The Hickensian

5.12.07 Return of MYOB

12 comments
Tagged with: myob, osx, rants

Last week I was contacted by the Mac team at MYOB, the software that I briefly wrote about 2 years ago. There isn’t a lot in that post, but it’s negative, and apparently showing up rather high in UK only searches for ‘MYOB’.

The chap I spoke to explained how much MYOB had improved since v11 (the last one I used), so I felt it was my duty to at least give a trial (even though I am now hiring a Bookkeeper for my finances). I offered to hide the original post while I did so, as I felt really sorry for them. After giving v16 a spin, I made the post live again (which is why it suddenly popped up again as the latest post on Monday – doh!) and here is the feedback I sent to them:

Installation took over 40 mins! A .sit file had to be expanded, followed by a .dmg and then an installer where the location had to be chosen. First of all, stuffit no longer comes with Mac by default (so I had to download an application to open the .sit file), a .zip would’ve been better. Secondly, Mac users are used to just dragging and dropping an application into their applications folder – simple and straightforward. Many developers are now doing away with drive images, and simply zipping the application itself, which is even better. The Aladdin installer not only took ages to install, but looked very dated. The instruction text looked like OS 9!

Once installed, it launched the ‘whats new’ page in Safari, rather than respecting my default browser setting.

Opening the app and creating a new company file, the Assistant featured a badly aliased and compressed oval image. Form fields are the OS 9 style text (Geneva?), and go to Anti-Aliased Lucida Grande once filled in – looks horrible!

The ‘Command Centre’ interface is still the same horrible mess from v11. It still looks and acts like a PC application that has been ported to OS 9, and then to X. Functions and features are still hidden behind layers of tabs and windows and dropdowns. Aside from a new application icon (which is a bit of a confused mess in itself) I see no interface changes that make this look and act more like a Mac application.

Address Book integration. The fact that it has to ‘sync’ addresses, and then warns you to back up addressbook data meant I didn’t want to proceed! How unnerving is that? I use Billings to do my invoices, and that simply uses an Address Book group (which it creates automatically) to read addresses from – no syncing needed!

The invoice template customisation is better, but nowhere near good enough. There are also no controls for things like line-spacing

Apparently iCal integration is coming, but as it isn’t yet available, I can’t comment on that. Quite frankly I didn’t want to go any further.

Overall, MYOB still feels un-intuitive, messy and distinctly un Mac-like. Maybe these things don’t matter much to the rest of MYOB’s market, but they do to me.

If you want to see a Mac finance app done right, look at the wonderful Billings, my invoice application and job timer of choice. It’s everything that MYOB isn’t: usable and native.

Comments | RSS

No.1

∞ Ed Molyneux said 829 days ago:

It was frustration with Mac offerings, and in fact the state of accounting software in general (serious overkill for our limited freelancer requirements, incomprehesible accounting language) which led us to build FreeAgent – “Streamlined Money Management for UK Freelancers, Contractors and Consultants”.

We’re really keen to hear what Mac integration we should add – we have iCal feeds of invoice and tax dates already on the to-do list. Lots more we need to do to address your requirements (more invoice templates, Address Book Integration). But we’re moving forward fast.

‘Nuff said. No plug. You just might find it interesting to check out what we’re up to.

No.2

∞ Craig M said 829 days ago:

We use MYOB UK Mac v16 on a daily basis at the marketing co I work at. The Accountants like the features and say it compares favorably with Sage for the way we work (although I agree with the comments on integration and UI).

BUT and it’s a big but, when you move away from a couple of seats, the networking is quite quite appalling. If we have more than a couple of account handlers on the system trying to work with POs or invoices, it slows to a crawl. The Accounts dept are seriously handicapped by speed and doing a search or report is painful, coffee time sort of slow. We’d love to use it for timesheets and project management, but it’s just impossible. We’ve ended up moving most of our project management off MYOB into a intranet/dashboard widget sys we’ve built ourselves, and doing imports into MYOB for the accounting/invoicing/PO/VAT stuff.

MYOBs tech guys give us three options – move everyone who uses MYOB to PC (er, yeah, right), run MYOB in a cytrix frame (good grief, welcome to 1994), or wait for a mythical “Mac optimised” version that is supposedly in testing.

We’re considering our options as we expand, but sticking with MYOB isn’t really one of them. Studiometry seems just as buggy in a realbasic way, so we might end up going the FileMaker developed bespoke route – we have a few FM dev contacts and the market is just gagging for a decent mac UK accounts solution.

(apologies for the long reply)

No.3

∞ Tim said 829 days ago:

What was MYOB’s response?

