History

Microsoft Office Accounting (formerly Small Business Accounting) is Microsoft's
accounting software targeted towards small business customers. The first version,
Microsoft Office Accounting 2008, was announced on November 14, 2007. It targets
small businesses that have between 1 and 25+ employees. It is directly competitive
with Intuit's QuickBooks.
A free version, Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2008/9, is available for early
startups and home-based businesses. Third-party integrated online services from
eBay, PayPal, Equifax, and ADP are available for additional fees. Microsoft Office
Accounting Professional 2008, equipped with more advanced functions, was made
available in November 2007.
Microsoft Office Accounting Express is the free version of Microsoft Office Accounting
being distributed in certain editions of Microsoft Office 2007, including
Office Professional 2007, Office Small Business Edition 2007 and Office Ultimate 2007.
Microsoft is currently distributing free CDs with Accounting Express and the application
is also available for download from their website.
There are only 2 country versions available at the moment (08/08/08) – US and UK.

Versions:
There are 2 versions available – Express and Professional.
In addition, MS are selling specific packs of Professional – standalone, 3 user pack and
(‘coming soon’) Professional plus. The latter will include the payroll service.
A comparison of these versions can be found here.

Licensing:
The Express edition is free. Not a common occurrence for Microsoft so I suspect this
will change in the near future. Professional edition is licensed on a per user basis.
The stand alone licence is £149.95 including VAT (as at 08/08/08).
The 3 user pack costs £349.95.
A 60 day trial version of Professional is also available for download from the
main MS Accounting web site. When the 60 day trial version expires, the user has
an option to purchase or downgrade to Express.

Who would use:
MS Accounting 2008/9 as a standalone – any small business that requires a application
to maintain business books.
MS Accounting 2008/9 and Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager – any business
requiring a tool to manage customer relationship management and its business books.
MS Accounting 2008/9 3 user pack – this package will happily sit in a server with
multi user access. There are some minor hurdles to overcome (mainly down to wizards
not including cross references to sql editions) but this is well worth the effort.
This ensures that the application can be used for small to medium sized businesses.
Please note that these are user and not session based licences.
MS Accounting Professional also allows an umlimited number of business books on the same
database. There is no additional licence cost for this and each set of books are discrete
and fully configurable.

Competitor finance applications (examples only):
Larger scale and also owned by Microsoft – Navision (Nav), Great Plains (GP), Solomon (SL)
Much larger scale – SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft
Comparable: Sage, QuickBooks.

Licence sales and support:
Licenses are sold through Microsoft direct via a purchase (for the Professional version),
download and email combination from the Microsoft web site.
For the Professional version, the application can be purchased here.  
The Express version can be downloaded from here.

What do you get?
Off the shelf package with default options set for, for example, the chart of accounts based
on business types.
Wizards to ease the initial set up including data migration!
Allows multiple users (1 licence per user) and multiple businesses (on same licence).

What don’t you get?
There is some functionality that is not within the application that users should be aware of –
most of thesewill cause issues for medium sized businesses and in this case the business
should be looking at larger package options. The main missing key functionality is there
are only 2 country versions available and each forces the base ledger currency to be
GBP for the UK version and USD for the US version.

So why use FPC?
We offer a complete range of services to support this application and experience in its use.
We offer a more flexible resource and can react quicker to enquiries and support calls.
We offer fixed price solutions to meet client requirements. We offer first line support
with fast response times.

Independent review from Amazon:
Here