Intuit Handles Small-Business Books for Free

Microsoft(MSFT Quote) has made it official: It no longer wants to be a small-business accountant. As of June 30, it will stop selling Microsoft Money Plus.

Few will miss the software. Rival Intuit(INTU Quote) dominates small-business accounting. Intuit officials say their QuickBooks products control about 94% of the market -- with the rest going to losers like me who use old-fashioned spreadsheet and calculators.

Intuit, for better or worse, wants to become the Transformers of this space: a massive, multi-component software giant. It sells every technical service a small business could need.

QuickBooks Online is the Web riff on the classic product. Intuit GoPayment is an online credit-card transaction tool. Intuit Websites is a sophisticated Web site hosting and development product. Most of these products come in boxed software as well as online versions. That includes Intuit Billing Manager, QuickBooks Point of Sale and Intuit Online Payroll.

However, the entire small-business behemoth starts with one simple product: QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition.

I tested the product two years ago, and since then there have been major upgrades. Be warned: Intuit views this product as a marketing exercise and upsell is a constant annoyance, but with a bit of patience you can get powerful results. And you can't beat the price.

What you get: Simple Start offers a decent accounting tool for free.

Intuit deserves props for making it easy to download, install and set up. The program took about 20 minutes to install on the HP Mini netbook I've been testing.