For all the program writers out there...

[thegurio]

Morning all, as i couldn't sleep i thought i would ask a few questions that were tearing my mind up lately. Is there anyone out there who can write a program that will talk to MYOB to stop the double handling that i do?

What i do now is i get the guys to do the work, then they print out a work sheet from google calendar (which has on it either what they did or how much they collected or how long it took), then i input that into MYOB which I then have to print out the invoice. All in all a fairly labor intensive routine. What i was looking for was some kind of program that would enable something to be sent from the boys iphones to MYOB that would then input into it how much the job was, and whether they collected money or not etc. and then i check it and "ok" the conversion and print out the resulting invoices etc.

On the wish list as well is a kind if time tracking section where i can see what times they start and finish a job (as some we do are on hourly rate) as well as where they are at the moment if i need to give them a job round the corner or need to know how far they are away from a particular job without ringing and asking. And also a "next" button would be great to go from one job to the next so that no jobs get missed (as some are being missed now). Integration with either Google Maps or Tom Tom or similar would be awesome!

As I use google calendar I would also like it if it could get its info from that.

Is it possible to give some sort of an estimate cost wise on this as well? A ball park figure will do!

Pretty much, the aim of the exercise is to take as much work as possible out of my day so i can go and earn some more money!

EDIT: I have found this, even if its only for US & Canada... But i want it in Australia

Oh, and i forgot to mention i am using a Mac and even though i can run a VM I would prefer to do it native.

[MrHyde]

Our company has developed links into MYOB before. What version of MYOB do you have? the standalone version or the server edition. One of the first things you will need is get a ODBC driver for MYOB from them and that has some licensing costs associated.

Then developing a web based application that will allow your staff to put stuff into MYOB is pretty easy. Could do most of your other stuff as well. Considering our daily rate, I would throw a random figure of around $50,000 to do custom development. We would approach it as a automating business process type of application.

I'm not sure of the tracking capability through iPhone as even though the phone has some idea of where it is, I don't think it can tell others that information. Andriod phones are brilliant for this sort of thing as they can be linked into Google Latitude and that can be used to track the locations without any custom application development. It is a feature of the phone so that people can see where their friends are. It can also be used to track staff.