The days of “Let me get back to you” are over. Accounting professionals can now perform essential client accounting tasks and work with their clients’ books on the Web, enabling them to provide counsel and quickly answer their clients’ questions from anywhere with an Internet connection. Web-based tools make sophisticated financial management usable and affordable to individuals and small businesses.  The heavyweight of small business accounting, Intuit, has launched an online alternative to its Quickbooks software that can be finally considered a valid option. While its previous attempts were not very successful, the current version of Quickbooks Online, priced from free to $34.95/month, is a quality product that, while not as powerful as the desktop version, does a pretty good job.

Peachtree, a longtime small business favorite, also has debuted a well featured online version starting at $150/year and representing a very viable alternative.

Notable new online-only accounting packages for small businesses include Clarity Accounting and Less Accounting which is nicely integrated via mashups with Web favorites such as Basecamp, Shopify, and PayPal. Almost ready to re-launch is NetBooks, a product with a bit of a troubled history, but with a very interesting and complete set of features and now in final Beta release. Accounts can now be opened and used for free.
A truly superb product, designed for mature small businesses is Intacct. Created from the ground up as a Web-based application, it provides very sophisticated accounting features and it natively integrates with a number of other Web-based software offerings such as Salesforce.com.
For even more mature and large organizations, requiring not just accounting but a comprehensive online suite of business management applications, NetSuite is the leader in the space.