6th Annual QuickBooks "Awesome Add-On" Winners Announced

According to Intuit, the publisher of QuickBooks, more than 94 percent of small business enterprises choose QuickBooks for their accounting software (and no, we don't know Intuit's definition of "small business enterprises"). Whatever the market penetration, QuickBooks is well-represented among Government contractors as well. Each year, for the past six years, the Sleater Group, a provider of technical reference materials, software expertise, and QuickBooks training materials for accounting solutions consultants, has studied the marketplace of add-on software and services that enhance the systems and processes of small businesses and has come up with a list it calls "Awesome QuickBooks Add-ons. The 2011 winners were announced yesterday at Sleeter Group's National Conference in Las Vegas. We always wait expectantly for each year's winners, hoping to find software and services that will enhance processes for our clients, many of who use QuickBooks.

In order to qualify for an Awesome Add-on award, the product and/or service must be developed and sold by a solid company with a reputation for outstanding customer support, and the product must have the following attributes:

• Show superior design, implementation and features.
• Integrate with QuickBooks using best practices of the QuickBooks SDK or IPP programming guidelines
• Use appropriate transaction types and field population for recording data into QuickBooks so as to preserve and/or enhance the standard reporting features in QuickBooks
• Conform to good accounting principles and operating standards

We were somewhat disappointed in this year's winners insofar as there being a "must-have" add-on for Government contractors. The paperless document management solution has great potential for enhancing systems and processess but there are quite a few of those already on the market. If you are using QuickBooks payroll, there is an employee web portal (that's free from Intuit) where employees can go to review their leave and earnings statements and download W-2s.

To see all the winners and read about their products, go here. There are also links to past winners, most of whose products continue to be available.