New Year, better clouds on the horizon

14
Jan

I love the start of a new year. It’s a time to think about possibilities, dream of what can be done and then get cracking to make them happen.

Generally, I take 2 weeks off over the Christmas to New Year period (running a business that is based around financial year end makes this possible). That means when I return, the hits and misses from the old year are behind me and there are only open fields and opportunities out in front. Happy days!

As CEO, my role is to ensure a clear vision of our future, get all parties on board, and make sure we have the right tools, capability and capacity to deliver on the vision. I’m a bridge between the outside and the inside of our business; between our shareholders, clients, partners and team members.

At MYOB our vision is to Make Business Life Easier.

Let’s be clear – being in business isn’t easy. There are never enough hours in the day. The pressure can be immense. You need to have so many skills to make everything come together. Experts charge an arm and leg.

And it wasn’t always sunshine and roses for us. MYOB was founded 21 years ago with the idea that if we made big investments in products that did most of what business owners wanted, we’d be able to offer them a solution at the fraction of the price available at that time. Commentators said we were crazy. That we’d go out of business selling accounting solutions for less than $500.

After 2 decades, we are stronger than ever. Most of the accounting solutions we sell today are still less than $500 – but we’ve served over 1 million businesses in those 21 years. On top of that, we now serve over 50,000 businesses with website solutions and over 10,000 accounting practices with practice solutions.

Over the past couple of years we’ve transformed our business from one of a provider of desktop solutions to a leader in online business.

The reason I’m so excited about 2013, is that the large initial investment to get our cloud solutions to market has been made. We’re now in the operational ramp-up phase. We officially launched AccountRight Live last year, offering online flexibilities to our customers. We’re supporting more live clients every day, listening to their feedback and improving our offerings based on what they’re telling us.

When we started our transformation years ago, our vision was connecting business owners with their bookkeepers, accountants, banks, employees, customers, prospects and others to make their business lives easier. And now we’re seeing it.

Clients have told us that they’ve cut a significant amount of their data entry time by having daily bank feeds in AccountRight Live. And by empowering business owners to build a website in 30 minutes that’s mobile-enabled and search-optimised, business owners are telling us we’ve saved them thousands of dollars and many headaches. It is so exciting for me to hear these stories – our vision has become reality.

For MYOB, 2013 will continue to be all about leveraging the cloud to make business owners’ days a little bit easier. We will build on what we’ve launched by listening, learning and improving our solutions.

My hope is that by the end of the year these solutions will help more businesses to do what they do best – and let you love your work.

Do you have a clear view of what your business will be doing in 2013? I’d love to hear some of your hopes, stories and dreams.

What others are saying

Author

Glenn Barnett

January 17, 2013 at 7:48 pm

Tim, which experts are you referring to?

- Author
  
  Tim Reed CEO
  
  January 18, 2013 at 10:31 am
  
  Hi Glenn – Happy new year! Thanks for the question.
  
  I was thinking of a wide range of experts. When you talk to different business owners they refer to different types of expert assistance, but there is a consistent theme of struggling to afford the level of expertise they wish they could access.
  
  The areas that come up most frequently are one-off projects. For example the cost of getting a professional developer to build a website. Similarly engineering advice, store fit-outs etc would fit in this category.
  
  The second category would be things that address risk but don’t build the business. Legal advice would be a good example – many business owners feel exposed here but struggle to justify the fees that it would cost to get advice on every contract that they enter. Network security would be another example in this category. These are complex areas that need deep expertise. Business owners understand that but still struggle with the trade off of the cost versus the exposure.
  
  The final group that come up less often in my conversations would be professionals that form a part of a necessary, ongoing, value-adding component of the business. Accountants are generally considered in this category – particularly those that are pro-active business partners.
  
  Cheers,
  Tim
  
Author

Teresa

January 19, 2013 at 3:32 pm

As a bookkeeper who provides both onsite and offsite bookkeeping services, I find all of the various MYOB cloud accounting products, an invaluable tool and highly reccommend these products to my clients. How much time have we wasted, in the past, waiting for clients to provide bank statements? Not any more. (YAY!!!) Thank you , for not only “making business life easier” for me and my business, but enabling me to help my clients “make business life easier”.

- Author
  
  Tim Reed CEO
  
  January 24, 2013 at 7:48 am
  
  Thanks Teresa – thrilled to hear that our work is having such impact for you and your clients. #LYW. Tim
  
Author

Jody Campbell

February 1, 2013 at 11:11 am

I work for an accountant and we have two clients using the live version and both clients cannot use it in their office as the internet is too slow. One client is using it off line as she is a sole user and will only put it online when she wants us to look at it. The other client is doing the majority of the work at home where the internet is faster and have their employee in the office only input invoices. They need to have multiple users so cannot work offline in the office.

One question I do have is, I went to the bootcamp launch and am sure that I heard the clients could run more than one file online under the one subscription but could only get bank feeds for one file. Both of my clients run more than one MYOB file and have been told they can’t do that. I think this should be a possibility under the cloud service. Using the old system allowed clients to run more than one file and it was not a problem, now you want to charge them. I can understand only one bank feed under the cost but surely they should be able to run another file. One client runs two files because they changed the way the business run. Previously under a partnership where they bought out the partner and then changed to a trust operation with different bank accounts and we had to start a complete new MYOB file for the new entity. But they still have vehicles in the old entity that at this stage are being hired to the new entity so still need to do a MYOB file. The other client runs under a trust which is their main file requiring bank feeds but we have been running two small MYOB files from our office for their trustee company and a rental property they have. It would be good if we could pass the company file over to them to run themselves.

Thanks

Jody

- Author
  
  Aishah Mustapha Blog Content Editor
  
  February 1, 2013 at 12:21 pm
  
  Hi Jody,
  
  With your subscription for AccountRight Live, you do get 1 company file. Additional files will need to be purchased. We do give discounts if you are purchasing additional file for the same company on the same product. You can refer to this page Community Forum – FAQ Company Files
  
  Hope that clears everything up.
  
  Cheers,
  Aishah Mustapha
  MYOB
  
Author

Anthony

February 25, 2013 at 7:06 pm

Why bother getting started with live services. If I use the live services I have to forego the benefits of M-powered such as batch payments. If I stay with m-powered I forego multi-user, bank feeds and cloud access

This is fragmentation not progress

- Author
  
  Aishah Mustapha Blog Content Editor
  
  February 27, 2013 at 1:24 pm
  
  Hi Anthony,
  
  Yes we definitely have plans to integrate M-Powered Services and Live. It is in the pipeline. Thanks for your feedback.
  
  Regards,
  Aishah