On the Road; MYOB Roadshow Diaries Week 3

MYOB AccountRight Product Manager Dale Dixon is on the road in Australia and New Zealand, presenting to 8,000-plus accounting and bookkeeping partners. In his down time, he’s blogging about the experience with observations from each event, questions from attendees, and tales from road. If you haven’t seen it, check out part 1.

FRIDAY 20 FEBRUARY – CHRISTCHURCH

Christchurch finished off what has been a truly fantastic Roadshow season. We had so many people that the room was bulging at the seams.

It’s been a while since I was last in Christchurch and it’s really weird to see so many empty blocks in the CBD. So many buildings have been torn down and many new ones are beginning to take their place. We stayed in what looked like quite a new hotel in Christchurch, which happened to be the same hotel the Pakistani cricket team stayed in. For the record, they’re not the chattiest bunch, although that might have coincided with their World Cup results.

Getting up close to accountants

As a product manager at MYOB, events like Roadshow are just wonderful because they give me an opportunity to speak to the people that use our software every day. By having accountants, MYOB Certified Consultants and bookkeepers together, I get a complete view of everyone’s requirements; from day-to-day data entry, to meeting compliance obligations for BAS and GST, through to end-of-year processing.

Sometimes it’s the little things that matter

Every year for the past four or five years, I have presented new features to our partners and I am always surprised by which things get the biggest reaction. This year in my presentation I spent 10 minutes just going through the small improvements that we have made over the years In AccountRight aimed at making the software easier to use. For example, adding a payroll category mid payroll or warning if the employee is going into negative leave. It really is these little things that count.

While new big features are great and necessary, we need to and will continue to invest in making the existing features just work that little bit better. It is these types of events where we can talk to partners and understand how the software is being used that allows us to continue to make these small improvements.

So just to wrap up I would like thank everyone that came along and supported this event. It’s just so great to have such a wonderful group of engaged partners that provide such valuable input so that together we can really make business life easier for our customers.