Microsoft's Accounting System If you're a Microsoft office junkie, this accounting program might be the all-in-one tool you need to bring your business's books in line.

Are you tracking your income and outgo in Microsoft Excel? Creating invoices with Word? Managing vendor, customer and employee lists in Outlook? If so, you're an ideal candidate for the newest addition to Microsoft Office: Small Business Accounting 2006. After a couple of failed attempts, Microsoft has delivered a surprisingly well-appointed accounting program that's a strategic component of Microsoft Office.

Small Business Accounting is unlikely to make a dent in Intuit QuickBooks' 80 percent-plus market share; nothing has in more than a decade. And this first version of Small Business Accounting would make an even poorer substitute for the other top entrepreneurial bookkeeper--Sage Software's Peachtree Complete Accounting.

But according to Microsoft, a very large share of entrepreneurial businesses is still wide-open to wooing. Its research shows that accounting programs are used by only a little more than half of all entrepreneurial businesses, with the rest using a patchwork of spreadsheets, contact managers, paper records and outside bookkeepers.