#addonslink

While MYOB comes with many standard reports, it was enlightening for me to find out that many users were out there which did not have the reports they needed.

As such, these users typically exported various reports to excel and re-coupled them together with many complex formulas.

The AddonsLink platform we created allows you to create those reports using more rigorous software development practices.

Overview

AddonsLink has a module called Data Warehouses. This module allows you to define various Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server databases which will store data downloaded from MYOB.

The standard get data process that BudgetLink, TimesheetLink and FormLink uses also downloads data to custom data warehouses. In fact, those products use the exact same technology.

The data warehouses can be programmed to pull the necessary tables simply by ticking them in the list. The get data process will flesh out the fields and populate the data.

Once this process has run, the data warehouse can be enhanced with custom SQL queries to shape the data as required.

The performance of those queries is surprisingly good since the data is cached locally to disk. On top of this, certain queries can be created to compute and store the results similar to the way stored procedures work.

It does not only work with MYOB but also integrate with some tables from Xero and Quickbooks. This means that both Quickbooks and Xero get an ODBC/OLEDB like access using this technology.

If you've ever wanted to create your own reports, knew a bit of SQL (or could design basic queries using the query designers) and feel up to the challenge, the data warehousing capacity of the AddonsLink platform could be for you.

One guiding design principle we've adopted is to make the AddonsLink platform as modular as possible.

When we first started, the whole platform was one monolithic application. While it did work, it created many problems when trying to push various parts of the product forward.

Since then, we started breaking down the application into many small parts. BudgetLink, TimesheetLink, DirectDebitsLink and others are really a repackaging of these various modules in a way that provides entirely different functionality.

The excel reports are simply smart layouts calling functions from AddonsLink/BudgetLink to display the data in a meaningful way.

Data warehouses are simply databases that receive data as input and produce data as output and contains various queries and tables to achieve this result. Their tables and queries can then be pulled into spreadsheets to provide reports. 

Ultimately, the AddonsLink platform is just a glue that knows how to organise these modules and structure them in such a way that any type of report, automation or integration can be provided.

These modules can be included or excluded as required without breaking the application at all. Even better than this, the modules can be updated independently from each other.

December was a lean month. And with the x-mas fiasco, I just didn't have enough time to post anything. January's been much the same.

There has been one substantial improvement in BudgetLink.

Accruals by Categories/Cost Centres for MYOB

MYOB has the ability to tag transaction against a category. We can now report numbers against these categories, similar to the way we do with jobs. More than this, both categories and jobs are support concurrently, so if you use both you have a lot of power at your fingertips.

All old reports are fully forward compatible which is no mean feat. Although we still need to weave the category filters on many reports. 

Interested? Download the latest trial.

November has been a massive month when it comes to enhancements and improvements in the AddonsLink platform. December, although short, will be even better.

DirectDebitsLink

We re-engineered the whole DirectDebitsLink solution to use the new filtering concept developed for BudgetLink. We've streamlined the menus. And we added thorough user guides that explain everything from setup to using it.

What this means is that DirectDebitsLink is now a turn-key solution. We've had a few users who have managed to successfully install, configure and use it themselves without any of our input.

Shortcut

When starting BudgetLink, DirectDebitsLink, TimesheetLink, etc., the software will now ask you if you want a shortcut on your desktop. It's a small improvement but one that has been requested a few times.

Help

We re-wrote and update all help documentation and user guides for both BudgetLink and DirectDebitsLink to have the most up to date content.

We've had a few clients lately who've had the need to allocate payroll data to multiple jobs. 

Unfortunately, while MYOB lets you allocate payroll information for each employee to a single nominated job as part of their standard pay, it does not let you do so to multiple job. Instead, you need to allocate the data when processing the pays itself, which is time consuming. 

The solution we designed was quite simple and elegant. If you feel it's something you could use, feel free to contact Accounting Addons.

Conceptual Overview

The basic concept was quite simple. Each employee which work for multiple job would have their pay allocated to a clearing job. This clearing job is simply there to post the payroll transaction to a single job. The tool we created can then reallocate the values in the clearing job to the valid jobs using a set percentage.

