MYOB Shifts Strategy For Holistic SME Accounting

Small business accounting service provider MYOB is revamping its strategy. Reports by ZDNet on Friday (Feb. 5) said the Australia-based company will look to offer businesses a more holistic solution around accounting and related services.

In doing so, MYOB plans to merge all of its core business units — transaction processing, compliance and advisory — into a single platform. According to reports, the move was dubbed “Connected Practice” by CEO Tim Reed, who announced plans for the merging of MYOB operations on Friday.

“Instead of thinking about individual ecosystems, we started to think about the Connected Practice,” the CEO said at the MYOB Incite event. “A single platform that integrates all of these components — transaction processing, compliance and advisory — all coming into one, to what we believe would happen in the future.”

The move will provide SME clients with a single, online portal through which they can access MYOB’s various offerings and accounting solutions. According to reports, this dashboard is similar to MYOB’s existing BankLink tool.

According to Reed, MYOB has been mulling this strategy for several years; the company reportedly came up with the Connected Practice strategy about a year ago. The executive added that the initiative is part of MYOB’s efforts to meet the evolving needs of business customers.

“What we have started to see was our customers’ businesses were evolving and changing; instead of there being a clear distinction between a bookkeeper, an accountant and a certified professional or IT consultant, what we started to see was the progressive clients of ours were actually moving more in the middle where they were doing components of all of that,” he said in a recent interview with ZDNet.

“That made us start to think: ‘If these aren’t three separate partner groups doing separate things and it’s actually one partner servicing a wider range of needs for the small business, what would they want?’” Reed continued. “We said everything we’re developing is helping them, and what would be even better is if there was a single MYOB platform to deliver all of those tools seamlessly.”