MYOB Live Accounts Review

MYOB has a renowned name for accounting software in the Australian marketplace. MYOB has a reputation for making bookkeeping work for small and medium enterprises as simple and easy as possible. MYOB Live Accounts (see more here) a relatively new product from MYOB seeks to simplify bookkeeping processes further than their products do currently as it faces some serious competition from Xero, Saasu and Quickbooks Online who all have online product offerings. MYOB Live Accounts does not yet offer all the same functionality that is available from MYOB’s desktop range of products Accountright and Accountedge but is continually being improved as new updates are rolled out.

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MYOB Live Accounts is capable of assisting most small and medium company businesses in the course of their daily business management. Doing the accounts, banking, and payroll in a more efficient and practical manner than other alternatives. Let’s now take a look in detail at some of the features which MYOB Live Accounts currently does offer.

Help Centre: The Help center enables MYOB users to get started with their new accounting file by assisting in creating an invoice, entering an expense, adding a new contact, and setting up a new bank account and linking the account to your bank in order to facilitate automatic bank feeds.

Invoices: The invoices page allows users to create, edit and delete customer invoices. Payments made by customers are also processed on this page, as well as creating and returning credits, viewing the progress on sales, and the printing or sending of invoices to customers. The ability to customize invoices as required is also made possible from here.

Expenses: From the expenses page, a user can view, create, edit and delete expenses as required. Users can also process purchases to be accounted for and paid at a later date plus set up items that your company buys or leases. Users need to be careful as to the tax code they use when applying it against a purchase or expense as this will determine how MYOB will report the expense for BAS purposes.

Contacts: From the contacts menu users are able to add a contact as a customer or supplier.  By doing this a user can store and view information about each contact, and track each contacts previous transactions. The type of information that can be stored for an individual contact include details such as email, telephone, fax and address. The current status of each contact is also shown in the format of a list.

Banking: From this option a user can view the history of account transactions for any given bank account where the transactions have been reconciled. For the ease of use and convenience of users MYOB Live Accounts can connect to your bank and download transactions automatically or alternatively if you are not comfortable with this for security reasons users can download a transactions listing from their bank account in a compatible format generally .csv and upoad the file into MYOB Live Accounts. Users can also set up bank rules to enable bank reconciliations to be completed more quickly, this works where periodical transactions occur MYOB will then treat the transactions as written in the rules you create automatically.

Reports: MYOB Live Accounts has some useful reporting capabilities including business performance reports like a Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet, Sales reports and Expense reports. These reports can be created at any point in time to give users up to date information for their business. MYOB also provides all the relevant payroll reports in order to successfully manage employees and an employer’s end of year obligations. Reports can be printed or saved in a .pdf or .csv type format.

Payroll: The payroll features in MYOB Live Accounts enable users to satisfactorily manage and track all ongoing employer obligations. The payroll screen can be used to set up new employees, make payments and track entitlements as required for employees. MYOB Live Accounts enables users to create a pay run and will calculate the tax to be withheld, superannuation to be paid and entitlements accrued for the pay period for each employee. Provisions have also been made by MYOB for the end of year processing of Payment Summaries or Group Certificates as they are also known.

Conclusion: MYOB Live Accounts is an efficient, time saving accounting software system that will save users time and money as the subscription price is an attractive selling point for the program. However, our opinion at Darcy Bookkeeping & Business Services is that the product is still a work in progress and lacks some great features offered by some of its product rivals. You can find more information here for MYOB Live Accounts or if you require MYOB Live Accounts bookkeeping assistance click on the link.

Quickbooks Online Review

Online accounting software or Cloud Accounting Software options continue to grow as an increasing number of service providers offer new and intuitive accounting software solutions. Quickbooks which has been a long term key market player in the accounting software sector in Australia has released their own cloud accounting software solution named Quickbooks Online. Throughout this article we will take a look at what their new accounting software offering brings to the market.
Try Before You Buy
Quickbooks offer a 30 day free trial and offer their accounting software at a lower price compared to the majority of other service providers in the marketplace. The trial version gives a user full functionality of everything Quickbooks Online has to offer. At which point after the 30 days expire you have the opportunity to subscribe or the Quickbooks Online (visit their website) will deactivate the trial.
Dashboard or Home Page
One of the main features of Quickbooks that distinguishes it from the rest is its simple navigation interface. Once logged in, a user will automatically be redirected to a the home screen containing a Click Map – similar to the Quickbooks Desktop offering which gives the user who may lack understanding of general bookkeeping processes, an understanding of the typical process from sale through to reconciliation and purchase through to reconciliation. The Home page also contains a list of Quick links for easy navigation to tasks which are undertaken regularly, a list of recent transactions and a tasks and messages section where Quickbooks will offer hints and advice and enable the user to add task reminder to be attended to at a later date. For user convenience Quickbooks Online allows users the ability to customise this page as the user sees fit.
Sales Function
Quickbooks Online sales features are still fairly basic but will support the average small and medium sized business that don’t need to account for inventory. Customer set up is fairly fast and the ability to create and send an invoice on the run is a definite upside. A big plus is the ability to use Quickbooks Online to accept credit card payments needing no additional software, obviously additional fees do apply as per normal merchant transactions. A feature which is really mandatory these days is the ability to customise invoices to suit which is available to users. The downside at this stage is the invoicing function is still very basic which does not allow users to capture additional information that they may want to create reports on at a later stage.
Purchases Function

The purchasers function in Quickbooks Online will allow a user to do all the standard functions which a user requires to run the business. Some key features are:

• The ability to write notes on an invoice which will not be seen by the client when sent.
• The ability to set credit limits for Vendors
• The ability to add attachments to each invoice.
• The ability to raise a purchase order and later convert to a bill.

