Accounting 2006 or Office Accounting 2007 or 2008, you qualify for a free upgrade to 2009. Paid for versions upgrade to 2009 professional and express upgrades to 2009 Express:

https://www.ideawins.com/Upgrade.aspx

Why upgrade?  

Besides the fact that it is a free upgrade, there are several new features and a good amount of bug fixes. You can read about the new features here:

https://www.ideawins.com/whatsnew.aspx

I especially like that the new reports save you from filtering existing reports if you just want to see this simple [insert new report here] as well as a bunch of new cash basis reports.

We also made the bilingual Spanish version a Language pack instead of a separate product. That means that if you are using an English version of Office Accounting, but want to be able to use the bilingual version, you can still upgrade and download the language pack. Nice.

And thank God we took those nasty watermarks off as default on the printouts. Who wants to receive an initial invoice with big nasty letters saying UNPAID? It is like an insult. Sometime engineers just live in their own little world. L

However my favourite feature is actually undocumented. Whilst we didn’t have time to switch SQL Express 2005 out with SQL Express 2008 when it finally became ready (we shipped Office Accounting 2009 months ago), we do support the newer and faster SQL in Office Accounting Professional. You can basically install SQL Server 2008 first and then choose to install the client only of Office Accounting and point to SQL 2008.

Who should not upgrade?  

A very small amount of people:

- Users running Windows 2000 with Small Business Accounting 2006. SQL Server 2005 does not support Windows 2000.

- Users with less than 512 MB memory. You shouldn’t really be running the application anyway.

- Users of Small Business Accounting 2006 who integrate with Outlook with Business Contact Manager 2003 or 2006. The old version of BCM is running SQL Server 2000 (MSDE) and you would end up with two database instances on the same PC (not good). DO upgrade when you upgrade to Office 2007 with BCM. All other Office 2003 users are fine.

Ehm, I am in the UK, hello???  

At the time of writing Office Accounting 2009 UK is scheduled to be released early next year, prior to the start of the UK payroll year in April. The government just release their pre-budget announcement with payroll changes and we need to make sure that our solution remains certified with HMRC as well as ICAEW.