Published on the 05/03/2026 | Written by Heather Wright
Smart invoice reminders, smart reconciliation and AI insights…
MYOB is ramping up its AI push for small businesses, unveiling a suite of workflow-embedded features designed to ease mounting pressures around cashflow, compliance and day-to-day admin across New Zealand and Australian businesses.
Currently in beta, the new suite of AI agents and features will progressively roll out across MYOB’s product portfolio including MYOB Business Lite, Pro and AccountRight, and aim to tackle one of the most persistent challenges facing SMEs: Time.
“Small improvements quickly add up to big results.”
Paul Robson, MYOB chief executive, says MYOB is targeting business pain points ‘ready for reinvention and transforming how customers and partners operate, unlocking a step-change in productivity through efficiency and insight’.
The new SME-focused AI features land against a wider backdrop of MYOB’s ongoing AI work across its wider platform ecosystem and a push to encourage local businesses towards becoming an ‘autonomous business’. Late last year Valantis Vais, MYOB general manager for product, product marketing and design told iStart that ‘practical’ was a key aspect of that push. While midsize businesses are curious about AI, they’re also wary of hype and sunk costs, wanting tools that provide practical benefits in the here and now, rather than promises of a sci-fi future.
He detailed to iStart a range of AI features going into Acumatica ERP solution, including accounts payable bill entry powered by OCR and semantic interpretation, expense management with AI-driven receipt capture, AI advisor anomaly detection and Auto Complete.
The new rollout extends the AI features to smaller businesses, including sole traders using Lite, as well as the more complex mid-market companies using AccountRight.
According to MYOB’s latest Business Monitor, 24 percent of employing SMEs say late payments exert significant pressure on their operations. The company believes embedding AI directly into existing workflows, with the likes of smart invoice reminders, automated reconciliation and AI-driven business insights, is key to unlocking productivity boosts without disruption.
Making sense of numbers and smart reconciliation
At the heart of the latest wave of promised updates is an AI Business Insights feature which will provide interactive charts and commentary to allow businesses to identify patterns and establish areas which need attention. MYOB says it will ‘plainly’ tell the story behind the numbers, providing easy-to-digest explanations for businesses, and a quicker avenue to surface trends and identify performance drivers in preparation for advisory-focused conversations for accountants and bookkeepers.
Another major addition will be Smart Reconciliation, which uses machine learning to categorise and auto-reconcile transactions based on user behaviour and pre-set schedules. Bank feeds are matched automatically, reducing hours typically spend on repetitive admin.
For small businesses, this means real-time visibility of expenditure and cashflow – an essential advantage in volatile trading conditions. For advisors MYOB says the feature means fewer errors and cleaner files when compliance deadlines loom, reducing the time spent tidying data before submission.
The focus on practical time savings echoes themes raised in MYOB’s earlier mid-market Acumatica rollout, where early adopters reported savings of upwards of 20 hours a month thanks to automation in accounts payable. While the new release doesn’t replicate those features, it shares the same underlying goal of removing manual volume so human effort can be redirected to higher-value decisions.
Behavioural cues to tackle late payments
The Business Monitor data shows late payments remain a stubborn issue for small businesses. MYOB’s Smart Invoice Reminders aims to address that, analysing late payer behaviour to recommend actions and tone, with customisable scheduling of automatic reminders.
For owners, MYOB says the offering will reduce administrative load, while providing clearer visibility of expected cashflow to reduce uncertainty in planning conversations for advisors.
Robson says the approach reflects the company’s belief that small improvements quickly add up to big results for local SMEs.
“AI can completely change the game for small businesses and their advisors, powering up productivity and accelerating innovation beyond anything we’ve seen before,” he says.
The company says it has guardrails and evaluation measures in place to ensure the accuracy and safety of its AI outputs, but does admit AI can still get things wrong. Users can view the context and data source of suggestions to review them.
