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

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.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2009
    If you are using MS Dynamics POS 2.0 and Office Accounting 2007 integration will the connection still work after you upgrade to 2009 or should those users be added to those that should not upgrade?

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2009
    I am having horrible time connecting MOA 2009 Pro to SQL Server 2008 Ent x64. My account is domain admin; all SQL connectivity is enabled; no firewall; same machine. Am I doing anyhting wrong or x64 SQL Server 2008 is not supported? MOA 2009 Pro works with its SQL Express 2005 (MSSMLBIZ) instance on the very same machine. Please let me know.

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2009
    I wrote a new post that OA is a 32 bit app and is has issues running on 64 bit SQL, but I actually managed to RUN OA 2009 on 64 bit SQL 2008 (on Vista Ultimate x64), however you cannot create a new company and you need to use the SQL Management Studio Utilities rather than the OA Data Utilities, which basically means running full SQL (as you are). Send me an email if you want the details.

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2009
    You mention that you can use sql server 2008 with OA.  I am having no luck in connecting OA to the sql server instance.  Can you share what I need to do to get this working?

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2010
    Just for your information, I am running Accounting 2009 (US) using SQL Server express 2008 R2 on Windows 7 32 bit. Thuisfar no problems, and have even changed the base currency to AU Dollar. However the SQL changes you recommended did not work. Cheers