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.