If your business runs on MYOB AccountRight plus a stack of spreadsheets and email approvals, then the spreadsheets are your ERP. The job of MYOB Acumatica is to absorb them.
That is the shortest honest summary of what this move is for. You are not buying a bigger AccountRight. Acumatica is an operational system that happens to contain the ledger, and the difference shows up on an ordinary Tuesday morning rather than at year end.
We ran a live session on exactly this, with Mylen Diesto from MYOB covering the platform and the roadmap, Stephen Archer from Stratus on what the migration actually feels like from inside a business, and Mark Belkin hosting. This article covers the same ground. The recording is below if you would rather watch it.
One hour, covering the MYOB roadmap, what you keep, what changes, and what the migration takes.
AccountRight is not being wound down. MYOB was unusually direct about this on the day: it is still being sold, still being developed, still supported, and for a lot of businesses it stays exactly the right tool.
What changes is the threshold. Once complexity crosses a certain point, Acumatica becomes the stronger fit. Moving is your choice, on your timing. It is not a MYOB deadline, and nobody is being pushed off a platform.
That matters because it reframes the decision. This is not a compliance scramble. It is a question about whether your systems are still keeping up with your business.
You tend to feel this before you can name it. The signals MYOB sees most often:
And here is where it starts to bite: rekeying errors, delayed reporting, no single view of finance and operations, decisions made on last month's numbers rather than this month's, and growth limited by your processes rather than by demand.
None of that is a criticism of your team or of your software. It is what growth does.
Reasonable question if you are being asked to move onto a platform for the next decade. What MYOB set out on the day:
MYOB has been in this market for more than 30 years and has held its relationship with Acumatica for over ten.
Start here, because the fear of losing something you use every day is what stalls most of these decisions.
This gets asked about more than almost any other AccountRight feature, and for a long time the honest answer was that Acumatica did not have it. That changed about six months ago.
It reads from an associated mailbox, so you can point an invoices or AP address at it, or you drag files in from your desktop. It reads the whole document, header and lines, not just the totals at the top. Where it spots a referenced purchase order, it matches invoice lines against purchase receipt lines, which gives you three way matching.
The part people do not see coming is the warehouse payoff. You can receive stock at any time, without an invoice. Stock arrives, you get it into the system, you sell it that afternoon. You are not sitting on saleable stock waiting for paperwork, and you are not fighting negative stock because the goods are physically there but the system reckons they are not. The invoice turns up when it turns up, and when it does it matches itself up.
The feature you liked is still there. It is just carrying a lot more weight now.
Sit down with any stock business and they will show you the same screen. What else do I buy from this supplier, what do I not have, and can I please just send one purchase order.
You keep that, and you get two ways to do it. Replenishment handles the usual mins, maxes and reorder points, then goes a level further with seasonality and sales history analysis, filtered by supplier so you can generate reorders against hard demand sitting on sales orders. Or you take the simpler route: raise a purchase order, choose the supplier, and see everything you buy from them with your current stock position and pricing on the same screen.
The question shifts from "what do I need from this supplier right now" to "while I am here, what else should be going on this order".
Acumatica is a global platform, so it is fair to ask whether it understands Australia.
Bank feeds almost sound too basic to mention, but they are genuinely hard for a global platform. Every bank, every format, every security requirement. Australia is not a huge market, so it is the sort of problem you only bother solving properly if this is your home market. MYOB built connected bank feeds in from day one, so businesses moving off AccountRight reconnect and keep going.
The same applies to compliance, and at the same depth as the small business platform. BAS and Australian tax, TPAR, the Payment Times Reporting Scheme, and Security of Payments for construction and civil work. Payment Times Reporting in particular tends to land right about the time you have grown to the size where AccountRight starts to creak.
Ten years of moving AccountRight clients up, and the first two questions have never changed. Does it have payroll? Does it do autopay? Yes, and yes.
This is not a small thing. Businesses look at larger platforms, find they do everything needed on the finance and operations side, then ask about payroll and get told no. Most serious global platforms do not do Australian payroll at all, so you bolt on a second product: another subscription, another vendor, another integration to build, maintain and retest at every upgrade.
