AU: MYOB adds smart bills feature / MYOB has announced the smart bills feature will now be available to clients using the AccountRight solution.

The software provider's SME solutions general manager, James Scollay, said smart bills provides a benefit to clients that no other accounting solutions provider has delivered in Australia and New Zealand - the ability to capture key data fields from supplier invoices and enter it into the software.

The data is then fully integrated into the workflow to enable easier compliance and better cash-flow management. It also allows for greater collaboration between SMEs and their accountant because the transaction is visible to both parties.

“This feature allows users to simply email or drag and drop a supplier invoice into AccountRight, which can be used to create a bill, or easily linked to an existing bill.” Mr Scollay said.

The feature uses optical character recognition (OCR) software to reduce the time business owners spend on data entry.

"If the supplier ABN is not already in your accounts, it will be read from the supplier invoice, validated against the ATO service and automatically added to the supplier details. This allows future bills from that supplier to be automatically matched. This unique feature to AccountRight provides multiple compliance benefits, such as ABN validation and the electronic storage of source documents. In other words, AccountRight users no longer have to keep paper files.”

Mr Scollay said the smart bills feature will make AccountRight even more compelling for SMEs, who also benefit from MYOB’s commitment to creating an easy and seamless experience for its customers.

“The smart bills feature is another way our online accounting products are helping to make business life easier. The ongoing innovation that bolsters feature-rich online solutions such as AccountRight is the reason a rapidly growing number of SMEs are switching to MYOB’s subscription services,” Mr Scollay says.

The feature was first introduced into Essentials Accounting, MYOB’s entry-level cloud accounting solution, in late 2014.