Myob Plus 12

Rating:
Summary: Overall, A Great Accounting Program
Review: I feel MYOB is an excellent program for smaller service businesses and product-based businesses which track inventory on a average-cost basis. However, if you operate a product-based business which must track inventory on a LIFO basis, you won't be happy with the inventory-management features of this program.

MYOB doesn't support LIFO or FIFO. It can only track inventory on a rolling average cost basis (Quickbooks is similarly limited. Peachtree Complete Accounting has LIFO as an option.). While average cost inventory isn't bad, if you want/need LIFO, you're SOL with MYOB. MYOB help doesn't even mention the concept of LIFO!

(As an aside: LIFO, FIFO, and specific cost valuation methods are approved by the IRS under Regulations 1.471-3, where inventory is valued at cost. Average cost is probably approved for most businesses, as long as average cost is acceptable within your industry and as long as it fairly states a company's income. In cases where a company has aging inventory (such as wine, I suppose), average-cost might not be acceptable for IRS taxation purposes. But, if you're dealing with inventory that must be aged, you probably have a custom inventory program. Check with your accountant if you're unsure if you can use average cost for taxation reporting purposes.)

An annoying aspect of the program is the convenient list of drop down names for customers that is provided when entering sales. This works great if you have only a few key customers, but if you serve many, many different customers, you'll find the drop down list far too long to be able to quickly locate your most common sales accounts. It would be nice is there were some classification, categorization, or nesting of customers, so that only key accounts would display when adding sales. (Maybe there is, but I haven't found it yet.)

I tried creating a "customer" named "individual sale" and using it for multiple customers. But this method is inherently dangerous, because payments could be attributed to the wrong customer. So, you're stuck with long drop down lists.

Also if you're entering customer payments, there's no button to easily add a customer credit. (You can do it elsewhere.) If payments are made in excess of money owed, MYOB chalks it up to "Finance Charges," if you aren't careful. A button "create customer credit" would be nice. (For prepaid orders, when a payment is entered along with the sale, you're given the ability to immediately issue a refund or else create a credit. "Issue Refund" immediately opens your checkbook to write the check, which is handy. But, if customers overpay after being invoiced, it's a bit less convenient.)

Other than that, I like the layout of this program. There's a "bank" feature that allows you to "spend money" which mimics your checkbook. You can "make deposits" of "undeposited" funds, which essentially mimics holding checks and then depositing them. "Receive cash" is handy for entering revenue you want to match with a particular income account, but that doesn't relate to a customer payment for a product or service. (For example, if you're an Amazon associate, you might have an income account "Amazon Associate Income." Then, when you receive your Associate payment, you can use "receive money" to attribute this money to that income account.)

Sales are easily entered, as are customer payments. Payments for sales should be entered under the "Sales" section. And, you're allowed to allocate payments to multiple invoices in any way you desire. However, while your own invoice number is listed as you're allocating payments, the PO of the company making the purchase isn't available. You'll need to go to another window to get it. So, if a payment received only has the other company's PO number and not your invoice number, you'd need to do some clicking around to attribute the payment properly. It would be nice to show the customer's PO when allocating payments to various invoices.

Of course, you can create your own accounts, delete accounts you don't need, and examine balances in your accounts. When in doubt, for those who are more familiar with accounting, under "Accounts" there is a place to record journal entries directly. For example, if you must deduct $4 as a bank service fee and aren't sure where else to do it, you could manually credit your checking account $4 and debit the expense account "bank charges." (And, you could examine your balances in the expense account and checking account to be sure you entered it correctly.) You can create templates of frequently used journal entries. You can always delete a journal entry and start over or reverse transactions to maintain an audit trail. And, you can examine the transactions you've made.

For your starting set of accounts, MYOB allows you to import a set, create your own set, or start with a template set of accounts appropriate to various types of businesses, such as newspaper publishers, etc.

Overall, this is a very good program. The other reviewer pointed out the support options, and that's very true. But, to an extent, I think we'll run into that with most accounting programs today. You're asked to pay ... for annual support. You get 30 days of support free.

I took off one star because MYOB lacks LIFO inventory capability. If you don't need LIFO and you're comfortable with basic double-entry bookkeeping, MYOB might be right for you.

Peter Hupalo, Author of "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur" and "How To Start And Run A Small Book Publishing Company"

Rating:
Summary: I threw Quick Books Away
Review: I have been using Quick Books before MYOB and just did not like the interface at all. Took far to long to get around in it or to quickly find something or lookup a past entry. Search feature was poor at best.

MYOB is much easier to use. Straightforward approach to doing anything. Entry forms are much easier to use than QB. Something else that always bothered me was QB was always trying up upsale me with support at a zillion dollars a year. I had a simple question once that was NOT covered in the Qucik Books maual or online help. Quickbookss wanted $ to answer the question which would have taken less than two minutes! Really ... me off.

