MYOB is not for me

I've come to the conclusion that MYOB is a crap application. I'm sure it does wonderful things for accountants and bookkeepers as well as business owners who like to control everything themselves, like myself. But it has to be one of the most unintuitive applications I have ever had the chance to use. Though, this is only my opinion. MYOB is a successful company so they're clearly doing something right. Then again, people are idiots and just put up with crap anyway, so I guess their success doesn't really show anything through my eyes.

Why do I have this opinion on MYOB? Well, I bought it end of last financial year because I thought it was about time I did something with my account management. I needed something better than a text file as an invoice template and my contacts and inventory control was hopeless. But after 5 months of using the application, having been trained in it by a great bookkeeper friend I can say that it is broken.

The application is not really intuitive at all. I can't sort my fields. I can't copy and paste, I can't seem to get my expenses to do anything. Expenses towards jobs aren't talking to the invoices I am trying to create. So I don't know how much I am really making on a project. Not to mention that my bank account according to MYOB is at -$4255.13 now. Even though I have been putting in my invoices as paid once they are. I would imagine that MYOB would be smart enough to see an invoice paid as income and add it to my account balance. NEIN!

Here's my idea of a better accounting package.

Create a job (not an invoice, you do that at the end of the sale - are you listening MYOB?). Add your expenses to that job, eveything you needed to buy and pay for to get the job done. Then when the job is complete, you open an invoice which closes the job, indicating that it is complete. Invoice is printed, emailed, whatever and sent to the client.

Sounds simple, but it's not. Apparently.

So I'm starting to think that maybe I didn't need MYOB after all. Or maybe I did just to find out that it wasn't for me. So I'll be searching for something new and better soon. Something that allows my bank balance to stay balanced. Something that helps me create an invoice when a job is finished not before it's started.

Right now I work around this by creating a quote for a client. Then I open my web browser and use an application that helps me keep track of jobs, allocate time to various tasks and enter items of purchase (expenses towards the job). Once I have all that and the job is complete, I go back to MYOB, change the quote to an invoice, print it and send it off.

The bad part is, if a job went over of under the quoted amount I can't easily edit the invoice before I've sent it. A business person I spoke to once about that told me it's better practice to create a new, separate invoice with the additional items/work. Makes sense, and I should probably do that. But in the interest of keeping it simple for me and my customers I just like having the one invoice for all the work. One bill, one payment.

I don't need things like stock control because I generally don't keep stock. I order in items my clients need at the time. I don't need half the things in MYOB. But it'd be nice to have things that a business could use. More specifically my business.

This is starting to sound like I need a customised solution. Maybe, but I doubt it. I don't see how my idea up the top is that big a deal. Or is it that I didn't spend enough with MYOB and I need to buy the updated package that has the features I need, with a host of a lot more I don't.

I had a thought last week. I wish I could develope software. I'd develope a web based accounting software package which is very much orientated around job management and invoicing.

It would be simple. Create a job. Allocate resources to it (time, purchases, etc), create the invoice when you're done. Print it, PDF it, do whatever you want with it. Make sure the client pays it within the terms. Surely it's not that hard.

pip