MYOB Accounting Plus

Supplier: MYOB Australia 1300 555 111
Internet: www.myob.com.au
Price: Full version: $535; upgrade: $265
Requirements: Pentium 200MHz; 64MB RAM; 200MB hard drive; Windows 98 or above; Internet Explorer 5.5.

Verdict: A long list of new features and enhancements will be welcomed by users, however the new activation process will not.

QuickBooks Premier 2004

Supplier: Quicken Australia 1300 784 253
Internet: www.quicken.com.au
Price: Full version: $1399; upgrade: $665

Requirements: Pentium 200MHz; 64MB RAM; 230MB hard drive; Windows 98/Me/2000/XP; Internet Explorer 6.0 (supplied).

Verdict: A top notch accounting program with something for everyone.

The annual battle of the small business accounting programs has flared again as both MYOB and Quicken roll-out their 2004 editions. While both have made several tweaks and additions to last year’s models, the main difference this time around is in MYOB’s new product activation model.

While many users will consider it overkill, there is little doubt that MYOB and others have suffered as a result of software piracy over the years and this time MYOB is determined to stop it.

When you first launch any of the MYOB range you’ll be required to activate the company file you are either creating or upgrading. Initially you can create up to five company files but you can still only install the software on one office PC, unless you have Premier or Premier Enterprise, which come with multi-user licences.

However, you can request a further five free company activations and install MYOB on a laptop or home computer provided it’s not used simultaneously with the one in the office. Once you have activated a company you will be required to confirm you are the registered user of the file every four to nine months, either online or by phone.

While you have 90 days to activate a new company file, you only have 30 days to activate an upgraded one and, of course, it is essential to keep your activation details in a safe and easily accessible place.

Thankfully Quicken has yet to become so intrusive. Its version of Premier comes with five user licences and multiple versions of the same software on the one disk. For example, if you were a manufacturer with a shopfront, you could install the retail edition in the shop, the manufacturing and wholesale edition in the back office and give your bean-counter the accountant’s edition. Makes a lot of sense.

MYOB prefers to sell you separate editions for retail outlets or accountants, although you can configure a standard edition to suit your business using the supplied templates.
While it may seem unfair to compare MYOB Accounting Plus with QuickBooks Premier, the main difference between the two is that QuickBooks Premier comes with five licences compared to Accounting Plus’s single licence. Apart from that both come with Payroll functions and the ability to track sales and GST, jobs, stock inventories and time.

Price-wise, QuickBooks Premier is comparable with MYOB Premier, which comes with three licences. Accounting Plus, on the other hand, is in the same price bracket as QuickBooks Pro.

MYOB has been the most industrious with its upgrade and there are more than two pages of additions, improvements and tweaks to Accounting Plus, although they are more practical fine tuning than major upgrades and the look and feel of the interface remains basically the same.

The payroll and superannuation tools have been made more flexible with employees now able to split their net pay in to three different bank accounts and to select from seven types of superannuation contribution.

Job management in MYOB has been improved with some simple tweaking such as increasing the job identifier to 15 characters enabling an easier recognised description.
The report filter has also been redesigned, making it easier to customise your reports and specify exactly the information you are seeking, and some simple cosmetic touches have been made to spruce up the previously austere MYOB forms by adding colour or images.
New customer and supplier ledgers provide better tracking of sales, payments and purchases and the banking interface has been improved so that the previously cumbersome method of recording transfers between accounts is now done in a single transaction.

A fair bit of work has been put into sprucing up the inventory tracking including the addition of a new capability to add and store full resolution images of stock items. One addition that a lot of small operators will find particularly useful is the new Statement of Cash Flows report, which can instantly identify cash movements.

All up it is an extensive list of improvements, many of them quite noticeable, and most of them worthwhile.

While Quicken Premier doesn’t have as many new features and enhancements, there are some that users will find particularly worthwhile. Also some of the new features apply only to industry-specific versions, such as changes to how membership dues are collected and tracked in the NonProfit Edition and how you record rent and other fees in the Property Management edition.

Of the general new features two new trackers are worth mentioning. The fixed asset trackers lets you keep a record of all of the business assets purchased, used and sold by entering details about the cost, selling price, serial number, warranty, and so on, while the new vehicle mileage tracker can be used like a log book for fringe benefits tax purposes or to invoice customers for your mileage.

The integration with Microsoft Office has been improved with a new Excel import tool that allows you to import items, accounts, customers and suppliers directly from Excel.
Multi-currency accounting has finally been added after being dropped at the last minute from the 2003 edition, allowing the creation of sales receipts, invoices, adjustments notes and sales orders in foreign currencies as well as entering and paying bills from foreign suppliers. Invoices in any currency can now include the total balance owed by a customer and statements can now be emailed as well as invoices.

None of this represents any major change, but it puts an added polish on an already slick product.