Perhaps with the emergence of Bento we will see some better off-the-shelf solutions. I’m a self-employed consultant and have used Macs since time began and regularly review all the Mac products available and none of them really cut it for me. Billings is about the best, but its young and doesn’t do some of what I want it to do. Unbelievably, I’m using a set of FileMaker Pro 3 templates I wrote in the 80’s. I have to keep an iBook running Classic so that I can run FP3! As Craig M says the market is still wide open …

No.4

∞ Emily said 829 days ago:

I’m one half of a web design partnership and tried out MYOB over the summer, but finally applied for a refund. Apart from the frustratingly unintuitive interface that looks like a PC GUI, and the hours I spent trying to figure out how to customise the appearance of the invoices, I ultimately gave up because the invoices looked so bad.

A good looking invoice is ESSENTIAL for a creative design agency and in spite of my initial joy over my 8 Step process (Link to my forum post about bookkeeping with MYOB) being condensed into 1 step, I just couldn’t accept the appearance of the invoices. As you mention Jon, the line spacing really needs attention, but also – the table headers could use some options to set background colours. I could also never get my logo to display to a satisfactory quality.

I have tried Billings and it is a wonderful interface and great for time-tracking and invoicing, but it doesn’t have the bookkeeping facility that I need.

So, I am currently in the process of trialling Business Accountz, which was only released in 2006 and is continually being developed with regular releases of update patches. However, although it is half the price of MYOB I don’t think that justifies the sense I get from working with this that I’m providing a free user testing service. No wait, let ME pay YOU to test YOUR product for you!

Still, the user interface is much easier to look at, and more intuitive than MYOB, and with a great deal of patience, the invoices can be customised to look pretty good. But there is no address book or iCal or Mail integration. And I’m currently battling with some errors I’ve encountered with the Designer GUI while styling my invoice….

SIGH

I guess I need to look forward to the day when I can afford to pay a bookkeeper like you Jon.

No.5

∞ Tim said 829 days ago:

I’ve been tempted by Bsuiness Accountz on more than one occasion – it looks to do everything I need and the developer seems very responsive on their forum (when you can find it). However, no ‘try before you buy’ facility has put me off so far and Emily’s experiences are not helping!

No.6

∞ Daniel Miller said 829 days ago:

Crazy pagerank: a blessing and a curse….

No.7

∞ Eric Barstad said 829 days ago:

Overall, I think financial apps are pretty lackluster for the Mac. I’m using Billings, too, which I love, but for bookkeeping I’ve just been using a spreadsheet. For banking, I actually run Quicken through VMWare Fusion. I also have Quickbooks for Windows, which I’ll probably start using again now that I have a better understanding of accounting, and since Intuit’s Mac offerings seem substandard.

No.8

∞ Gerben said 828 days ago:

Looks like they take Search Engine Reputation Management more serious than writing good software.

No.9

∞ Gordon Mackay said 828 days ago:

Ah, Billings looks SWEET! Thanks for that!

I really have a pet loathing for Mac apps that are not native… to me it often seems like the developing company has rushed to compete in both the Windows and OS X market with a generally sub-standard, awkward and ugly Windows hybrid app which only just runs on a Mac.

Pathetic really.

No.10

∞ Loz Gray said 828 days ago:

I was desperately dissappointed that I couldn’t comment on your old post when it appeared to tell you to try Billings as its brilliant. Thank god you are, in fact, using it. Accounts wise I just use an Excel spreadsheet – it’s just easier.

No.11

∞ Alan Bristow said 828 days ago:

Hey Jon,

Ok, it doesn’t try to be a time tracker and an invoicing app’, but as a past user of ‘On The Job’ and ‘Billings’ for tracking time, I can recommend http://www.mediaatelier.com/TimeLog4/ so thoroughly that you wouldn’t see a spot of gravy on my plate afterwards.

Can’t invoice from within TimeLog? That can’t be right can it? Yes, if the ability to get data out is beauty in software execution itself. And one other reason I am loving TimeLog so much they may take out a restraining order, is the ease with which you can reliably capture time and comment on the captured time and loads and loads more in the form of superb design over click-able doohickeys.

I am not affiliated with TimeLog and do have a note on this envelope to remind me to write a post about how good it it, but reading your post about time capture software forced me to comment. Btw, these guys do some good looking and sounding Mac accounting software: http://www.cognito.co.nz/

Cheers, -Alan

No.12

∞ Chris Ivens said 828 days ago:

I have to concur with Alan there. I’ve used Timelog for a few years now and it just got better with the latest version for Leopard. You can now export an xml file of your time. I’ve not used it yet but I’m itching to. Also given that timelog uses iCal to store its info it can be shared across to other machines as read-only so if some bod in an office wants to see combined times for a job they can do so just as easily as seeing one person’s.

I too am not affiliated with TimeLog but I really like it. As for my accounts, I just have to leave it to my accountant who for some reason refuses to be paid. Not many of those around I bet.