Once the payroll transaction is recorded, our solution can query the journal records table to retrieve the totals posted to that clearing job. The database involves has an additional table that stores the percentage split to reallocate the clearing job to the effective jobs.

Lastly a report is used to display the general journal reallocation transactions that will be recorded to MYOB. At single click of a button, the information will be reallocated correctly.

Example

Assume you have an employee called Nicolas. This employee works 75% of his time to Charity Job and 25% of their time to Software Development. MYOB does not let you setup this split.

A clearing job called Nicolas Clearing Job is created. All pay for Nicolas would be posted to Nicolas Clearing Job. This can be done in MYOB in the Employee screen under the Standard Pays section. As such, it is setup once and does not need to change ever.

Our solution can then be setup such that the Nicolas Clearing Job is split into the jobs as the percentage indicated above.

When a pay is recorded where Nicolas was paid 1000$. Then this 1000$ is allocated to Nicolas Clearing Job by MYOB. The solution will create a journal adjustment to deduct 1000$ from the Nicolas Clearing Job and allocate it 750$ to Charity Job and 250$ to Software Development at click of a button.

Other employees can be reallocated in other ways by clearing different clearing jobs for each. If the percentage split changes each month, they can be adjusted prior to recording the journal reallocation.

Conclusion

In our customers case, it needed to be applied to payroll. However, this same concept can be applied to any type of transaction where splitting the data is slightly time consuming. 

It's quite simple to understand and use. If you are interested in it, drop a line.

While there is no way to delete customers/cards in bulk in MYOB, we did create a smart way to automate this process in bulk.

Overview

The approach we took was to use the Send Keys API from Windows and send actual keystrokes to MYOB. I'll aim to detail the SendKeysDef function which we created to markup these keystrokes in a later article.

The solution retrieves all your MYOB customers or cards and lists them down a report. From this, you can select which customer to delete.

Once your selection is made, you can then press the Delete button it will go through and remove the selected customers. You only have to walk away from the machine and come back when it has finished.

The solution will send all the required keystrokes. It's structured to even cope with errors or warnings that arise when deleting customers such as the error message when trying to delete customers that have history.

If your list of customers or suppliers has grown quite large and need to be culled back, this tool may be for you.

MYOB have decided to discontinue support and availability for the ODBC driver used by third-party providers to integrate with MYOB.

MYOB AccountRigth 19.7 or prior are not affected by this decision. It only affects MYOB AccountRight 2011 or 2012 users.

It's not all doom-and-gloom in that MYOB will be providing a new way to integrate which promises a lot. Unfortunately, what this means is that third-party developers will be left in the dark for MYOB AccountRight 2011 and 2012.

Luckily, we had developed an export-based mechanism to integrated with MYOB when the data file and MYOB were on the MAC. This means that BudgetLink users who have upgraded to MYOB AccountRight 2011/2012 will not be totally on their own.

However, if you have not upgraded yet, we recommend you wait until further notice.

I know I've been quiet of late. I've been in the process of renovating the bathroom and have not had as much time to dedicate to keeping you up to date. That's almost over now (thankfully).

August has been a month dedicated to revising the codebase and fixing issues. Most fixes are not substantial but it does mean that the product is getting better, more consistent across various environments, reports, etc.

Architecture

We've continued to restructure the codebase into various addins. Ultimately, this is a long running process of ours that will provide faster response time and a good overhaul of the whole solution. The benefits are more technical but we are hoping that with a more solid architecture, we'll be able to deliver features quicker than before.

Importing Budgets 

We've fixed a few loose ends when importing budgets. There are now new buttons to browse to your file so you don't have to cancel the whole process. We can also import comments and we've added a few improvements here and there to make the process faster and easier to use.

Quickbooks

We can now retrieve the budgets created in the Quickbooks data file in the same manner we have done with MYOB. The two new version are Data File Budget and Data File Job Budget.