Peachtree Premium Accounting 2005 introduced a powerhouse new feature: company consolidation. After that, the applause died down. Peachtree Premium Accounting 2006 lacks a barnburner of a new tool, but offers more solid across-the-board improvements than last year's model. It's still one of the most capable small-business accounting programs, with a strong set of records, transaction forms, reports, inventory-management tools, and general business acumen. Peachtree 2006 also includes online banking and bill-payment features, along with the new Internal Accounting Review and revamped forms.
Peachtree's setup tools help you specify preferences and create databases of customers and vendors, inventory items, and employees. Informational tool Peachtree Today is a window that serves several functions: It's a setup guide, offers navigation aids, and gives a bird's-eye view of your company through charts and tables. While these are effective tools, Peachtree's navigational system overall is dated, and not as quickly understandable as QuickBooks'.

Self-service payroll is comprehensive; an add-on service takes the grunt work out of your hands. Time billing and jobs tracking are about as good as it gets in this space. Peachtree's comprehensive inventory management puts it ahead of the pack, and a fixed-assets module is unusual in this software class. Company consolidation costs $2,500 from Intuit, but it's available in Peachtree's $500 entry.
Peachtree plays well with Microsoft Office. You can do a mail-merge for customer letters and export reports to Excel. You can also turn reports and financial statements into Adobe Acrobat files, and e-mail many document types.