M.Y.O.B. Plus (for Mind Your Own Business) is a full-featured, fully integrated, multi-user accounting package for the Macintosh that can automate most small business financial and accounting operations. 

All expenses, revenues, etc. have to be assigned to an account, in a structure known as the chart of accounts. This package comes with starting charts of accounts for 100 industry and company types, allowing you to create one for your business very quickly. The chart of accounts can be modified, during creation or after, by adding new accounts and deleting unused accounts. 

After logging into the program, the user is presented with the Command Center. This interface has eight large buttons, one for each module. There are modules for general ledger, checkbook, sales, time billing, purchases, inventory, and the card file. Cards represent people and companies that the business deals with. There are cards for customers, vendors, employees and personal contacts. Each module has its own set of routines and reports that can be selected. 

The main drawback is that MYOB is very mouse-dependent. There is no alternative to using the mouse in completing some tasks. Applications that require entering a lot of data, such as accounting applications, should not rely so heavily on the mouse for menu selection or dialog dismissal (for example, clicking OK). In MYOB, there are some dialog boxes where using the Enter key will not work.

To partially offset this disadvantage, names and account numbers are completed automatically and the included help topics are rather substantial, including "cue cards" for procedures useful to advanced users. The Help uses Quickhelp, a system that allows users to annotate help topics. 

There are more than 100 report templates in which you can rearrange the presentation order of all columns shown or delete a column. Most reports have a filtering process that allows you to view the report from a particular date or for a range of clients. However, there is no built-in report generator to build new reports, so if the report template that you desire is not present, you are out of luck. To partially offset this, any changes made to a report template can be saved as a "custom report." 

Information can be linked to other applications in several ways. The Officelink feature is the "Plus" of MYOB Plus: it allows a degree of integration with Word and Excel. With one click, a report can be exported into Excel, or a customized form letter will pop up as a Word document. 

Execution of this feature is a little slow, but not unacceptably so. Reports can be saved in four different formats, including the seemingly ubiquitous HTML. Data can also be directly exported or imported. 

If a small business has no unusual requirements for their accounting software, and wants a package to run on a Macintosh, there is little that could go wrong by selecting this package. 

MYOB was tested on a 233 MHz IMac, upgraded to 64 MB of memory, using OS 8.1.

Rating: 4 / 5

Comments: A solid accounting package for businesses without special needs, MYOB Plus needs to lose its mouse dependency.

Price: $199 US, $269 Canadian