H&R Block (NYSE: HRB) turned in strong numbers for its last fiscal year, which ended April 30, 2009. Income from continuing operations climbed 15% to $513.1 million ($1.53 per share), compared to $445.9 million ($1.36 a share) the previous year. But, the income growth came on basically flat revenues of $4.1 billion.

The Tax Services division saw revenues grow 1.5% to $3 billion, with pretax income up 13.7% to $893.8 million. H&R Block prepared 5.8% fewer returns, though the average fee per returned was up 7.2%. The up-tick in fees resulted from increased tax return complexity and an increase in clients with higher adjusted gross incomes.

Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) has made a fortune by selling easy-to-use and affordable accounting software for small businesses. But competition is heating up -- which is, no doubt, a great benefit for customers.

The latest entrant is NetBooks, which recently raised about $9 million in a Series A round. The investors include CMEA Ventures and Integral Capital.

Developing accounting software is extremely complex. As a result, it took NetBooks about four years to create its offering. Interestingly enough, the company's founder, Ridgely Evers, was the mastermind of Intuit's QuickBooks.

With NetBooks, a small business can accomplish things like sales management, customer relationship management (CRM), vendor management, and so on.

And since it uses an on-demand approach, NetBooks is fairly easy to implement and does not require large information technology (IT) expenses.

But the big test will be the upcoming IPO of rival NetSuite. If it's a success, I think we'll likely see more companies like NetBooks hit the market.

If you want to check out more venture fundings, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.