At a glance
| Unit to report | Transactions: sales, purchases, banking and journal entries, counted together. |
| Where the count lives | MYOB Business in the browser: Banking menu, then Find transactions, Transactions tab, with the date range set wide. AccountRight desktop: the Transaction Journal window from any command centre, with the date range set wide. |
| Typical years retained | MYOB keeps the file's history for as long as the file is active, including years converted in from an older desktop file. The earliest dated transaction after a wide search is your start year. |
| What usually makes it valuable | Sales and purchases with outcomes, inventory and job records tied to them, general journals with their memos, and the bank reconciliation decisions behind every line. |
| What stays private | Customer, supplier and employee cards: names, ABNs, bank details, addresses and contact details. Payroll. Any client file you only have adviser access to. |
Paths checked against the MYOB help centre: Finding a transaction and Export for accountants. The browser and desktop products differ, so check in your version.
Where the count lives
Nothing needs exporting. Two routes, depending on which MYOB you use.
- MYOB Business in the browser. Open the Banking menu and choose Find transactions. Stay on the Transactions tab.
- Set the date range to start in the year the business began using MYOB and end today. Leave transaction type, contact and category unfiltered.
- Search. The list is every transaction in the range. Read the total shown, or page to the end; if the page caps the list, narrow to one financial year at a time and add the years up.
- AccountRight desktop. From any command centre click Transaction Journal, set the dates wide, and read the list. Right-click gives Copy to Clipboard if you want to paste into a spreadsheet and count rows there.
- Sort by date, either route. The first row's date is the start year to enter on the intake. If the file was converted in from an older product, the history usually came with it; check the earliest date rather than the subscription date.
What to put in the intake
| Field | What to enter | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | The transaction count from Find transactions or the Transaction Journal, rounded. | About 90,000 transactions |
| Years covered | Start year to now, and whether the file was converted from desktop or started fresh. | 2009 to now, converted from AccountRight in 2021 |
| Estimate | Tick it if the number is rounded or added up across years. | Ticked |
Estimates are fine. If you only know the financial years and a rough monthly volume, multiply and tick the box.
Why buyers value it
MYOB files are often the oldest continuous record a business owns, and length matters more to a buyer than size. The sales and purchases registers carry every invoice and bill with the payments, credits and adjustments that followed, so the outcome of each transaction is on the record. Where inventory and jobs are in use, the ledger links what was bought, what was built and what was billed, which is the shape of a trading business rather than a bank statement. General journals with their memos show how the owner or bookkeeper corrected, accrued and reclassified, in their own words. Bank reconciliation adds thousands of labelled matching decisions. A long, consistent MYOB file is a whole operating history that no public dataset contains.
What stays private
- Every customer, supplier, employee and personal card is de-identified: names, ABNs, bank account details, addresses, emails and phone numbers are irreversibly removed, with each removal written to the audit ledger.
- Payroll (pay runs, tax file numbers, superannuation) and timesheets that carry pay rates are excluded at extraction.
- If you are an accountant or bookkeeper with adviser access to client files, those files belong to your clients and are out of scope. Only files your business owns are in play.
- Buyers receive a prepared, de-identified copy under licence, never a login and never the raw file. The Trust and Security pages cover the full process.
If you want to export the full history
Only after an offer is accepted. Until then the intake runs on the counts you type in. In most engagements we connect read-only with your signature and you export nothing. This is MYOB's documented route if you would rather hand over files.
- In MYOB Business, open the settings menu (the cog), choose Import and export data, then the Export tab.
- Under Data type choose Data for your accountant. Set the Period, or custom Date from and Date to, to cover the whole history. Pick an Export file type and click Export. This produces the transactions and account balances for the range.
- Items export from the same screen as a tab-separated text file. Contacts come from the Contacts report under Reporting, then Reports, exported to Excel. Any other report exports to Excel or PDF from its Export button.
- AccountRight desktop users can also take a full company file backup from the File menu. Check in your version for the exact label and where the backup lands.
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