MYOB Live2Air Roadshow Special – your questions answered (part 1)
25th March, 2015
One of the fun parts of our recent MYOB Live2Air Roadshow Special was the extended Q&A session. Sadly, we only got through a handful of questions before the broadcast’s scheduled finish. We’re not letting that get in the way of answering all the questions, though. So today, in as orderly fashion as I can muster, are the answers to many of those questions. Shortly I’ll publish the questions about practice solutions.
I’ve split them into the broad categories of:
AccountRight/ Essentials Accounting
Marie wanted to know options for customer payments
Q: I have a client who invoices while in her office only. She does not create invoices or take payments when on a client site. She wants to upgrade to the current version of AccountRight (from v19). What options are available to her to automate her customer payments (i.e. like M-Powered)?
A: M-Powered Invoices is now available in AccountRight
Gerard also had a question about M-Powered Services
Q: We use M-Powered Super, invoices & payments. When can we move from Premier V19.10 to AR 2015.1?
A: The Super and Invoices equivalent exist in AccountRight today. We have payments slated on the roadmap. Depending on the value that solutions like bank feeds, cloud access and smart bills adds to your business, you could consider moving now, stopping using M-Payment and use an ABA file upload to internet banking until this feature becomes available in AccountRight.
Gillian wanted to know about logging into client accounts
Q: Can we log in to our clients accounts at the same time as the client or do we have to contact them to ask to log out first. How fast is the cloud. If client no longer uses MYOB, how do the access their historical data?
A: Yes you can login at the same time as your client. If you end the subscription we will remove the data after 60 days. With ARL you can move your company file locally, with the documents you are able to save them back to the local PC, all be it one at a time at the moment.
Kirsty wants to know whether services are available in both Essentials and AccountRight.
Q: Do all of the new features (smart bill, PayDirect etc.) work with AccountRight or just Essentials?
A: PayDirect, bank feeds and smart bills are available in both AccountRight and Essentials.
Andrew had a question around data storage
Q: Where is all of the data stored that is added to the client’s file? Does it make the file excessively large?
A: The documents are not stored in the company file and do not affect the size of the file. The documents are stored separately in cloud storage.
Christine had a query regarding Essentials for service businesses
Q: The invoicing module in Essentials is not suited to a service industry. Is this going to fixed?
A: We have recently released improvement in Essentials invoicing including the ability to create Service Layouts.
Smart bills
Vick asked a great couple of questions around OCR technology
Q: Can smart bills 1) capture data from tiff, jpeg files, and 2) capture an invoice that was snapped with a smartphone camera i.e. a Bunnings invoice by tradesman?
A: You can take a photo of a supplier invoice and email it to bills@accountright.myob.co.nz or bills@essentials.myob.co.nz. The OCR technology is much less reliable when using photos and the quality of the photo makes a difference. We recommend a scanning app Like TinyScan on the Apple App Store, for example, which improves the quality of the photo. Regardless, there is still a lot of value in just being able to have the source document attached.
Angus had customisation questions
Q: Do you require to do any customised set-up on AccountRight to enable smart bills running properly to read different suppliers’ invoices? I have tried to use smart bills a couple of weeks ago by importing the invoice into ‘In Tray’, but AccountRight could not read the data from any of the invoices?
A: No, you just need an active subscription and your company file must be in the cloud. The technology used to read the bill will have varied success depending on the document. PDFs should be more successful than images. The reading of the bill is only a small component of the overall value that smart bills offers. It has the potential to change the way an SME works with their partner, while having the source documents attached to the transaction will help improve EOFY for all.
Ange wanted confirmation of the correct email address to send bills to
Q: What email address would you email the supplier invoice to if you are using AccountRight?
A: bills@accountright.myob.co.nz. For the record, Essentials bills go to bills@essentials.myob.co.nz.
Fiona asked a VERY popular question about how smart bills recognises emails to a seemingly generic email address
Q: If you email the invoice from your phone to bills@essentials.myob.co.nz / bills@accountright.myob.co.nz, how does it get to your particular software? If everyone emails to this address, how does it know where to send the invoice?
A: We use the sender’s email address to match it to the company. We did this to make the email address easy to remember. For this to work you need to make sure that the email address you are sending from has been invited to the company file in question.
Deborah (and many others) wanted to know about costs
Q: Is smart bills included in the cost of the software?
A: Yes, it’s included in the subscription.
Heidi had format concerns
Q: Can smart bills invoices be .JPEG or .PDF only?
A: Both, plus .JPG, .TIFF, .TIF and .PNG files
Roadshow Live2Air Recording
Want to catch the entire MYOB Live2Air Roadshow Special in full? Here it is!