It's hard to imagine how a small business can exist without QuickBooks or a competitive product. Quickbooks claims 94 percent market share for retail purchases of small business financial software. But as it turns out, there's an enormous competitor with about 75 percent market share, according to QuickBooks' group product manager Alex Hood: Small businesses using no automation at all.

There are approximately 26 million small businesses with 20 or fewer employees in the United States, and about 4 million of them run on Quickbooks.

There are some that run on competitive platforms, but the big winner in the market is...wait for it...paper. Journals, notebooks and scrap paper are still the norm for many small businesses. And for those who run their financials off Excel spreadsheets, that's just a modest step up from paper. It's a frightening thought.

People who are serious about getting their small businesses running faster will like Intuit's 2011 release of QuickBooks. Hood notes that the new version, available in late September 2010, has three main areas of enhancement: giving users faster access to their data, making routine tasks more efficient, and introducing mobility. Here's a rundown of the major enhancements:

• Customer Snapshot offers a consolidated view of an individual customer's purchase history, average days to pay, and outstanding balance. This helps small businesses make timely decisions on customer requests.
• QuickBooks Search lets users quickly locate any customer, account, report or invoice details within their QuickBooks repository with a simple keyword search.

• Customer and Vendor History provides at-a-glance views of important customer and vendor details, such as history, estimates and past orders, on a single screen.
• Balance Sheet by Class provides a way for QuickBooks Premier users to separately track multiple funds, departments or locations in a single, easy-to-access report.
• Batch Invoicing lets small businesses owners who often bill many customers for the same service streamline the process by creating one template invoice to send to all related customers.
• Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail Integration allows businesses to easily send invoices, estimates, and other e-mails from their preferred webmail service directly from QuickBooks.
• Collections Center helps users to quickly identify overdue and almost-due invoices, and then directly e-mail collection notices from their Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail accounts.
• Intuit PaymentNetwork (sold separately) provides a way for a small business's customers to instantly pay their invoices.
• Offered as an add-on service to QuickBooks 2011 and sold separately, QuickBooks Connect provides access to essential QuickBooks customer and transaction data online or on an iPhone (Blackberry and other platforms will come later). Users can create and manage invoices, pull customer information, check the status of a payment, and get real-time answers to questions from mobile locations.

So are you still using paper and Excel to manage your business? Hood says that when a small business gets to the point of needed an outside CPA to do tax planning and preparation, that's a perfect time to automate your financial record-keeping. In most cases, CPAs use QuickBooks or something like it themselves and can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.