QuickBooks 2012's new forms interface appears to be a pretty thorough redesign of the way you interact with estimates, invoices, and your customer data. While data entry on these forms remains the same as it was in earlier versions of the application, there are now a number of new buttons that give you quick access to features for printing, emailing, and previewing the form you're looking at.

There are also two new sidebars, one of which displays a list of all the invoices or estimates you've created and the other which offers up account information for the customer whose invoice or estimate is currently being displayed in the main window.

The information displayed in the invoice sidebar can be filtered using a Spotlight-like search field and each entry in the sidebar offers visual cues that let you know when an invoice is overdue. The account information sidebar displays your customer's phone number and email address as well as the current open balance and a list of recent customer transactions. Intuit has also added a new button that lets you preview your form without requiring you to use the print preview option available in every OS X print dialog.

These are all great additions to the application that make your customer and vendor information easy to access without requiring you to jump between the application's many modules.