One of the advantages that has accountants and entrepreneurs drawn to MYOB as a software program was the amount of financial control they are able to directly influence and effectively make use of to best benefit them. However, if you are just starting out, you will need to know certain things so that you will not be at a loss of what to do. Here’s what you should know:

MYOB allows users to set their own budgets, audit their own records, review/analyse their financial activities and keep track of their cash flow. Financial information of corporations should be tracked on three different levels for clearer management- Accounts, Categories as well as Jobs. This is so that you will be able to accurately gauge information and make better informed decisions.

Accounts level information tracking is usually the first step since it shows you the profits and details of your corporation as a whole. But you will also need to pinpoint the true profits and financial details of individual sections if you have different departments/divisions/office branches/properties and other related sections. That is where Categories comes into place, and also incidentally how you can know where your highest profits are earned, and how you are to go about targeting your marketing strategy. Then you will also have to perform essential activities like payroll, so you will also need to track profits and details on an individual’s level, which can be done in the Jobs level.

In MYOB, part of exerting financial control is being able to access essential information, analyse the data presented and make improvements to lacking areas. You are hence given many different options when reviewing financial information in your files- business insights, balance sheet analysis, profit/loss analysis, job analysis and more.

Using tables/graphs and charts that are interactive, you will be able to delve deeper into business insights- learn about your cash availability, the general cash flow, compare profits with loss, keep track of the money and payments you owe to your suppliers, keep track of pending payments from customers and more. Under business insights, MYOB presents 4 summary panels with additional windows so you can further retrieve more information in greater detail.

In addition, you can also make use of MYOB’s features to keep track of expenses that can be reimbursable by your customer. Simply set up a ‘job’ and assign the relevant expenses to the ‘job’ before you begin recording them. This way, you can add the reimbursable notes to invoices you bill to your customers whenever applicable.

Once you have all important financial details presented to you, take some time to analyse the data you have achieved before focusing on your budgets. Are there certain areas you have to make changes to? It’s imperative to understand that budgets are set based on predicting the financial situation of your company during the duration of a certain time. To ensure that you are within your set budget goals, you will be required to constantly check and compare your projected data values with your actual data values. If there are certain factors that detrimentally affect your financial situation, you will need to make changes in order to keep everything within your budget planning.

Some factors to consider during budget planning are the income your corporation is earning, the cost of expenses/sales, special assets and liability balancing and other essential factors that can pose an impact to your financial state, for example: A Loan. Keep track of your projected and actual data- if you see any large variations, it is recommended to investigate why.

View your financial reports through the reports menu in your MYOB software. Choose to index to reports and open up the window, you will then be able to choose between different account reports, according to what you wish to see.