MYOB LiveAccounts

MYOB LiveAccounts is an online accounting software for small service companies in Australia and New Zealand. With LiveAccounts, users can create invoices, register expenses, and keep their bank accounts in sync with bank feeds. However due to few shortcomings in the system, we reckon MYOB LiveAccounts immature. Yet if you are ok with few “BUTS”, you can give it a shot.


Getting Started
MYOBS LiveAccounts has a very simple user interface, yet wrong wording of menu items, for example “Expenses” instead of  ”Purchases” makes you give a second thought.
On the dashboard, users can view unpaid invoices and aging summary as well as top 5 expenses.
Even though, MYOBS LiveAccounts offer setting up beginning balances by account, there is no way to assign Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable to customers and suppliers respectively, that makes data transfer from another system cumbersome.
Contacts
In MYOB LiveAccounts, users can add Customers and Suppliers quite easily. You can also indicate one contact as both supplier and customer at the same time. Of course, this won’t net off contact balance, but doing simple arithmetic is not a big deal to anyone.
Although MYOB LiveAccounts offers contacts batch upload, it is MYOB centric, that requires you to follow MYOB text file format.
Invoicing
MYOB LiveAccounts has a nice invoice add/edit form. However, MYOB LiveAccounts invoice form is limited, as if you need to include more than 5 line items, you would need to create two separate invoices. There was no way to add extra lines.
Also MYOB LiveAccounts failed in sorting/recognizing overdue invoices when we issued sales with back dates.  Also date pickers in invoices were misleading, as you cannot tell previous month days from the current. Just applying different colors could make such a huge difference.
Customer payments receipt form in MYOB LiveAccounts is much better than in Crunch, Kashoo, etc. However, it misses automated allocation of amount by invoices. Instead it is manual allocation process. Also, it was a bit lame to click “Enter payment” within an invoice, as we still had to select a customer in a new window.
Expenses
In MYOB LiveAccounts you can easily write check/make direct expenses. You can selected multiple expense categories and assign amounts.
However “Receive Money” which is under the same section, “Banking” was a bit bizarre. Even though we indicated bank account to handle deposit and a customer who we are receiving payment from, we were still required to choose “Allocated” account. It makes sense in “Spend Money” but it is not a piece of  ”Receive Money” form at all.
Reports
Hate it or love, but we give the best appreciation to apps with a really cool reporting that puts us on top of every single transaction, and some 5% favorite bias is a giveaway. But MYOB unlike most apps we have covered so far, do not present any reports on the web UI, instead users can only download PDF without ever seeing it, which means there is no drilling into any report. How does that sound, huh?
It is not only preferable, but a must to see something before you print it, and if you master the way LiveAccounts offer, you can pretty much play chess with closed eyes, just like my instructor of Corporate Finance.
Conclusion
MYOB LiveAccounts is a simple online accounting software we can recommend if your business is services with few transactions.