Print
Discuss
Send to friend
Perhaps lesser-known to many of us than the all-conquering Quickbooks, or Sage, MYOB (or mind your own business) shares that characteristic of successful personal finance and accounting packages - a loyal buying base.
Like every package here, the setup process is rigorously idiot proof. With accounting being taken away from the experts and brought in house, things have to be simple. Accounting Plus walks you step-by-step through setting up your company accounts. At every stage you are pumped not just for information about your company, but what tasks you want the software to perform. Based on your answers, MYOB then customises itself around your business. It's not up and running in minutes, as it claims - we'd set aside an hour or two to transfer all your data and set up your systems - but most important, the process isn't scary for accounting novices.
The look and feel of MYOB is very different to Quickbooks and Sage. While their tabular, spreadsheet-derived pages scream 'this is an accounting package' MYOB goes for an illustrated menu system. Click on one of the cutely illustrated menus and a clear black-on-white flowchart appears.
Everybody's mind works differently, but we find this almost naively plain approach much to our liking. It makes it easy to understand the stages of each financial process and, crucially, prevents us getting lost when performing something like a stock audit.
Click Payroll and you'll be pointed to options for printing the monthly payslips, dealing with P45 and P60, organising payments to staff accounts and so forth. There's an arrow from those staff payments off to Banking.
Similarly, if you accept a client order and, apart from the core job of processing the order, dispatching the goods and billing, you'll find links to banking (for payments received) and to the Card File for your client.
Over time, this holistic approach makes accounts appear much simpler, and you begin to construct a mental model of the company as a whole, with all the different operations relating to each other.
We're impressed by the customer information. The flexible Card File lets you store up to five addresses and contacts per card, and ship to multiple addresses, while billing a central site. You can set unique customer credit terms and payment methods, and log personal information about your contacts.
Search by individual, postcode, last contact date, and you can generate reports, using the customer or supplier history to construct a five-year snapshot.
The payroll function is strong too. The instant you run a payroll, all records are instantly updated, and MYOB calculates and tracks PAYE and NI as well as employee entitlements and expenses. It's also flexible enough to run side-by-side monthly and weekly payroll systems and to have concurrent systems for hourly, salaried, overtime, commission and bonus pay systems.
Multicurrency accounting will appeal to anyone who does business abroad, and will be especially useful if your company operates in more than one country. You'll be able to use suppliers' and customers' local currencies, track exchange rates at the transaction level, construct reports and debtors and creditors in your (and their) currency - or even a third 'neutral' one, such as the dollar or euro, and immediately calculate exchange rate gains or losses on the deal.
The Professional Time Billing is a wise attempt to move beyond mere bean- counting to a more creative use of financial intelligence. It lets you maintain an audit trail of original time - in other words showing you the real cost to your company in time spent on a job. This is a tool that can really benefit your operation, showing you where to tighten things up and which jobs are simply not paying their way.
And though MYOB may be foreign to Sage or Quickbooks users, the transition will be eased by the fact that it works seamlessly with Word and Excel.
You can even generate reports in HTML, so anyone can display them in a web browser - a handy alternative to large pdf files.
Contact: MYOB 01344 397 283
www.myob.co.uk
System requirements:
- Pentium or faster processor
- Windows 95 or later
- 32MB of Ram
- 40MB of free hard disk space for program installation, plus an additional 35MB for each data file maintained
Back to Accounting Software Group Test
See also:
Accounting Software: Personal Computer World Group Test. 01 Sep 2003
All Finance & Accounts
del.icio.us
Digg this
reddit!
