Review

MYOB Premier 2 95/98/NT

By, Terry Fong, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) is a well-designed, full-featured accounting package that helps automate financial and accounting operations.

MYOB Premier 2 is aimed at small to mid-sized businesses and features the accommodation of multiple currencies and multiple users, along withinventory control.

Setting up is easy, using the Easy Setup Wizard. The application comes with starter chart of accounts for 100 company types, allowing you to pick a model and create one for your business very quickly. The chart of accounts can be modified during creation or after, adding new accounts and deleting unused ones. For those changing over from another program, data can be imported from comma or tab delimited files, which most programs support. Quicken data files can also be imported.

After logging into Premier 2, the user is presented with the Command Center. This interface presents a large buttons 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.

Data entry is very straightforward. Almost all functions have a keyboard shortcut to go directly to a field or function, although there seems to be some minor bugs accessing currency in some screens, to change currency or the exchange rate. Names and account numbers are completed automatically.

The included help topics are rather substantial, including "cue cards" for procedures useful to both novice and advanced users. Strangely, for such a mature product, there is no context-sensitive help.

Premier 2 provides a plethora of reports, nearly 150 in all. In each, you can rearrange the presentation order of all columns shown or delete a column. Almost all reports can be filtered to view the report for a range of dates, clients, vendors or accounts. There is no way to build completely new reports, however. 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." Finding a report is a tad easier than in earlier versions, as the Report Finder lists all standard reports in alphabetical order and can show a sample output. Reports can be saved in four different formats, including HTML.

Information can be ported to other applications in several ways. Premier 2's Officelink feature allows a degree of integration with both Microsoft Word and Excel and Corel's WordPerfect. With one click, a report can be exported into Excel, or a customized form letter will pop up as a Word or WordPerfect document. The templates are standard Word and WordPerfect template files. With an increasingly global and integrated economy, more companies do business in more than one country, which results in dealing in multiple currencies. This is simply and elegantly done in MYOB.

Once a customer or vendor is set to a particular currency, transactions for them are entered in their currency. The program creates exchange transactions automatically.

There is no need to remember to create exchange amounts for every transaction. The system will even track gains or losses due to currency fluctuations between when an order is entered and when payment is made. The default exchange rate in effect is used and stored for a transaction. This rate can be easily overridden and used subsequently as the default. On reports, the appropriate currency symbol is used to more easily identify foreign transactions.

Multi-user access usually involves some security functions, to control access to sensitive reports and functions. In Premier 2, this is simple and relaxed, with access controlled by password and no user logging. A password initially provides access to all functions and can be easily changed to deny access to specific reports or functions. It would have been nice to have a "deny all" button, for setting up "inquiry only" passwords.

The program comes with three licenses, allowing three users to simultaneously use the program. More can be obtained directly from MYOB.

Rating: 4.5 / 5

Reviewer's comments: MYOB Premier 2 is very affordable for companies that want to automate most accounting operations and need to deal with multiple currencies.

System requirements: Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 or higher, any Pentium processor, 16 MB RAM, 40 MB on hard disk, CD-ROM for installation, NetBIOS or NetBEUI compatible for network.

More information: http://www.myob.com (US), http://www.myob.ca (Canada)

Price: $331 US, $665 Canadian