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Intuit's Quickbooks is one of the most widely used business accounting software programs on the market. Each year Intuit updates the products based off its user feedback. The new Quickbooks 2012 is all about saving time by reducing redundancies and improving reporting. I will be honest, I was pleased with this year's updates.

Here are some of the Quickbooks Pro 2012 product highlights:

IMPROVED REPORTING:

Calendar View: Finally, Quickbooks is offering a calendar view. It combines all the daily accounting to-dos and tasks and populates it into a familiar monthly, weekly or daily view. Interestingly, Intuit sought its customers opinions about integrating the Quickbooks' calendar with Outlook, and the majority wanted to keep the accounting calendar separate.

Report Formatting in Excel: If you are a Quickbooks users who exports reports, you understand that any formatting you make to a report must be done every time you run the same report -- an absolute waste of time. Quickbooks has fixed this problem (hallelujah!). Now all Excel formatting and formulas will be saved and rerun on the report each time it is run.

Access to 1,000 Report Templates: Quickbooks has set-up a user community where reports can be shared and ranked. This has taken the report templates available from 125 to over 1,000.

GREATER ORGANIZATION:

Lead Center: For small business owners on a budget, Quickbooks was often used as a lead collection database or CRM tool.

Because it wasn't initially designed for this, reporting would be confusing and often times cluttered with leads, not customers. Intuit has heard us! They have created a limited lead management section of the database to collect all prospective customers. Leads can be converted into a customer with one click.

Document Center: To help us clean up our desk clutter, Quickbooks has a more robust and easy-to-use document center. Users can now drag and drop documents like invoices, proposals, receipts...etc into the document center, which can then be connected to a transaction. It is important to note that all the documents will be stored locally, which means you may need to expand your hard drive space if you plan to store a lot of files.

TIME SAVERS:

New Quickbooks Set-up: Intuit opted to change the new customer Quickbooks set-up to just the bare minimum. This allows people to start working right away. (This was something Intuit learned from its recently acquired company, Mint.com).

One-Click Transactions: To reduce data re-entry, users can now process transactions with one click.

PRICING & AVAILABILITY:

You can start finding the various 2012 Quickbook editions in retailers October 9, 2011. Quickbooks Pro's Single User Cost: $229.95