Product Reviews

With its clever balance of power and ease of use, MYOB's suite of accounting applications has dominated finance software for small- and medium-sized businesses. But its reign is under threat from a clutch of rivals, including invoicing applications, such as Billings 2.5 and the high-end NetSuite 11.

MYOB's response is a brand new suite loosely based on its erstwhile Accounting range. It comprises FirstEdge, a basic invoicing program that can create cash VAT returns, a pricier AccountEdge program with more reporting functions and Microsoft Office interaction, and the high-end AccountEdge Plus, boasting multi-currency, payroll, professional time billing and advanced stock control.

The release of AccountEdge marks a split with the Windows version of the program, which retains the Accounting monicker. A striking indication of this is obvious in the new Mac-only interface. Those used to Accounting's dowdy and unchanging main window will be delighted with the revamp. It still contains chunky icons that link to the same half-dozen Command Centres, such as Sales and Purchases, that control the main activities of your business. But the flow charts that illustrate how money goes in and out of your business are now in - wait for it - a resizable window. That's a welcome, if surprisingly belated, acknowledgement of a world beyond 14in monitors. But it would've been good to have seen MYOB go further and have important business information, such as an up-to-date cash flow overview, a feature of many Windows accounting applications, appear on the main screen, too.

For MYOB Accounting migrants, the most useful interface change to AccountEdge and AccountEdge Plus - though not FirstEdge - is the addition of a Task Drawer to the right of the main window. The drawer, another Mac-only feature, gives quick access to individual application windows. You can add the active window to the list in the Task Drawer through a menu command. For those who haven't memorised existing keyboard shortcuts, it saves time trying to navigate through the multiple windows that can easily clutter the desktop.

The transition to AccountEdge improves integration with other Mac applications, too. AccountEdge and AccountEdge Plus sport the same excellent Microsoft Office integration as their Accounting predecessors - in fact, this version has been beefed up with support for Office 2008. It's easy to send reports to Excel for further editing, or use Word's mail merge feature to generate a mailing list. Contacts held in the card file can be synchronised with Address Book.But AccountEdge now lets you publish sales, purchases and recurring transactions to iCal. That's handier than it sounds, and it's not an 'all or nothing approach'. A simple Publish to iCal checkbox appears in the transaction window. When selected, an event is added to an MYOB-generated iCal calendar when the transaction is recorded. Credit terms are automatically reflected: if you give one customer 30 days' credit,

Both AccountEdge programs let you back up your data file to a .Mac server and restore it from the same place through a simple menu command. It works well, if quirkily, as when you start backing up open application windows disappear without warning. It took a fair amount of time to create a first backup, stored as a .sit archive in an iDisk's Documents folder, but subsequent backups proved speedy, helped by the fact that you can exclude non-financial data, such as graphics, from the backup.

Archives are stored by date, so AccountEdge will store multiple backups on the same server. There may be some privacy concerns over storing company data on a .Mac server in this way, but the compensation of easy offsite backup should convince many.

That said, security concerns are clearly a priority in AccountEdge. Previous versions of Accounting offered decent security settings, such as the ability to lock past periods to prevent amendment. But this is now more versatile and you can now set a specific date, rather than a set month, to lock accounts. And you can now apply an audit trail to a Receive Items transaction, Rather than allowing for a direct edit. AccountEdge insists you reverse and lock the original transaction and generates a new one with any changes.

A further security boost is provided by the simple way you can restrict user access to accounts. In a User Access window you select a user and check off the accounts to deny them access to. Handily you can copy settings from another user, although there's no way to set access for groups of users.

The reporting functions in FirstEdge and AccountEdge see moderate improvement. You can sort invoice statements based on credits or discounts applied, and add debit and discount information on remittance advice slips given to suppliers. Useful, but hardly the sort of thing that, alone, will tempt upgraders.

Changes to AccountEdge Plus are more significant. These include the ability to email payslips from the program, especially handy for those who employ teleworkers. It's also now possible to link multiple wage categories - for example, various types of leave - to entitlement wage categories, so that they are dealt with in the same way. Plus, end-of-year Tax Forms Assistant has been tweaked. It now involves a few more steps, but it is well worth it - it looks much more like a printed P35 and is far easier to fill in.

For all programs, it is often the smaller improvements that make a huge difference to usability. For years Accounting users had to endure the fact that the Command-n shortcut created a new company file - not something you're likely to do frequently. But it now does what it should do: create a new record in the currently active Command Centre. If you're in the Sales Command Centre, for example, it will generate a new invoice - in the Stock Control Centre it will create a new stock item. Improvements to the HTML help file may sound mundane, but it's far easier to locate topics - and the help file opens by default with advice on the currently open window or task.

Thanks to improvements in appearance and integration with Mac OS X applications, AccountEdge and AccountEdge Plus remain the best buy for small- and medium-sized, Mac-based businesses. FirstEdge is a good introduction to accounting, but the lack of Mac OS X integration does count against it. Applications such as Billings or Billable are more suitable for those with simple invoicing and record-keeping needs.