What do you do if you're a software company that already has produced a product that is stable, seemingly complete and used by 3.7 million businesses? Intuit, the publishers of QuickBooks business finance software, decided to tweak the core functionality of the product and to add features that could help their clients in other parts of their businesses.

		David Radin is a business consultant and free-lance writer. You can contact him at www.megabyteminute.com.

QuickBooks 2007 picks up where QuickBooks 2006 left off, as a stable product with a solid interface that includes special centers for customers, vendors and employees, allowing a user to perform related activities consecutively without jumping from section to section. Then it went several steps further by including marketing functionality, making it easier to share your books with your accountant, for instance.

The QuickBooks 2007 tweaks are not often noticeable, but come in handy. I like being able to pay my bills and then have the software prompt me to automatically go into a batch print mode immediately. It saves a few mouse-clicks from earlier versions, but is not the type of change that every one will see.

The marketing capabilities that Intuit has added to QuickBooks 2007 are mainly through a partnership with Google. Using QuickBooks' integrated Web browser, businesses can set up Google AdWords accounts so their text ads can show up on Google's search engine as well as on pages of other Web sites that show Google ads.

QuickBooks 2007 users also can tie their products into Google's Froogle shopping engine, thereby offering them to new customers searching for certain product types. By entering products into Froogle through QuickBooks 2007, business people will be able to save the time of re-creating product descriptions, because they are drawn from the QuickBooks database -- even offering a near real-time inventory level.

If a business, such as those in retail, is sensitive to geography, the marketing through Google can be tied to Google Maps, where an icon pinpointing the business location will show up on an interactive map available for would-be customers to find directions to the business.

Similarly, QuickBooks 2007's Shipping Manager offers integrated access to FedEx and UPS, so users can save a few steps when shipping packages. And it has increased the number of banks and financial institutions that will allow the user to use QuickBooks as an interface to their online banking functions. For businesses that process a lot of checks or credit card transactions, this can save a lot of time entering data.

The relationship between QuickBooks and Google is more than just a marketing partnership, though. QuickBooks also uses Google Desktop as its primary search mechanism to find answers and transactions within QuickBooks 2007. Importantly, when you switch on Google Desktop for a QuickBooks search, it hides your QuickBooks data except when the Google Desktop search is conducted from within QuickBooks. This means your financial data is not exposed to people who use your system who don't have permission to use QuickBooks.

There are now 24 editions of QuickBooks, including a Simple Start edition, an online edition, and more robust editions aimed at various business sizes and industry segments. Each edition allows transfer of data in the proper form to your accountant -- a function that also has been improved in the 2007 version -- and a variety of functions to meet the needs of the intended users. The company also offers add-ins for payroll processing and credit card processing. QuickBooks 2007 is available at various software retailers and at www.quickbooks.com.