29 January 2006

More MYOB comments

As much as anything I keep this diary to remind myself of the issues when we come to redo something. I won't be suprised if we need to upgrade our accounting pckage as we will inevitably outgow MYOB in due course so I need to keep track of what causes us headaches now, before our workarounds become the norms.

If I go to a supplier account history I would like to be able to click on a given month, then be shown all the invoices, then be able to zero in on a particular invoice. I can't do that. Instead I have to scroll through ALL supplier invoices trying to guess the one that had the thing in it that interests me.

When suppliers ship to us we need to be able to use their delivery note to increase stocks as, typically, it will be a week or so until the invoice arrives. MYOB is genuinely an accounting package and so the workaround is to do a manual stock adjustment, but this means that we can double count when the invoice arrives, plus - even if we don't doublecount - we have to reverse out the stock adjustment and then enter the invoice. Of course any JIT production system will create this issue.

The field display size on MYOB needs to be user adjustable. I have plenty of screen real estate but MYOB displays in fixed coulum widths which are less than the field width. So my product codes (e.g. ..AM METL00001 all look the same as the column truncates them all to ..AM METL 0). I'd like to be able to quickly open out the columns.

I'd like to be able to give standard POs a title as a memory jogger so that I can reuse them (the reuse feature exists, but one needs to remember which was the relevant PO for a given supplier) as otherwise I am forced to use the BoM to create batch orders. I don't always want to use a BoM to batch order as e.g. the EOQ of castings may equate to three batches whereas the EOQ of bearings may equate to one batch.

I can't easily use a BoM printout as a job card for the workshop. In fact the underlying issue is that I can't create a job card for a production line. Oh and when I 'autobuild' in MYOB it is a zero time process so raw material gets immediatey shifted into the relevant finished goods whereas in real life the workshop takes time to make it - and ideally there should be a way of closing the loop. This one is going to be difficult to live with for a while.

I still haven't figured out what causes my computer to get so many more lock files than the others in MYOB.

We have figured out what caused the non-printing product codes. We had some quick idfentifiers in the product codes (e.g. AA=product we sell; /AA=facilitating servce such as transport; //AA=components in items) and the / and // were being interpreted as no printing codes. This wasn't in the MYOB manual, or widely known by the MYOB help desk staff as it had supposedly been removed in the latest release of MYOB (there is now a selectable field) but apparently is still in the code as a legacy feature (i.e. bug) which we inadvertently triggered. Our workaround was to use ..AA etc.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Jes Lahay said...

David—

Have you found a workaround for the fixed width issue? I'm a new MYOB user and this is driving me crazy! it's so inconvenient.

any advice would be appreciated. thx! -jes

3:11 AM  
Blogger David Sharman said...

Yes it is a tad inconvenient. In fact it is a pain in the $%%^^ as I end up guessing part numbers when scrolling down a long list (it rather reveals that MYOB don't sell to organisations with long part etc numbers).

Unfortunately I have found no way to resize windows in MYOB. I guess that bugfix will be the feature of the next release. I see they have fixed another issue (receiving goods prior to an invoice arriving) in the most recent release, for the princely sum of £100 or so. Very Microsoft.

9:59 AM  

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