Microsoft's first foray into the low-end book-keeping market leaves a favourable first impression.

Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting (SBA) is the software giant's first foray into the low-end book-keeping market, having already infiltrated the high end with its enterprise-oriented Great Plains software. Built for businesses with 25 or fewer employees, SBA will launch in the US towards the end 2005, as part of Office for Small Business Management: it will compete primarily with Intuit's QuickBooks Pro and MYOB Plus. Microsoft has not yet provided a release date for SBA in the UK and Europe. SBA promises tight links with existing Microsoft Office applications, specifically Word, Excel and Outlook. For instance, SBA will let you export invoices from SBA to Microsoft Word for editing and printing and funnel profit-and-loss statements to Excel for number crunching. Users running Outlook with Business Contact Manager (another component of Microsoft Office Small Business Edition) will be able to link sales leads stored in Outlook with client accounts in SBA.