Microsoft's accounting app aims at eBay users

Microsoft is offering a public test-drive of its new small-business accounting app, which lets you post and track eBay listings. If eBay is the bread and butter of your home-based business, no other accounting software will enable you to track eBay auctions in real time while making and receiving payments through PayPal. In our early look at the beta edition of Microsoft Office Accounting 2007, we found the eBay integration convenient.

Office Accounting 2007 deepens its integration with other Microsoft apps, so you can export financial data to Word to create forms or to Excel to generate calculations. You can pair Office Accounting with Outlook with Business Contact Manager to access and update financial transactions alongside customer and vendor relationships. Microsoft has added the financial reporting tools of Office Accounting, and support for multiple currencies is in the works. Companies will be able to use the software to handle payroll and print checks while managing multiple employee roles and data access levels. This program is built to allow CPAs to view clients' profit-and-loss statements in real time and to automatically calculate depreciation.

This is the first update to Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006, with a slightly different name. Microsoft is planning to offer integration with the Office Live system down the road. You can download the beta versions of Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 here. The final version is due for availability around the end of this year; we'll report back after we test it.