"There is a lot less to learn to become efficient in this product," said Kevin Kirn, product manager for QuickBooks Online. Besides featuring fewer drop-downs, lists are more consistent from section to section of QBO.

However, changes extend far beyond that product, although not immediately to professional tax products. Critical to speeding up operations is single-page architecture, implemented in the new QBO, and which will be used in other online applications such as payroll and payments.

The entire application loads the first time it is accessed. After that, the system refreshes only changes. That provides desktop speed in QBO since most elements of product screens stay the same while the system is being used.

The simplified approach to screen design includes three buttons at the top of the page that can access most functions users needed. These include "Create, which provides the ability to reach the vendor and customer pages and transactions. Kirn says the system does not require sub navigation. With the previous navigation system for transactions "You really had to understand the architecture," he says. "Now you don't need that understand the product."

The company has also produced a new mobile application for QBO "Professionals wanted to see full functionally of QBO on a tablet," says Kirn. The application is "not quite as fast as it was on the web, tablet browsers are slower," Kirn says.

However, instead of accessing the product via a mobile-only website, it now reaches QBO via the same home page as the full version. Kirn says that with the prior version, "You could do a few things, but "it wasn't a complete product. You couldn't do a lot of the things you could do with QuickBooks Online.

While there are still some functions not available on the mobile version, those will be eliminated.