The screens are easy to navigate and not cumbersome with the detail which needs to be provided in order to execute each step.
Banking

In our opinion the greatest achievement of Quickbooks Online Accounting Software which will save you time and money is the ability to upload bank files to hasten the bank reconciliation process. Unfortunately as this is not a product originated in Australia, this feature is not offered to customers with accounts in a typical Australian bank. This is a short coming which hopefully will be rectified very soon.
Reporting
Another great feature offered by Quickbooks Online is the very visual and simple reporting layouts. Divided into sections for company, customers and employees, banking, accountant and taxes and lists the reports provide well-organised up-to date information that is required on a day to day basis to effectively manage a business. All the typical reports are available such as the profit and loss, balance sheet, ageing payable and receivables are available but beyond this Quickbooks Online offer the use of graphs which was a strength of their desktop offering.
Conclusion
Overall we would class this product as a work in progress due to the fact it is still a relatively new product and has not had the opportunity to have a great deal of customer feedback in order to shape and improve their offering. There are still a number of short comings particularly in relation to the bank feeds, however as this product is improved Quickbooks Online will certainly be a product to look out for in the future. For further information get in contact with this bookkeeping service provider.

Local Bookkeepers For The Sunshine Coast

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Outsource Your Bookkeeping

In today’s world of continual cost cutting and innovation businesses are trying to determine how they can successfully reduce overheads, increase profits and deliver a better product or service than last year to stay ahead of the competition.  One way businesses are achieving this successfully is through the principle of outsourcing.
Outsourcing has penetrated nearly every major identifiable business department in the western world whether it be sales, customer service, advertising, production and even bookkeeping, accounting and financial management. This trend in itself proves that the expertise is there so why not seek it out and take advantage of it? Well, the reason that businesses often do not consider this as an option is management do not want to risk compromising the products or services that they deliver to customers.
If outsourcing can be achieved successfully at a basic level without compromising the quality of a business’s products or services can this be done across all business units? Time has proven that outsourcing can be achieved with a level of success as everyone will have experienced the product of outsourced sales or customer service when engaging multi-national and international companies. But What if a business considered outsourcing the bookkeeping and accounting functions in its operations? Could a business unit that is so critical to everyday operations and carries a high level of information sensitivity be successfully outsourced?
When somebody thinks of the term “outsource” they generally think overseas but this is not always necessary to achieve the results that are sought after. This is true especially if someone were looking to outsource a business function which requires a greater level of knowledge and expertise of national law and customs they would feel more comfortable outsourcing domestically to a business which specialises in that particular need. In today’s marketplace in Australia the domestic market is very competitive in the industry of accounting and bookkeeping services.
Today if a business requires personnel to execute bookkeeping or accounting functions that business would typically first look to employ somebody internally to fulfill this need. However there are a number of factors that should be considered if a business is seriously evaluating whether to hire internally or engage an external accounting or bookkeeping firm to fulfill the immediate and foreseeable financial needs of the business.
Overheads are one of the greatest considerations of taking on extra staff. Beyond what the basic wage and entitlements are of employing somebody you also need to consider other employment costs. Other employment costs which a business takes on generally with a new employee are the recruitment and training costs, staff amenities (tea and coffee etc.), additional office space, cleaning costs for the additional office space. The list could continue on but these are some of the main costs incurred when taking on new staff. But what if a business could engage someone to take care of the businesses bookkeeping and accounting requirements without having to introduce any of the overheads?
Engaging an external domestic bookkeeping or accounting firm could be a game changer for many small and medium sized businesses. Having a professional bookkeeper or accountant that can pick up the workload of a business without introducing the overheads listed above is probably something that many businesses have not even considered and have just come to expect holistic employee costs a bi-product of doing business. This does not need to be the case though as we will now explore the advantages of outsourcing the bookkeeping and accounting functions of a business.
The advantages of engaging an external or public bookkeeper or accountant for the financial requirements of a business are as follows. A public accountant or bookkeeper must keep up professional development requirements in order to maintain their registration with the tax Practitioners Board. Both accountants and bookkeepers are required to have specific qualifications in order to practice in the industry this ensures that the service which is delivered is generally of a high standard. In comparison to this internal bookkeepers or accountants require neither in order to execute their job function.

If you are considering outsourcing your bookkeeping follow the link for more information.