"We have done  concerted work on performance improvement so QuickBooks will start up faster," says product manager Samir Khosla, group product manager, QuickBooks Premier Accountant Edition. The end result of the tinkering in the lab should produce a 15-percent-to-20-percent time saving for those using the latest version. For those working with large data files, it’s going to be important for them," Khosla says.

And that approach represents a basic change in how Intuit promotes the package. At its Investor's Day this week, CEO Brad Smith said the company has gone from talking about bookkeeping and accounting to discussing time savings and how much saved costs result from that.

Intuit has trumpeted the improvements it says have been made in the installation itself, one of the areas, the company said has led to one out of five QuickBooks purchasers never using the product. QuickBooks 2009 has 17 screens and an average installation took 11 minutes while 2010 installation utilizes six screens and installation time averages four minutes.

The latest version can also flag common mistakes made by users, so that the accountant doesn't have to spend so much time cleaning them up. For example, a user trying to get an invoice out might not take the time to set up all inventory items correctly. "It flags things which accountants should look at or discuss with business owner," Khosla continues.

Another area in which mistakes are commonly made is in entering cost information. "These are classic mistakes if you are in a rush and trying to get a transaction out," says Kholsa. "It results in wrong bookkeeping." Rather than having to dig into each item separately, the accountant has a single screen  from which to check all costs.