In Acumatica, payroll was built ground up for this platform. It does not feel like a separate part of the system. Your chart of accounts is where pay items and liabilities are defined, and you can push time to projects or cost it to jobs. STP Phase 2 and Payday Super are covered, and you get access to the MYOB Pay Super clearing house, which matters if you have never had to manage your own super clearing and would rather keep it that way.
Worth asking every vendor you talk to: is payroll in the product, or am I buying a second system and paying someone to connect them?
In AccountRight, Jobs is one simple construct doing whatever you need. Talk to another AccountRight user in a different industry and you will find they use it for something completely different. You might be using Jobs for actual jobs, where someone on your team gets their hands dirty. A not for profit might be using them as cost centres. Same field, very different intent.
In Acumatica that one construct opens into a proper set of options.
For not for profits and anyone thinking in cost centres or tracking external funding, Projects works well and is genuinely good for acquittals. But a lot of those businesses are better served by sub accounts, and working out which is part of the job.
All of these integrate. A project can generate service management jobs, or trigger a production run in manufacturing and write the work in progress back. Whatever you have been forcing into Jobs now has a proper home.
You can still run a sales order with a quote phase, and if that is all you need then that is a perfectly good answer. But there is a native CRM module built into the platform, on the same database as everything else. Not an integration and not a bolt on.
That gives you marketing campaign tracking, leads tracked against those campaigns, and pipeline management through opportunities. An opportunity can carry multi version quotes, customer and client tier price lists, estimating for both manufacturing and projects, and product configuration.
Or you keep it simple. Create an opportunity, key a manual amount at the top, and use it purely to hold the conversations: emails, chats, meetings that create events in Outlook. How much you use it is up to you, and plenty of businesses leave CRM until after the rest is live.
AccountRight gives you a solid set of built-in reports, some editability and some dashboarding, and that is fine. Acumatica is a different tier, and there are four things worth knowing about.
The shift is that you stop exporting data to answer questions, and the answer stops being something that only exists once a month.
This is the one that takes away flexibility a lot of businesses genuinely like holding onto, so it is worth being straight about it.
In AccountRight, depending on your security settings, a transaction is there, you change it, or it is gone. In Acumatica that stops. You get secure postings out of the sub ledgers, accounts payable, accounts receivable and inventory, into the general ledger. Only once that posting is done are your financial statements up to date, and you can automate it on a schedule or run it live.
Once something is posted, it is fixed. If it is wrong, you raise a correction, a reversal or a credit depending on the transaction type and post that through instead.
Smaller businesses generally do not prioritise general ledger security. As a business grows, and as tax audits become more common, it stops being optional. It does ask for a deeper understanding of what is happening in the background, and it is a real adjustment for whoever on your team is used to going in and fixing things directly.
Plenty of businesses end up needing multiple AccountRight files. Property developers running one per development because each has its own ABN. Civil construction with an asset company, an operating company and another for payroll. Diversified wholesalers and importers segmenting suppliers into separate ABNs. All of it makes sense, and all of it means paying for separate files that do not talk to each other.
Acumatica handles this differently. Within a single instance you get a consolidated chart of accounts with one customer list and one supplier list, and separate payables, receivables and agings underneath. Separate tax and BAS, separate reporting, and consolidated reporting layered over the top. You flick between companies, each with its own colours and logo, and restrict who can access which.
Intercompany then works properly. Intercompany journals, an AP bill split across group companies, and a purchase order raised in one entity generating the reciprocal sales order in the other. Ship between warehouses with freight applied, and landed cost flows into average stock valuation in the receiving location, so your margins are actually clear.
Three MYOB customers who made this move, and one of ours.
Winton, an NZX and ASX listed property developer, put it plainly: "We can get the financial analysis for our board packs pulled together within a day now. That used to take us two weeks." Same board, same questions, answered while the numbers still mean something.
Ainscorp were taking orders by email, putting them into a spreadsheet and uploading them into AccountRight, on a system only accessible from one computer at head office that only two people knew how to operate. They reported a 6 per cent year on year lift in sales after moving.
