This is just a mini rant about MYOB. I hate MYOB. I hate it with a passion.
I remember seeing a demo of the original version of MYOB back in the late 1980s at the Apple Users’ Group in Sydney. I remember clearly the guy saying that he’d written it himself, although a quick refresher course on Wikipedia seems to suggest otherwise. Being a hard core Apple IIer at the time, my mates and I thought strange name, but its still Mac shit as we rather affectionately called it.
I didn’t realise that 20 years later I’d be using it myself. My first mistake was actually choosing MYOB to do my accounts. I was thinking that its been around a long time, so its probably the Microsoft Word of the accounting world. Wrong. My second mistake was buying the Windows version, assuming that the Windows version would be better than the Mac version, due to how many Windows MYOB users are out there. Wrong again.
MYOB has been around for around 20 years now, yet the user interface (of the Windows version) is almost unusable. I’ve been struggling with it for four years now, and every six months when an update comes out I think to myself “ahh, this will be the update where they refactor the UI”.
For those who don’t use MYOB, here’s a few of the stupid braindead things that it does. The developers should be ashamed of themselves letting a bad quality interface like this out the door.
- You cannot open more than one transaction at a time. I can’t remember invoice details off the top of my head, so I just copy the information from the previous invoice. Things like the item title, the purchase order number, and regular monthly invoice totals that never change. In MYOB you cannot open an old one and edit a new one at the same time. It’s impossible. You have to open the old one, write the details down on paper, then close that and create a new transaction, and hand enter what’s written on the paper. Unbelievable. There is absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be able to do this.
- Window content in many windows is fixed size with scroll bars. If you make the window larger, the scrolling pane inside the window stays the same size. So you end up with a scrolling list and hundreds of pixel of blank padding between it and the window edge. Why allow me to resize it if its not going to make any difference. There’s absolutely no reaon why the window shouldn’t resize its content. That’s what a window is for!
- If you’re creating a transaction and you click on account number cell, the first cell you edit in a new transaction, then it will not let you leave that cell unless you enter a valid account number. You cannot hit Esc to exit, Delete to clear it and exit or anything else. You have to enter a valid dashed account number to get past it, and this gives you a new line in your transaction which you don’t want. Hitting tab at the end of an item line also starts a new item and puts the cursor in the account number cell, causing the same problem when all you did is accidentally tab off the end of a line. And once the new unwanted entry is created, the only way to delete it is to erase the entire transaction.
- Key presses seem to be randomly assigned across the application. Its as if different people wrote different parts of the interface, and they all had their own master interaction style guide, which was different to anyone elses.
- Finding anything is impossible. There are so many menus which give no indication of whats inside them, and finding a particular function is very difficult when there could arguably be a half dozen different menu items where it might be hiding.
- The BAS tool is just plain buggy. It runs outside of MYOB, which is braindead considering it is the only really mandatory accounting task for every Australian business. Once you’ve entered your data, you can save it, but it only saves some information. It doesn’t save your name, phone number and business name for example, things that don’t change from BAS to BAS. So if you open up the current BAS from the saved version, it won’t print or validate, because your name and phone number, of all things, are missing!
I’ve had it, I really have. I understand its a Windows application, so my expectations are already pretty low, but they don’t even meet that. I understand that Windows developer are on the whole pretty stupid and ignorant, and that Windows developers can get away with not knowing what interaction design is. But if their millions of Windows users aren’t complaining about their shit UI, then surely their test team complain every time they have to jump through hooops just to enter test data for each release?
Using MYOB is like pulling teeth. Every month I sit down and wrestle with something that hasn’t even been designed properly for its primary audience: small businesses who need to do their accounts, quickly and easily, so they can get on any do things they do better, like building their business and satisfying their customers. The most basic requirement of MYOB I would have thought, aside from it actually doing accounts. And after 20 years, these idiots still can’t get it right.
I need to change, but I don’t know what to change to. I’d prefer a Mac app, which is what I should have done from the start, but are there any good ones for Australian accounting standards?
Rich – your “issues” caught our eye! Would you mind giving me a call (0421991898) or an email.
Did you follow them up? I hate the email interface in premier enterprise. MAPI is far harder to program than using Mail in .net
It’s about 10 fricken lines of code to send email in .net plus the problem of anti-malicious-code in most email programs is avoided.
Not yet, but I will. I know they mean well, but right now I’m a little too busy doing what I do best. i.e. not accountancy.
WELL SAID, Glad i’m not the only one, unfortunatly I had to buy this heap of S#!$ too.
I run a business in the IT field working on many programs each and every day, this IS THE ONLY one i need to stop and take an anger break with.
The interface is 20 years old was it programmed with a type writer as i feel like right hook punching the monitor to start a new invoice.
I have been trying to find how i delete a test invoice for over a hour now!!!!!!
Well my mistake was to take this peice of crap and make try to make it work for multi-users. OMG, Ive sween dialup that can work faster than MYOB over a network. Enterprise 4000 dollars :O. WTF…. Xpunlimited YAY. remote desktop login. Fast as. but no support for xp 64bit with xpunlimited. Ok windows 7, whoops big mistake. Boy am I sorry I upgraded my clients PC. If the clients are running xp and using outlook express, when sending an invoice though outlook, these clients don’t recieve their invoices. Then everytime the secretary sends the email you get a allow or deny prompt.
I giggled when I read this post as I jhave seen the secretary writing on post it notes and note pads. I have extensive knowledge of Quickbooks and find it so easy but MYOB is so backwards and their support staff blame M$ and viruses for the crap not working on Windows 7 and Outlook 2010. Word of the wise. Stay on XP until the death. You might compremise security but hell ya get some work done..
My 2 cents
I agree, myob is absolute crap! I changed to Xero and is far better than the abortion they call myob . . I still have a copy of myob and don’t even want to sell it, would rather burn it than put anyone through using it! Most small business owners I know have now changed after showing them what product we use now.
After reluctantly using MYOB for a number of years in a Windows environment I changed to MAC. With all other programs (Including MS Office 2011) this change has been an absolute pleasure. However MYOB on the MAC is the worst product I have ever used, it sends the system into overdrive. MYOB support in trying to find the problem demonstrated their true lack of expertise, claiming it works on other peoples MACs. The error logs I sent them clearly show that MYOB (Specifically Account Edge) is making illegal System Calls. They said they would look into it but it may take weeks or months before they could get back to me. That was the end of it from my persepctive. It is now uninstalled and I’m moving over to Xero. Interesting our CA firm applauds our decision and is recommending all their MYOB Clients move to Xero as they spend too long supporting MYOB. MYOB going-going-gone.
You do all know that a free spreadsheet can do everything these packages do?
Give your accountant a spreadsheet at the end of the year and they will tell you that you are a genius and you will save a fortune.
MYOB is a total waste of time. It stops working after a while and wants more money to work again via fake updates which are only re-validations to extort more money.
ITS A SCAM
The thing I ate about MYOB 11 right now is I stuffed up an import of customer files (300 of them) and there does not seem to be any way to delete them as a group – just one by one ….
MYOB is exasperating; it is so limited. You can’t export data in a tabular grid-like format; you can’t add card IDs to custom payslips; you can’t change the displayed title in a custom report; it uses a ridiculous crappy locked file-system based database which is prone to corruption etc etc etc etc.