Welcoming isn't a word usually associated with accounting programs, but MYOB Accounting Plus 15 comes about as close to living up to that description as a financial application is going to get.
The program comes in two versions. MYOB Accounting offers payroll, stock control and contact management features in addition to standard sales, purchases and nominal ledgers. Its more expensive, multi-user Accounting Plus sibling, reviewed here, adds time billing and multi-currency support to the mix.
Whichever application you choose, even the rustiest bookkeeper can get started quickly thanks to a suite of setup assistants that guide you through creating accounts and ledgers suitable to your type of business.
The familiar cartoon-like main window separates the accounting process into eight command centres. These sit above links to functions displayed as a chart to represent the flow of money through your business.
All the way through, Accounting Plus masks standard accounting double entries, although you'll still need to manually enter year-end adjustments such as asset depreciation. Fortunately, the program is backed by excellent paper documentation that explains these procedures clearly.
Accounting Plus isn't all good looks. Few other competing applications - and certainly none in its price range - can match the reporting and analysis options, which permit a quick overview of anything from cash flow to contacts you haven't been in touch with for a while. A further clutch of reports has been added to version 15, most relating to payroll liabilities and stock summaries. Handily, most reports let you drill down rom the headline figures to the individual transactions that make them up. Reports can be grouped in batches and run for any month, quarter or year to date periods.
Of all the changes in version 15, perhaps the most welcome is the improvement to budgeting. For a start, you no longer have to wait for the current financial year to end before you can set a budget for the upcoming one. A new Prepare Budgets window lets you view and set budgets for all profit and loss and balance sheet accounts in a single window, and a couple of excellent features make budget creation both speedier and more accurate. A 'Copy Previous Years Actual data' button lets you base your budgets on proven figures by extracting the current financial year's actual account figures and placing them in the corresponding position in the upcoming year's budget. Similarly, a single click lets you copy one month's budgeted figure to all remaining months of the year.
As well as HTML, PDF and text, most reports can be exported directly to Excel, and you can build personalised letters from Word templates using details culled from Accounting Plus's Cards list, the contact database. This effectively allows you to use the application as a contact manager in its own right. Thanks to AppleScript support, it's even possible to automate import and export functions. The ability to import budget details from an Excel spreadsheet is another example of Accounting's excellent integration with Microsoft Office.
It's worth noting how much more flexible stock control is in this version. You can keep a record of stock at multiple locations and shift items between them from a single window. Awkward transposition errors are avoided as only the location - not the total stock level - can be changed here. Of less critical importance is the way you can now choose to sell items that aren't yet in in-hand - kept perhaps at a secondary location - and account for incoming stock even if you don't yet know how much it will cost.
The best productivity enhancement is the appearance of the Enter timesheet command in both the Time billing and Payroll command centres. Details that you enter on payroll timesheets can be used to build time billing, saving duplication of effort.
In Version 15 details of closed transactions can now be kept for up to seven years - previously, creating a new financial year automatically wiped closed transactions from the books.
There is one disappointment: lack of improved online integration. Although you can submit payroll tax forms to the Inland Revenue, you can't do the same for VAT or corporation tax returns.
Accounting Plus is the best financial application on the market, although sole traders should consider MYOB's cheaper Accounting program. Upgraders, on the other hand, shouldn't feel obliged to fork out for this version.
Author: Tom Gorham
MYOB Accounting Plus 15