PolyNovo, an ASX listed medical device manufacturer, was running AccountRight on its own servers while selling into multiple countries and nine currencies, with a finance team maintaining infrastructure. That is not what you hire finance people to do. After moving to Acumatica Manufacturing they reported over 60 hours back every month, made up of 13 hours on end of month financial processing, 10 on accounts receivable and 40 on procurement and accounts payable, plus $10,000 a year on server infrastructure and maintenance and $48,000 a year in processing and product management efficiency. Same finance team, same headcount.
A facility management business we worked with operates a major facility on behalf of a state government, on a usage based commercial model where different areas are used by different parties at different times, often on different terms.
They ran AccountRight for the books, an Access database for usage and contract data, a pile of spreadsheets for calculations and billing and reconciling between the other two, and M-Files for contract management and compliance records. Nobody sets out to run four systems. Each one was a sensible answer to the problem in front of them at the time. AccountRight kept doing its job; the trouble was that every new requirement landed somewhere outside it, so the Access database grew and the spreadsheets multiplied.
To answer one question about one client's use of one area, someone had to open four systems and trust that all four agreed.
Today Projects is the spine of the business. Each contract, each instance of facility usage by area, is a project. Usage is structured around how the facility is actually consumed, with asset usage and utilities such as water, gas and electricity tracked back against the project. Bookings are managed through a deeply integrated third party product that feeds usage back automatically, so there is no reconciliation step because there is nothing left to reconcile. Billing comes off that data, whether it is time and materials, cost plus, or a contract value based on square metres, with open purchase orders visible against budget and billings on one screen.
Three systems retired completely, and AccountRight replaced by a proper record.
Ask most businesses 18 months ago whether they were using AI properly and the honest answer was not yet. They were right. The technology was not good enough. What has changed is the length of task a model can complete on its own: a year ago that was minutes of work, now it is hours, and the line is still climbing. That is the difference between AI that drafts an email and AI that can do meaningful work.
MYOB's argument is that this is not a separate project or another tool to buy. Seven AI capabilities are live in the platform today, and they do three jobs: assist your people, automate the routine, and advise you on what to look at.
MYOB's position is that none of this requires a separate tool or an integration project, because it already knows your customers, inventory and financials, and it runs under the same role based permissions as the rest of the system with data kept in Australia.
The framing worth borrowing is the self-driving analogy Mylen used. Level zero is hands on the wheel. Level one is cruise control, then lane assist, and level five is a car with no steering wheel. What moves you up that road is not the technology, it is trust, and nobody would get into a car with no steering wheel if they had never used cruise control. Your business works the same way. You let AI take one workflow, prove itself, and earn the next. Nobody is at level five. The question is whether you have started.
Before any implementation there is a discovery conversation. We spend time understanding your processes at the level of: is there a fit, and do you actually need to change? Sometimes you do not, and we will be honest with you about that. If you do, the questions become what that fit looks like and whether we can bring you real value.
UAT is the phase most often squeezed when a project runs late. That is a mistake. It is where your people confirm the system actually does their job.
Finance focused, single entity, clean data sits at the short end: 12 to 16 weeks, and that is realistic. Manufacturing, construction, more entities, or going paperless in the warehouse all move that out. Six months is a fair average across mid market ERP generally.
We also do not rush, and we will not rush you. If you need to pause because you have a business to run at the same time, we pause.
One more thing on timing. A lot of businesses arrive certain it has to be 1 July, and for some of them it genuinely does. But across close to a thousand implementations, going live in the middle of the financial year is very normal, in any month. Quarters are clean and year end is cleaner, but year end is also an extremely busy time. Never feel you cannot ask to go live at a point that suits you operationally.
The first question, every single time. Standard scope covers:
Historical transactions are generally left out, and we will tell you up front that we are not quoting them. The reason is mapping. You have done things differently over the years, you may be changing your chart of accounts, and part of a good data migration is deciding to leave behind half a book of inventory you no longer sell. We can absolutely talk about bringing history across, but there needs to be a reason for it.
Open sales orders and purchase orders are good things for your team to key in during training, with us in the room.
Data migration drives whether people trust the system. If your team goes live and the numbers look wrong to them, you have lost them, no matter how good the configuration is.
