QuickBooks is one of those live-or-die types of applications. Companies that use the product, can't see living without it. In fact, the product has become so ubiquitous that a whole set of support vendors has sprung up -- and most financial institutions interface with the product.

I've been using it for a decade to run several businesses. And every time I see something interesting that might replace it, I think of all the time, effort and dollars I have put into using QuickBooks to date -- and never get past that "the other product looks interesting, but ..." stage.

Intuit, the developer of QuickBooks, has released an updated product almost annually, and each time I take a look to see whether it's worth upgrading.

The 2008 version of QuickBooks adds some usability features that are slightly better than the 2007 version, but the real advantage is for new users and users of even older QuickBooks versions.

Like the 2007 version, QuickBooks offers the ability to create a copy of your financial data to give to your accountant. The 2008 version enhances the capability by allowing you to select a date when creating your accountant's copy -- and not include anything after that date in the accountant's copy. This cutover point allows you to continue to work on accounts after that date without impacting the accountant's copy.

Similarly, the e-mail features are incrementally better than in previous versions. In older versions, you had the ability to automatically create e-mails from various reports and statements -- such as creating an invoice and sending it to the customer. In 2008, the rough edges of this capability have been smoothed. Instead of pushing the e-mail out from QuickBooks, it integrates better with Microsoft Outlook to send out the forms -- and that means more flexibility and better record keeping of your outbound message within Outlook.

The new version also lets you password protect and upload your accountant's copy to a secure server where your accountant can fetch it. When I used it, though, it seemed to permanently lock the file, so neither of us could open the accountant's copy. On the other hand, the old way of saving a file to a local disk to send on CD worked flawlessly.

Converting from older versions of QuickBooks should be a cinch, but it didn't work out that way for me. QuickBooks 2008 didn't take the older files, and I ended up having to ask Intuit support people to manually convert my files by uploading them, converting them, and downloading them again using a private server. According to the support people, the problem was on my system, and it affected other files too -- not just my QuickBooks company files.

Once I solved that problem, though, using QuickBooks 2008 has been very easy. Not many interface changes from earlier versions, so it's a natural transition. The Customer and Vendor Centers are still among my favorite features as they make it extremely easy to understand where you stand with customers and suppliers -- and put every action you need related to each of these groups in a single place.

The online aspect of the product and how it works with various banks still has its rough edges. With one bank, QuickBooks kept duplicating the accounts online every time I did an online bill-pay. And if the bank makes a mistake on the ledger, there's no easy way to reconcile the problem. Thank goodness most banks rarely make mistakes.

All in all, QuickBooks 2008 in its various forms is a solid product, even with these rough edges, and with every release, Intuit smoothes out a few more.