Product Reviews

Up until now, I've always had trouble explaining MYOB's position in the UK accounting software market. On the one hand it's a SoHo/SME accounting system that packs only slightly less of a punch than the market-leading Sage Financial Controller, and does so at a fraction of the price. On the other hand, the upgrade path has been non-existent and the lack of an integrated UK payroll a serious drawback - particularly when compared to the similarly priced Sage Instant Accounting and Payroll, for example.

However, with the release of this latest version, I trouble myself no more. The team has clearly been busy over the last 18 months, and MYOB 8 now sports a revamped look and feel, alongside many new features and enhancements.

The result is a product that now has a built-in upgrade path into the multi-user zone of reference, and features all that a small business might need to run its accounts and payroll straight out of the box.

Ledger bender

For those unfamiliar with MYOB, the software manages all of the functions of a serious sales ledger, purchase ledger and nominal ledger-based accounting system. You can keep track of customer credit accounts, posting manually prepared invoices and credit notes. Returns can be settled, payments received and printed invoices raised for both stock and service items.

The purchase ledger handles similar features for suppliers' accounts, while a cheque book module provides direct cash, bank and credit card facilities. You can reconcile accounts on-screen, and produce cash flow reports based on actual receipts and payments due over a user-specified number of days.

You can analyse all your postings to jobs and sub-jobs, which is useful for recording stage payments. Anything can be analysed to a job, including nominal journals, and later you can interrogate the job file for profit and loss details or expense tracking. Reimbursable expenses can eventually be added to the customer invoice - with a choice of mark-up settings if you wish.

Not quite a full order-processing situation, but MYOB can store sales and purchase invoices as Pending. This means you can raise purchase and sales orders and the system will keep a track of the stock for you.

Just about anything you can post into MYOB can be set to repeat at various intervals, according to your taste. This neatly handles standing orders and recurring sales and purchase invoices, not to mention regular monthly journals for the accountant. These standing journals can then appear in a to-do list. MYOB scores extra points for wrapping all this in a user interface that sets the standard for accessibility. You can drill down from any screen until you reach the original posting, at which point you can change anything you like and re-post. This feature can be password-protected and you can set a time limit for backdated postings - an ideal feature to save disrupting last quarter's VAT without thinking.

On

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the payroll

Perhaps the most interesting new feature found in MYOB Accounting 8 is the fully integrated payroll, not just a set of nominal journals as in previous versions. The MYOB payroll handles PAYE/NI calculations, and everything is linked straight to the nominal accounts instantly. As with any payroll system, MYOB allows you to set up your own pay and deduction categories, enter accumulated pay history, decide on pay frequencies and so on.

Unlike Sage Instant and many other payroll systems, you don't scroll through employees in a dedicated payroll environment. In use, the Paycheque window acts like a normal cheque-writing screen, except that the fields are preset for PAYE deductions and earnings. You simply set up a recurring option for each employee pay cheque, process when required, changing the amount to fit the actual hours worked each payday.

MYOB hasn't skimped here, either. You get full P60, P11 reports and P35 deductions working sheets. At the end of a PAYE month, the P32 report even tells you what to pay the taxman. Of course, all this data is instantly fed to the nominal ledger - so your accounts are bang up to date.

A few more enhancements to the basic MYOB Accounting also cater for calendar-monthly debt ageing, and a choice of days between aged periods - handy if you don't fit into the standard 30, 60 and 90-aged debt routine.

The user interface has also been re-organised a little, and more importantly you can add multi-user capability if you need it later. There's no limit on the number of transactions the data file can hold anymore, and separate operatives can perform different tasks from multi-user workstations - a built-in upgrade path at last.

In an attempt to avoid showering a business with unrequired features, MYOB has added a Plus version to the basic product. This costs an additional £100, but you do get a sizeable addition in the form of professional time management. MYOB Plus caters for time-slip entry by individual employees, across any number of user-definable activities. If you run a service-based company, you can now track work in progress, review what to bill on-screen, and transfer the chargeable time to an invoice.

The Plus version also adds enhanced stock control with user-defined fields such as Location or Size or Colour, individual customer price break discount matrixes for each product, high colour images and longer descriptions. This gets the stock file e-commerce ready for eventually publishing to the Web.

Finally, there's a major multicurrency re-write, including full exchange-rate manipulation, with profit or loss situations on currency conversion fluctuations automatically catered for. If trading in foreign currencies, you'll need asset accounts for tracking foreign debtors, bank accounts where foreign currency will be deposited, a liability account for deposits received and so on.

MYOB has always been a well-specified accounting package for the small business, but Accounting and Accounting Plus 8 represent excellent value. The addition of the payroll means Sage Instant has a major competitor now at a very similar price, and with more accounting poke by far. QuickBooks probably looks the nearest in terms of features, but compared to MYOB it appears overly sophisticated and unwieldy for the novice user.

MYOB 8 is well-priced and the features are accessible enough for the office at home, while time billing, a multi-user capability and foreign currency handling make it likely to last your business well into the future.