As you are no doubt well aware, MYOB brought support for AccountRight Classic to an end in September this year. For many businesses, this presents an unwanted change challenge – but, with so many improvements in technology, usability and convenience in newer products, the change challenge can also present an ideal opportunity for supercharging your business.
That said, we’ll be the first to acknowledge that nobody likes change. But we’ll also be the first to point out that without change, we’d still be stuck in a DOS world – and few are likely to remember those days fondly!
Before we get to that, what does End of Support for AccountRight mean? This is a good (and essential) question, because it provides a lot of the ‘push’ reasons for upgrading to MYOB Advanced.
Like any other products, software has a defined lifespan. Because it is a ‘virtual good’, that lifespan is often far longer than those of ‘physical’ products – but the lifespan comes at a cost. Vendors like MYOB must constantly invest in software products, keeping them secure, up to date and compatible with other software.
But there comes a time when that investment is no longer justified, and the vendor must call time. As a result, while AccountRight Classic will still work, it will no longer get the development attention for features, patches, compliance updates or product support.
While those are the ‘push’ reasons, there are plenty of compelling ‘pull’ reasons which go to the essence of why End of Support can mean a business boost for you. Even though it does mean dealing with change.
MYOB itself points out that when it first developed AccountRight, business was done very differently. Accounting, too, was done very differently. A lot of manual work, tons of paper, endless issues with secure storage, both digital and physical. Of course, back in the day, this was still far better than the alternative, which was Excel spreadsheets, the back of cigarette packets, and even more volumes of paper.
With AccountRight, sure, things were pretty good. But the constraints of how technology systems had to be structured in that day and age has given rise to their limitations today. Issues like limited visibility across your business, difficulty integrating third-party solutions, and inflexibility.
Those limitations have only really become obvious thanks to better ways of ‘doing’ technology. With the emergence of cloud computing and mobile devices, most of us expect continual access to various services that make our lives easier and our jobs more efficient and manageable.
This goes to the heart of what you can expect with an upgrade from AccountRight Classic to MYOB Advanced. It’s a solution designed for the modern age using the technologies of today, rather than hanging on to a legacy which stretches back to the days of DOS.
And if the idea of change and a big capital investment to make it happen is a bitter pill to swallow, here’s the good news. The old server on which AccountRight is creaking right now? No need to replace it. The RAID storage devices which, despite redundancy somehow seem to fall over at the most inconvenient times? No need for them, either. Nor all those network attached devices, tape drives and offsite backups.
As a cloud business management system, MYOB Advanced gives you an integrated set of modules capable of handling every aspect of your organisation. Accounting, Finance, Distribution, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Field Services and Project Accounting – it’s all there. Put together and professionally implemented, it means your business can be more efficient and more mobile than ever. With information flowing between functions, Advanced delivers reduced duplication of effort, largely eliminates repetitive manual data entry and serves up a good helping of what business owners everywhere really appreciate: real-time business insights.
Being in the cloud means there are no hardware costs. It also means there are no capital expenses, just a single monthly fee. And your online data is securely stored in local data centres giving you the flexibility and freedom to work the way you want.
Yes, change is hard. But make no mistake, it is also necessary. Make the leap to Advanced – it’s an investment worth making.
