Accounting Applications - Essay Example

Value addition allows firms to effectively market their products and services, while putting emphasis on the power of brand rather than the commodity. Through value additions, firms can charge higher prices and enjoy competitive advantage. This is because products and services with higher added value are less price-elastic and difficult to be copied by the rival companies. Addition of value can either enhance the product’s value or price. For example, offering one month of free support on new software would be a value-added attribute (Pramanik 2005).

The primary purpose of job functions in MYOB is to group certain transactions into a reportable entry. This is achieved by assigning a job for each profit centers, which for the case of the printing business can be assumed to be the two divisions including Hamilton and Auckland. Henceforth, every transaction that belongs to each division (profit center) is assigned to a job that is associated with it. Job reports, which represent the profit centers, are used to report the activity of each job.

A job function is set up to follow income and expenses associated with service jobs. This function is especially helpful when performing multiple jobs for a particular customer. A suitable job number is allocated to each amount every time the user executes a transaction. This feature allows the user to relate different jobs with different amounts in a single transaction. By creating a jobs budget analysis, a profit and loss statement for each job and actual results can be prepared and compared with the budgeted values, for each profit center.

Ideally, job function is useful for companies that perform more than one job for the same customer, for example the printing business could be performing different jobs in the two divisions, but for the same customer. This is made possible by MYOB because it allows such jobs to be created underneath the name of the customer. Furthermore, a printing business can use job function for each service performed or goods transacted in order to track the services and products that are most profitable and those that eventually generate losses.

This information can be used to prepare comprehensive reports, which enables the company to analyze all the transactions they have made with the business during a certain period (MYOB 2006). The business of printing can assume each of its two divisions as distinct profits centers, for which it can track income and expanses separately. The jobs function can be used to group transactions belonging to each division (profit centers). The performance of each division can then get tracked and relevant reports generated accordingly.

Additionally, to breakdown a job into distinct parts, a firm can use sub-jobs (MYOB 2006). Category function The category function allows firms to track profitability of properties, offices and other segments associated with the business in question. For every time users input a transaction, they are required to assign the category that suits its description. For the case of a printing business with two divisions, we can take each division as an individual category and then track the profitability of the products they produce: say, product A, product B, and product C for Hamilton and product A, product B, and product C for Auckland division.

Thereafter, a profit and loss statement can be prepared for each division. Examples of transaction that can be assigned categories include: general journal entries, receive money, historical sales and purchases, inventory adjustments, inventory transfers, purchases,