5
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Why I Hate MYOB
Pondered by Nat
quite a long while ago…
After a day of Minding My Own Business, I am starting to wonder if MYOB is almost a joke. Someone, somewhere must be laughing, because someone, somewhere is making a fortune off crummy OLD software that disobeys virtually every usability and design rule ever created, and not in a good way.
I now have massively increased respect for the battles Tim has faced in the past when getting our accounts into order. The only reason I even signed up for a trial was that we have such faith in web 2.0 that we've been patiently waiting for a solution while our accounts sit patiently waiting to get done, and we're at a point that it's now or business finance disorganisation forever more.
I would like to bitterly and sarcastically 'thank':
- web 2.0 for sticking to your tag clouds and not building something with a little practical use
- MYOB for using my all-time most despised marketing lies to sell a sub standard product to small business owners.
Hello, my name is Natalie, I have a business called 
September 5th, 2006 at 5:58 am
Amen. And if you’ve had the pleasure of Quickbooks, you’ll know its just as bad.
What irritates me the most is how its completely and utterly disconnected from a task-based UI, especially as 80% (at least) of its users will only touch it at most once a month.
grrrrr (the pain is recent).
September 5th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I once had a friend say to me, No offense (since I was an accountant) but the problem with this accounting software is that it was *designed by an accountant*. He was talking about a particular front-office interface to the firm’s sales order entry system. I was in fact offended at the time but in the intervening 20 years I’ve found his underlying assertion to be essentially correct: Accountants are control freaks who (left to their own devices) write bloated software systems with overly cumbersome data entry controls.
It looks like http://www.objacct.com is developing nice accounting SaaS though (but, unfortunately, with seemingly more of a middle-market focus). And, unfortunately, I must also say it doesn’t look as nice as EvolutionOne did!
September 5th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Have you tried Microsoft Money2007? It seems quite alright to me.
September 5th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
We try to stay away from Microsoft as much as possible, due to past experiences of being ripped off for bad software ;)
This is just a trial version so I'm not sure we'll stick with it, hopefully something pops up in the next three months…
September 6th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
After a year struggling with QuickBooks, and then a year wrestling with MYOB, I started using a book keeper, just to firewall me from such poorly designed software.
This has its own frustrations since my business is tiny, and I could easily manage my own accounts if I had software that was easy to use and understand.
There’s no pressure on MYOB to improve its product. MYOB earns significant revenue from charging quite a bit for telephone support and training courses, so why would they want to make it easier to use?
One big problem with building a web 2.0 small business accounting platform would be that accounting practice and tax law varies so much from country to country. A product developed for one market would be unusable anywhere else. That limits the customer growth and revenue for the developer.