Half a million customers sign up to MYOB

MYOB has announced that it has reached a new milestone, signing more than 500,000 regular paying clients as of December 2014.

MYOB said that of its regular paying clients, over 116,000 are cloud subscribers.

The company added that it has more than 1.2 million businesses actively using its SME solutions, including AccountRight, Essentials, and BankLink. In the last quarter ending December 31, over 67 percent of new MYOB SME production registrations were cloud subscriptions. This compares to the 61 percent in the quarter ending June 30, 2014, and 48 percent in the comparable quarter for 2013.

MYOB SME solutions general manager James Scollay said the results indicate the market's eagerness to adopt the company's cloud offerings.

"We recognise that small and medium businesses have different and specific needs and have invested significantly in R&D, with over AU$40 million invested in 2014 alone, to develop a range of leading-edge cloud solutions," he said.

Key competitor Xero reported similar results last December, with more than 400,000 paying customers in the UK, New Zealand, and the US. This resulted in the company processing NZ$250 billion of transactions and 95 million invoices.

On Thursday, Xero announced that it will be adding a payroll service, dubbed Payroll, to its cloud accounting suite that will be geared towards small businesses.

This launch comes after Xero announced last September that it was going to indefinitely extend its free MYOB-to-Xero conversion service, Jet Convert, allowing MYOB customers to easily shift their account ledgers onto Xero's platform.