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For a lot of small business owners, doing the BAS is one of those tasks that quietly eats up a disproportionate amount of time. You know what the numbers should look like. You’ve been through it before. But still, there’s the reconciling, the checking, the second-guessing. It takes longer than it should.
And for bookkeepers and BAS agents, multiply that across 15 clients, and you start to understand why automation isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a business that can grow, and one that’s constantly at capacity.
We sat down with two MYOB users — Suresh, who runs six franchises, and Charmaine, a solo BAS agent and bookkeeper — to talk about how banking automation has changed the way they work. Their stories are different, but the thread running through both is the same: less time doing, more time reviewing, and a lot more confidence when it counts.
“I sat back and realised, it’s running itself”
Suresh has been using MYOB for more than 20 years. As both a business owner and a principal auditor, he brings an accountant’s eye to the way he sets up and manages his six entities — same chart of accounts, same naming conventions, same automation setup across all of them.
He’s systematic about adopting new features, too. When MYOB’s AI category auto-matching rolled out, he didn’t turn it on across all six licences at once. He enabled it in one, watched it closely for a couple of weeks, and only once he was satisfied did he replicate it across the others.
When I first turned on the AI matching I spent the same amount of time as before for a couple of weeks, just to reassure myself it was working well. Because you never know: if a human can make a mistake, automation created by humans can too."
That careful approach paid off. Before AI matching, Suresh was spending an hour to an hour and a half each week reviewing transactions across his businesses, and that was with bank feeds and rules already in place. Now, he’s down to 30 to 45 minutes, across an average of 50 to 75 transactions a week.
But the number he keeps coming back to is the BAS.
“Less than half what I used to spend for the BAS, because previously I was doing manual reconciliation, and now it’s automated. I reviewed all the transactions, found not a single mismatch in one business, which gave me the assurance to pass it across the others and lodge,” he says.
“One thing is I can take on more clients”
Charmaine has been bookkeeping since 2007 and became a registered BAS agent in 2019. She works solo, which means every hour she saves is an hour she gets back to use somewhere else.
Her biggest client has three mechanic workshops and up to 100 transactions a day across those three sites. Before banking automation, that kind of volume meant significant manual work: waiting for bank statements, printing them out, running a ruler down the page and ticking off each transaction one by one.
“That was the whole previous way of working. Bank feeds were huge, and now the AI auto-matching is saving probably an equal amount of time on top of that.”
That was the whole previous way of working. Bank feeds were huge, and now the AI auto-matching is saving probably an equal amount of time on top of that.”
What strikes her most is how the work has evolved. She’s not entering or manually matching transactions anymore; she’s reviewing them. She’s checking the logic, confirming the AI got it right, and, occasionally, correcting it when it hasn’t learned a new supplier or unusual transaction yet.
“(The AI) doesn’t take long to learn. Even within the same session, or the very next time I go back into that client, it’s much more accurate, or fully accurate,” she says.
For Charmaine, the upshot is straightforward: with the time she’s reclaimed, she can grow. “One thing is I can take on more clients because it’s saving me so much time.”
The bigger picture
For Suresh and Charmaine, all of this has been a shift in how they relate to the numbers.
Suresh, who once spent hours on manual reconciliation, now has the confidence to step back, because the numbers are right before he even checks. Charmaine used to dread the sheer volume of manual work at BAS time. Now she scrolls through a 23-page BAS report and her eye catches anything that doesn’t look right.
Both of them took a measured approach to trusting the automation. They checked, reviewed, and only relaxed their oversight once the system had earned it. Instead of being reluctant to embrace new technologies, it's exactly how it should work.
And once that trust was there? The relief was real.
“It’s saving me a lot of time and energy in managing my books,” Suresh says. For a business owner juggling six entities alongside a full-time career, that’s not a small thing.
For Charmaine, it’s opened up what her practice can become. The work is still there, the judgement, the expertise, the accountability. But the repetitive, time-consuming parts? The software is handling those now.
That’s the point
But what made it work for both of them was the quality of data feeding into the automated processes.
Bank feeds remove the element of human error from importing transactions, and connecting a bank account is now even easier with the introduction of Open Banking. Customers can now connect their bank account or credit card in minutes, and have their data flowing in the next business day*. Open Banking also gives users access to a greater range of institutions and account types to connect to, such as ING, Up Bank and Me Bank.
The other input is receipts. Charmaine remembers the old way well: clients arriving with boxes of paper receipts, or sending through faded copies that were barely legible by the time they reached her. With MYOB Assist, receipts are captured on the spot, snapped on a phone the moment a purchase happens, with AI pulling the key details straight into MYOB. That additional context helps MYOB make sense of a transaction.
Automation isn't a single switch. The real benefit comes from identifying the opportunities across the product — bank feeds, receipt capture, matching — and letting them work together. Get the data flowing in cleanly from the start, and everything else has something solid to build on. That's what Suresh and Charmaine are already living.
*Data will begin flowing the next business day after your first transaction using your connected account (via Open Banking).
Information provided in this article is of a general nature and does not consider your personal situation. It does not constitute legal, financial, or other professional advice and should not be relied upon as a statement of law, policy or advice. You should consider whether this information is appropriate to your needs and, if necessary, seek independent advice. This information is only accurate at the time of publication. Although every effort has been made to verify the accuracy of the information contained on this webpage, MYOB disclaims, to the extent permitted by law, all liability for the information contained on this webpage or any loss or damage suffered by any person directly or indirectly through relying on this information.
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