A Family of Accounting Products

The Great Plains family of accounting and business management products includes three products tailored for different audiences. A fourth product in the works, the entry-level Small Business Accounting (SBA), will be an Office-based accounting system that will ship late in 2005. Although not officially an MBS product, SBA will be built by a team of developers in the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) business unit and based on new .NET Framework code. Microsoft plans to develop a migration path from SBA to Small Business Financials (SBF).

With the release of SBF 8.0, MBS has refactored the products in its Great Plains line to better align them with key customer segments for small and mid-size businesses, and to make room for SBA. Specifically, SBF (previously Small Business Manager) targets companies with 10 to 49 employees; previously it targeted companies with fewer than 25 employees (now the target market for SBA). Similarly, Great Plains Standard Edition previously targeted companies with 25 to 99 employees, while Great Plains Professional Edition was aimed at companies with 100 to 5,000 employees.