MYOB Integration Guide: Connecting Your Accounting to the Rest of Your Business

MYOB has been a fixture in Australian accounting for over three decades. Despite Xero’s rise, MYOB still holds significant market share — especially among established businesses, trades companies, and larger SMBs who’ve been using it for years.

The problem is that MYOB often sits in isolation. Your CRM has customer data that MYOB needs. Your job management tool tracks completed work that should trigger invoices. Your POS system processes sales that need to land in the general ledger. And someone on your team is manually bridging these gaps.

Connecting MYOB to the rest of your business is one of the most valuable things you can do for operational efficiency. But MYOB integration comes with specific challenges you need to understand first.

MYOB’s API: What It Can and Can’t Do

MYOB offers two main products — MYOB Business (the cloud version) and MYOB AccountRight (the desktop/hybrid version). Both have APIs, but they’re different APIs with different capabilities.

MYOB Business API — the cloud-native API. It covers contacts, invoices, bills, accounts, tax codes, and basic inventory. Reasonably modern and well-documented.

MYOB AccountRight API — the older, more powerful product. The API covers more ground (payroll, timesheets, jobs, categories) but has quirks. AccountRight can run as a desktop application, a locally hosted server, or via MYOB’s cloud hosting — and the API endpoint depends on which mode you’re running.

Where the API Falls Short

• Webhooks are limited — you’ll mostly be polling for changes, meaning integrations have a 5-15 minute delay rather than real-time updates.
• Rate limits are tight — high-volume syncs need to be designed around API throttling.
• Authentication tokens expire — if your integration doesn’t handle OAuth2 token refresh properly, it will silently stop working.
• Documentation gaps — MYOB’s API docs have historically been less comprehensive than Xero’s, especially around edge cases.

Common MYOB Integration Patterns

CRM to MYOB

The most common integration. Your sales team closes a deal in the CRM, and the integration creates a customer record in MYOB and generates a draft invoice.

What to watch for: MYOB doesn’t enforce unique email addresses, so your integration needs its own duplicate detection logic. Company name matching is unreliable — “Smith Bros Electrical Pty Ltd” vs “Smith Brothers Electrical” won’t match automatically.

Job Management to MYOB

For trades and service businesses, this is where the real value lies. Tools like ServiceM8, Simpro, AroFlo, and Fergus track completed work with detailed labour hours, materials, and job costs. When a job completes, the integration should create a MYOB invoice with correctly coded line items.

The challenge: A single job might have 15 material items, 3 labour categories, travel charges, and a disposal fee. The integration needs to map each to the right MYOB account code and tax type — not dump everything into a single line item.

POS to MYOB

Retail businesses need point-of-sale transactions flowing into MYOB. Two approaches:

1. Transaction-level sync — every sale creates an MYOB record. Maximum detail but high API volume.
2. Summary sync — end-of-day totals pushed as journal entries. Less detail, far more practical for high-volume retail.

Most retail businesses are better served by summary sync. Your POS keeps transaction detail; MYOB gets the totals it needs for reporting and BAS.

MYOB vs Xero: The Integration Gap

Xero’s integration ecosystem is significantly larger than MYOB’s — more native connectors, better webhook support, more middleware compatibility, and a larger developer community.

This doesn’t mean you should switch to Xero just for better integrations. But it does mean MYOB integrations typically require more custom work. Where a Xero integration might use an off-the-shelf Zapier connector, the equivalent MYOB integration often needs a purpose-built solution.

Planning Your MYOB Integration

Before you start connecting things, answer these questions:

1. Which MYOB product are you on? Business (cloud) or AccountRight (desktop/hybrid)? This determines your API options and whether cloud middleware is even possible.
2. What’s your transaction volume? Low volume can tolerate simpler integrations. High volume needs careful attention to rate limits and error handling.
3. How complex is your account coding? If different products, services, and job types need different account codes and GST treatment, you need proper mapping logic.
4. Are you considering migrating to Xero? If so, it might make more sense to invest integration effort there rather than building MYOB integrations you’ll retire in 12 months.
5. Who maintains it? Every integration needs someone monitoring errors, updating mappings when your chart of accounts changes, and refreshing credentials when they expire.

The goal isn’t to make MYOB do everything — it’s to make MYOB do its job (accounting, GST, BAS, financial reporting) while receiving clean, correctly coded data from the systems that handle your operations. When that works, your bookkeeper stops chasing data entry errors and starts providing the financial insights your business actually needs.