Allow me to tell you a story of the first and last time I explored MYOB's “online” accounting solutions.

A new client had just come on board using AccountRight Live which has just upgraded to from Essentials, so I went to myob.com.au on my MacBook to log in. I was looking forward to getting up to speed on AccountRight Live and proving to those people who said MYOB is being left behind wrong. MYOB was the largest accounting software provider in Australia and the merits of Cloud Computing were obvious so they surely couldn't be that bad --I thought.

When I clicked on the log-in button however, I was given 7 product log-in options, none being AccountRight Live. Confused, I spent some time navigating their home page only to realise that I would have to figure out which AccountRight Live software package to download in orderto actually use the file.

Reason 1: AccountRight Live -- an "Online Solution" by definition should not require a download.

Fair enough I thought. If I have to download something I will.  Noticing the “Need Software for a Mac, Find out more about AccountEdge" line, I clicked through to be greeted with the cheery message that I would have to pay $1,099 for the privilege of using this "online solution" on my Mac. Still working off the presumption that this was a cloud accounting package, I thought, ”This can’t be right, I am missing something here.” So I eagerly headed to the Help section of the site in search of the FAQs.

30 minutes later, deep in post after post on the detailed MYOB community, I was no better off so I gave up and reached for the phone for someone to talk to. After another 30 minutes navigating an automated answering machine and being on hold, I finally got through to someone.

Reason 2: I am not willing to spend this sort of time waiting to talk to someone about an issue.

Prompt accessibility in customer support is a must and it is standard with Xero and Quickbooks online in my experience. To my amazement not only was I was told that I would indeed have to download software to use AccountRight Live, but I wasn’t going to be able to access the file on my Mac anyway, as this file would only work on Windows machines.

Reason 3: A software company that doesn't allow your files to be accessed by its own software on different operating system is crazy.

I was not pleased.

I had to take 2 hours out of an already busy day to find out that not only did you have to download software to use their ‘online solution’, I actually couldn’t ever access my clients file because I used an Apple MacBook.

Common sense would tell you that MYOB cannot hope to continue in this vein if they want to seriously compete with the other cloud accounting players. So I have to believe that they will improve, if haven’t already. However, the ball is definitely in their court, as I won’t be spending any more of my time finding out.

P.S. I refuse to believe that I really can’t use an Account Right Live file on my Macbook via AccountEdge (it’s essentially the same software made by the same company!), so if the support person was wrong about this, or I got the wrong impression, please do let me know.