I haven't set up my books completly yet but have been working on it for the last three days non stop. I can tell you that as far as easy of use, it's light years ahead of QB.

Quick Books, their tech support, and their upsale attempts, are going in the trash this week. MYOB has made a GREAT product! I haven't used all the report features yet but I think for my needs (small business doing $500K or so a year) that it will be fine.

Anyone want to form a Quick Book haters support group? I'd be the first to join!

David

Rating:
Summary: Not quite good enough anymore...
Review: I've been using MYOB Accounting Plus for two years (started with version 10) and I'm getting tired of its inadequacies. It was a huge step up from Peachtree and One-Write Plus as far as program stability and networking, but it still does not suit my needs.

Pros:
-Great stability, never crashes or causes data loss
-Works well with a small network (additional [$$$] license fee per workstation applies)
-Easy to learn and operate
-Really neat customer support website that looks like it might help a few people

Cons:
-Must upgrade to newest version each year if using payroll functions (upgrade fee is about [$$$] less than full price of latest version)
-Customer service is separated into two groups...those who can't really help you with your problem but they can sell you some business forms and those who refer you to group one.
-Need help? [$$$] per year will allow you to get technical support, but don't expect much. They basically read out of the user's manual for you.
-Business forms are proprietary so no more free W-2s from Uncle Sam...expect to pay [$$$] for something that should be free with your yearly [$$$] upgrade
-MYOB claims it provides custom financial reports...I suppose if you call changing color schemes and fonts "custom." Expect to print out two or three reports to get the information that should be included in one report.
-Back to stonage bookkeeping when it comes to finance charges or discounts. Do you have customers that pay late or early? Might as well figure those finance charges by hand because MYOB does not keep track of them. And discounts aren't kept track of on the statements...I have to write mine in by hand.

Overall:
MYOB is a great package for small businesses that have 100 or fewer customers and a dozen employees. If you look for your business to grow then this package might impede that progress unless you can overlook the minor problems. Expect to work harder than the MYOB software package does.

Rating:
Summary: Multiple Warehouse Location and Inventory Sub Categories
Review: I've implemented the system in three different types of users.
1. Household financial management - I've migrated from Microsoft Office
2. Subdivision financial management - The Home Owners Association never had an accounting system in place since 1994 until I joined two years ago.
3. Motorcyle Parts Retail Store - I setup three years ago Microsoft Profit and last year migrated to MYOB.

The first two were just perfect. Everything that I needed were present in the software. On the third however, when the business really became good that we had to open four separate outlets and correspondingly four storage warehouses, I cound not find in the system the option of having more than one Warehouse location.

Recently, I'm about to implement on an aircon and refrigeration business where multiple warehouse and parts sub-categories are required in the inventory, I'm again having difficulty making the setup perfect.

Also, I want to see that Philippine Tax table and other government mandated deductions for payroll are captured so that we can also effectively use the Payroll module.

I hope MYOB will look at my comments. I will also be interested to enter into some business relationship with MYOB since I am bringing their business to the Philippines. I still have other friends I intend to help and I consider MYOB as a good option.

Rating:
Summary: I threw Quick Books Away
Review: This product should be called... 'The Intelligent Business Partner'.

I got MYOB Plus so that I could figure out how to stop giving my accountant so much money to do my books. Little did I know that doing my own books would lead me to various time-saving procedures that makes my business processes more efficient. These accounting software companies like to talk about these 20,000 foot-level virtues of using their software but in this case, I've found it to be true. My staff and I save probably an hour a day using MYOB Plus as an estimates & invoicing tool. Bottom line, I can email estimates & invoices to customers right from MYOB - rather than doing this by hand, using fax machines, getting busy signals, re-sending, etc.. I've also discovered something called a ToDo list which provides immeasurable value to the running of my business.

And, the reason I got it in the first place, I now have the ability to get financial reports whenever I want them - and at no extra cost. Of course, I've also discovered the really neat sales and receivables reports so I know who owes me what and when.

I now wonder how I did all of this before I went with this accounting software.

Rating:
Summary: MYOB Plus ROCKS!
Review: This product should be called... 'The Intelligent Business Partner'.

I got MYOB Plus so that I could figure out how to stop giving my accountant so much money to do my books. Little did I know that doing my own books would lead me to various time-saving procedures that makes my business processes more efficient. These accounting software companies like to talk about these 20,000 foot-level virtues of using their software but in this case, I've found it to be true. My staff and I save probably an hour a day using MYOB Plus as an estimates & invoicing tool. Bottom line, I can email estimates & invoices to customers right from MYOB - rather than doing this by hand, using fax machines, getting busy signals, re-sending, etc.. I've also discovered something called a ToDo list which provides immeasurable value to the running of my business.

And, the reason I got it in the first place, I now have the ability to get financial reports whenever I want them - and at no extra cost. Of course, I've also discovered the really neat sales and receivables reports so I know who owes me what and when.

I now wonder how I did all of this before I went with this accounting software.