Finding your way around QuickBooks just got a lot easier.

Intuit grandly trumpets its flagship bookkeeping software QuickBooks Accounting 2009 for Mac as the “most significant upgrade in product history.” Over the years, Intuit has sold, canceled, and reintroduced QuickBooks. It has always been a stepchild to the array of Windows versions on offer and sometimes felt like a half-hearted port. So the “most significant upgrade in product history” isn’t necessarily a high bar, but QuickBooks 2009 is a whole lot better than previous versions.

The user interface has been reorganized to put related information in context. The new Home page gathers the most common tasks and displays them as a workflow. It’s a page taken straight from rival MYOB that makes getting started significantly easier. The Home page links to Centers that consolidate, say, customer information into a single window. Filters allow you to see frequently accessed information, such as all customers who currently owe you money. From there, it’s a simple matter of clicking through to the relevant invoices.

QuickBooks’ Report Center has been shined up a bit too. It now uses a Cover Flow–style interface to display samples of each report type. We appreciate the nice big previews you get with Apple’s Cover Flow, but in QuickBooks 2009, it’s just a flashy repackaging of the existing reports. And we found one example of the preview not matching the selected report. Instead of generic previews, we’d love to see a preview that uses your actual data.

One truly new and useful view is the Company Snapshot. This window displays an income and expense chart, a list of upcoming reminders, account balances, customers who owe you money, and vendors you have to pay. We like it so much, we’d prefer to see the Snapshot at startup and open the Home page only when needed. The Layout Designer—a tool for creating customized forms—didn’t pick up much in the 
way of features, but it has become easier to use and a lot more stable.

We found that most of the improvements in this update help you navigate QuickBooks’ vast feature set, while fewer changes actually make features easier to use. Once you get two or three layers into the interface, you find that most of the old design still lurks under the hood.