MYOB Essentials

How does this home-grown Aussie accounting platform stack up in the cloud age?

MYOB has been a dominant provider of Australian small business accounting software for decades. With the 2020 release of MYOB Essentials, you get the latest cloud-based tech in an accounting package that draws from the maker’s long history of supporting SMEs. With functionality to cover micro and growing business, Essentials offers all of the key components required to remain compliant and competitive if you’re doing business in Australia. The platform rolled out a new look and feel in March of this year, which new subscribers will see immediately upon registering; existing users should expect to see the upgrade rolled out to their accounts before September.

Every small business needs a strong understanding of its cash flow – ideally, you want to use a combination of bank feeds, auto-matching and rule based allocations to make the task of not only tracking your cash but accounting for your business transactions very easy. Essentials covers this base extremely well, highlighting the experience MYOB brings to this vital function. It’s not quite perfect however, and while the new interface in the 2020 release of Essentials improves on the bank feed tech, dashboard cues don’t clearly show the status of your bank feeds. This can be a problem if your bank feeds fail to update.

Invoices are customisable, so you can give your customers a form that’s tailored to your business and style. The ‘In Tray’ feature is a great addition, providing a full online storage solution for your supplier invoices and documents. You can create transactions directly from an inbound email or via the MYOB Capture app, which scans the contents of the document and prefills detail like the invoice total, reference number. This streamlined process will not only cut the time you take doing the books, but stores everything in one place for easy recall.

Budget Management is a tool that will offer invaluable insights into future performance scenarios. Essentials standard report set covers a lot of bases, with a fair amount of customisation and output options. This latest update has implemented some welcome improvements in the reporting selections, which continue the clean lines of the interface into the reporting output.

With the backing of such a large service provider, it’s perhaps no huge surprise that that MYOB is able to deliver Essentials consistently and reliably. With data hosting based on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in Australia, and a large on- call support team, you can have reasonable confidence that your important business information is always going to be safe and accessible.

Essentials has come a long way in recent years and is a polished contender in the cloud-based accounting arena. Small businesses need a tool that can streamline processes and save them time while delivering business intelligence with ease – Essentials measures up to this mark, with a solid feel and helpful, context-sensitive support throughout.

KURT BEST

“Every small business needs a strong understanding of its cash flow – ideally, you want to use a combination of bank feeds, auto-matching and rule based allocations to make the task of not only tracking your cash but accounting for your business transactions very easy.”

Clear and concise, MYOB Essentials makes the grade for ease of use and feature richness.