Today Intuit announced the next iteration of its QuickBooks for Mac, which will hit the streets September 26. Aimed at small businesses, QuickBooks for Mac 2012 has more than 50 new features, and last week Intuit gave us a demo of four of them.

Before we get started, you might be wondering about the prime complaints we had with QuickBooks 2011, reviewed here -- namely the lack of feature parity with the Windows version. Intuit addressed that right off the bat by explaining that they weren't actually aiming for feature parity in the first place. Their research shows that the customers who run Mac-based businesses tend to be smaller shops, from a sole proprietor to a handful of employees, and are more likely to be service based than retail. So because of those businesses' different needs, Intuit focused on creating a product that "doesn't do it all, but does it well."

Without having experience with QuickBooks on the Windows side, or the chance to really put QuickBooks for Mac 2012 through its proper paces (yet -- a review is coming soon), we can't say yet whether they were totally successful in hitting the right feature mix for the majority of Mac-based businesses, but it was still reassuring to hear how much beta testing and research went into this new, Lion-and-iOS-inspired version.

QuickBooks for Mac's new interface puts more information at your fingertips.

For new QuickBooks users, Intuit included a Guide Me feature, with step-by-step walkthroughs in a pane on the right, that use plain language and no accounting jargon. They also set up a blog called Little Square with tips and tricks from both QuickBooks engineers and other Mac users. And the optional Getting Started Right program includes one hour of time with an expert who can help users import their data and understand how QuickBooks can best work for them.

The UI has been redesigned, with Lion-like touch-friendly navigation. You can swipe back and forth between invoices, for example, and the Report Center has a Cover Flow-like view. Overdue invoices are highlighted in red in the sortable Invoice list, a nice touch.

The new Search window should make it easier than ever to find what you need, with Saved and Recent searches accessible in the pane on the left.

Instead of sortable search columns, you get one search box and then you can filter the results further just like in Mail or Outlook. Saved searches (which work like smart folders) and recent searches stay accessible in the pane on the left. Better yet, one Search window can search for anything -- in previous versions you had to first go to a specific section, say the Customer or Invoice windows, and run a search from there.

QuickBooks 2012 wants to take the pain out of importing transactions from your bank, assigning them to customers, and keeping you organized.

Importing transactions from online banking is also improved. The split-pane view shows transactions downloaded from your bank on the bottom, and transactions in QuickBooks up top. You select bank transactions to send to QuickBooks, and as you rename the transactions from "bank-ese" to normal English, QuickBooks sets up rules in the background to rename future transactions for you, speeding up the process on subsequent imports.

When creating invoices from your estimates, QuickBooks 2012 will let you invoice for only part of a project, and then remember for later what's already been invoiced.

Invoicing overhauls include the ability to invoice in multiple stages over the course of a project -- this is streamlined from the multistep process in previous versions. When you click Create Invoice from an Estimate, for example, you can now invoice just part of it: a percentage of the total estimate, only certain items, or even different percentages of each item.

These changes, and the other improvements, are all designed by Intuit with the goal to save time, reduce errors in your data, let you access info faster, and simplify multistep tasks so you can spend less time doing the accounting and more time running your business. We'll have a full review later on -- QuickBooks for Mac is scheduled for release September 26. Suggested retail prices are $229.95 for one user, $439.95 for two, and $599.95 for three, with additional seats for $209.95 each.