Product Reviews

Accounting might not be big business on the Mac, but MYOB's range of financial applications has dominated the small business market on the Mac platform for years. However, with increased competition from web-based services such as Blinksale (blinksale.com) at the low end to Netsuite, Accounting Plus 16 now has something to live up to.

As with previous versions of the program, there are three flavours of Accounting: the budget BusinessBasics, aimed at sole traders, lacks stock control or payroll functions; the standard version, Accounting; and the high-end Accounting Plus version, which differs from the standard version by offering multi-user and multi-currency support, as well as advanced stock options - it's this version we review here.

Once you've navigated an awkward install procedure - it thankfully doesn't follow through with its threat to require a restart after installation - Accounting Plus 16 looks familiar. From the friendly setup assistant that tailors your accounts list to the chunky Command Centre icons representing the different parts of your business, there are few visible changes from previous versions.

In some ways, this is no bad thing, as wholesale rethinking of a financial application's interface is generally dangerous, but some elements - notably the Command Centre's fixed window size - look glaringly dated.

However, there are important - if not groundbreaking - functional improvements to compensate. The handiest is Card Sync, which links Mac OS X Address Book contacts to customers and suppliers in your MYOB card list. In practice, we found syncing slightly more awkward than we expected. We had no trouble importing MYOB contacts

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into Address Book, but as MYOB requires contacts to be divided into customer, employee, personal and supplier categories, it creates four different Address Book groups to manage these. This means a workaround when synchronising the other way: Address Book entries are ignored when first syncing, and then you have to add your Address Book contacts to those groups after they're created so they can be synchronised.

Elsewhere, improvements are more straightforward. Version 16 combats one stock control headache: how to order goods from a supplier based on an incoming order. You can now convert the contents of a sales quote or order into a supplier purchase order by clicking a Create PO button in the quote window. The purchase order is pre-populated with the line items from the sales quote. Handily, only those stock items you have specified that you buy are transferred, and the purchase order's Journal Memo field keeps a track of the original purchaser's details, simplifying stock allocation on arrival.

There are two other significant enhancements. You can undo bank reconciliations: a basic Reconciliation Undo tool even lets you unwind multiple reconciliations. You'll need to perform the whole reconciliation from scratch again if you undo, but it's an option worth having. And we really liked the new payroll verification report, which effectively lets you preview a payroll before running it.

Disappointingly, Accounting Plus still hasn't fully grasped the concept of e-commerce - online integration is still limited to the submission of certain payroll forms. More importantly, Accounting 16 is still PowerPC-based. In practical terms, the lack of native Intel support isn't crippling - the program hardly taxes the processor and runs perfectly well under Rosetta - but as this is the second full release of the software since the announcement of the Intel transition, it's still annoying. MYOB tells us it plans a June release of a Universal update.

These gripes shouldn't detract from the fact that given its existing multi-user and multi-currency features, ease of use and price, there still isn't a better accounting choice than MYOB Accounting Plus if you're a medium-sized businesses. Nevertheless, that doesn't mask the disappointment that, for existing users, version 16 is an upgrade you can afford to skip.