This is the most useful number in the article and the one nobody tells you: if we give you a budget of hours to get you live, budget about the same again internally. Quoted 200 to 300 hours? Plan for 200 to 300 hours of your own people's time.
That does not mean you are doing the configuration. It means data preparation, and internal meetings to make real decisions. Are we changing the chart structure? If we are going into manufacturing, what are our work centres? In the warehouse, do we want bins, and do we want to track them? Those decisions take time, and they are almost always left out of the plan.
You will also need to commit time to training, to testing, and to change management and preparing your team. This is more than telling us to go and do the thing. There will be a lot of questions asked of you.
You need a Solution Champion who can decide without a committee, the people who know how the work actually happens, and your finance lead, heavily. Four things go into every proposal we write: the right people in the room, extensive testing before go live, your team keying in your own open orders, and system essential staff not on leave during training or go live weeks.
Two things go wrong. Scope drift, once people see what the platform can do. And under prepared teams who sign off on testing to be helpful.
People do not love change, but they will do difficult things if they have had buy-in, understood the reason, and been given some ownership. Change management is line items on our quotes from the very beginning, not a marketing line. But two of the four steps belong to you.
There is good research behind this split. Leadership and management hold the most power over whether behaviour actually changes, and when we run a change programme on a client's behalf we see adoption suffer. Your people need to see your leaders driving it.
Three parts: licensing, implementation and ongoing support. All three get worked through properly in a proposal, but here is the feel for each. Treat the figures below as indicative Australian pricing rather than a quote.
Licensing is per user, per month. Standard Edition starts at approximately $131 per user per month, Advanced and industry specific editions run from $200 to $271, and Manufacturing or other specialised editions sit around $310. What each person costs depends on the access they need and which Edition you are on, and limited access licence types, such as a field technician, cost less than a full user. You license what you need from day one and add licences as you take on more modules or as the team grows. That is particularly good news if you are currently paying for multiple AccountRight files, or paying for a bolted-on product we can bring inside the platform.
Implementation typically runs $50,000 to $150,000 for small to mid sized deployments, with complex multi entity rollouts exceeding $300,000. That is a budget rather than a fixed price. Just as we can limit licences, we can limit scope. Start simple and the implementation is lighter and cheaper. Go big bang and do everything at once and you are at the top of that range. It is invoiced do and charge against actual hours, and design and build is always the biggest slice.
Ongoing support is a fixed fee. Day to day helpdesk by phone, email, remote or onsite. Why are my bank feeds not working, let me take a look: keep calling us, that is built in. A new report or training a new starter is consulting work, quoted and approved first. What matters is knowing exactly where that line sits before you sign.
Put together, a total first year investment ranges from roughly $60,000 to over $350,000 depending on scope.
Coming from AccountRight, the subscription is what gets your attention first if you have been paying a small amount. But the implementation is where the cost and the risk actually sit, and it is the part that determines whether this works. Scope it properly, set expectations up front, and build in contingency.
Think of Acumatica as a hardware store. It has every tool and all the timber, but how you put that together into a house is what actually matters, and you want a builder who has done it before and understands what you are trying to end up with.
Unlike AccountRight, where you get what you get and there is a fairly fixed way of working, an ERP is highly configurable. You could enter an order and ship it to a customer thirty different ways depending on your business, which modules you use and how many people touch the process. That configurability is the value, and it is also the risk. When an ERP project goes badly it is requirements, implementation process or aftercare. It is almost never the software.
Stratus has been doing this for about 20 years, Australian owned, with close to a thousand implementations. AccountRight businesses are the single biggest source of the customers we work with, so we know the gaps, what is better in the new system, what is worse, what is different, and how to mitigate it. We also work across MYOB Acumatica, Business Central, Wiise and HubSpot, so when we say Acumatica fits, we have something to compare it against. And if it does not fit, we will tell you that instead.
Before any demo and before any quote, have a discovery conversation about how your business actually runs, what you are working around today, and honestly whether this is the right move for you. From there we can show you what Acumatica would look like for your business with a demonstration tailored to you, and work out real numbers rather than the ballpark ranges above.
It is free, and you will come out with a much clearer picture either way.