Moving from MYOB to Odoo is a structured data migration followed by an operational handover. You export your chart of accounts, contacts, open invoices and bills, inventory and payroll year-to-date figures from MYOB; you configure Odoo’s Australian localisation, import the data, lock down opening balances, and cut over on a BAS-clean date. For most Australian small-to-medium businesses it takes four to ten weeks and $20,000 to $60,000 depending on scope. Done properly, it closes the gap between your accounts and your operations.
We worked with a Perth wholesale distributor last quarter who’d been on MYOB AccountRight for eleven years. Thirty-eight users, clean books, a bolt-on warehouse management tool, two CRM spreadsheets, and a reordering process that lived in a single staff member’s head. MYOB did what it was meant to do — accounting and payroll — exactly right. Everything else around it was held together by habit. The migration wasn’t about MYOB failing; it was about everything outside MYOB needing to catch up.
Why Australian businesses migrate from MYOB to Odoo
The trigger is almost never accounting dissatisfaction. MYOB does accounting, BAS and STP Phase 2 well. The trigger is the rest of the business having grown past the accounting layer. A wholesaler needs multi-warehouse inventory with landed costs. A manufacturer needs bills of materials, routings and subcontracting. A field-service operator needs scheduling, mobile timesheets and recurring jobs. None of these fit inside MYOB Business or AccountRight. Acumatica closes part of the gap at a price point where Odoo becomes the alternative worth costing properly.
Rule of thumb: when you’re running MYOB plus three or more other SaaS tools to make the business work, a single Odoo instance typically wins on total cost and operational clarity within eighteen months.
MYOB Business vs AccountRight vs Acumatica — what migrates differently
Which MYOB product you’re on changes the migration mechanics. Getting this wrong adds weeks.
MYOB Business (the cloud SME line) exports cleanly through the web interface and the MYOB API. Chart of accounts, contacts, items, invoices, bills, bank transactions and GST codes come out as CSV or via connector. Most migrations here are straightforward because the data model is narrow.
MYOB AccountRight (the hybrid desktop/cloud product) holds richer transactional history and supports more complex inventory, jobs and card files. Export via AccountRight Live or the company file (.myox) is mature but you’ll hit edge cases with custom fields, categories and item analysis codes that need mapping into Odoo’s tag and analytic account structure.
MYOB Acumatica (formerly Exo and Advanced) is a full mid-market ERP. You’re migrating bills of materials, work orders, multi-warehouse inventory, project accounting and potentially CRM — which means the scope looks much more like a mid-market Odoo implementation than a Xero-style lift. Budget accordingly.
If you don’t know which tier you’re on, check your MYOB invoice or ask your bookkeeper before scoping anything else.
When NOT to migrate off MYOB — the honest gate
Not every business should leave MYOB, and we’ll tell you if you’re one of them.
If you’re a sole trader or under five users, and accounting plus light payroll is genuinely the whole job, MYOB Business does it cheaper and simpler than Odoo. The annual licence is roughly $360 to $1,300 depending on tier; Odoo for the same headcount runs around $2,040 per year in licensing before implementation. Unless you need inventory, manufacturing or CRM in the same system, the maths doesn’t favour moving.
If your payroll is dominated by complex award interpretation — construction EBAs, the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Award, or the Hospitality Industry (General) Award with split shifts and penalty stacking — MYOB’s native interpretation will save you more than the integration hassle of running Odoo with Employment Hero alongside. We cover that gap below.
And if your accountant is a single practitioner deeply embedded in MYOB and unwilling to move, the change-management cost is real. A good Odoo implementation survives a reluctant accountant; a bad one doesn’t. Have the conversation before you commit.
Export your MYOB data
MYOB Business exports through Reports → Export, the API, or a third-party connector. AccountRight exports via AccountRight Live or by sending the .myox company file to a migration specialist. In either case, the minimum export set for a clean Odoo import is the chart of accounts, contacts (customers and suppliers), open invoices and bills, the item list with costs and quantities on hand, open purchase orders, GST code mappings, and the general ledger trial balance as at cutover.
Don’t try to migrate every historical transaction. Twelve months of transactional history plus opening balances is plenty. Older data stays archived in MYOB as a read-only reference.
Choose a cutover date that works for BAS
Pick a BAS-clean date. For quarterly lodgers, cut over on 1 July, 1 October, 1 January or 1 April — the day after a BAS period closes. For monthly lodgers, cut over on the first of the month. This means your final MYOB BAS covers a clean period and your first Odoo BAS starts fresh, with no mid-period split that forces manual reconciliation between two systems.
The end of the financial year on 1 July is the most common cutover we run for Australian businesses. STP Phase 2 finalisation has been submitted in MYOB, year-end super is paid, and Odoo starts year one with a clean ledger and a fresh payroll cycle.
Set up Odoo’s Australian localisation
Before importing anything, install and configure Odoo’s Australian localisation package. That gives you the tax codes mapped to BAS labels (G1 through 7A), Peppol e-invoicing under BIS Billing 3.0, ABA file generation for the big four banks, STP Phase 2 payroll event structures, and the financial report templates ATO auditors will recognise.
Map your MYOB GST codes to Odoo’s tax types before you touch invoice data. GST, GST Free, Export, Input-Taxed and Out of Scope all need to land on the right BAS label or your first quarter in Odoo will be a reconciliation exercise nobody wants.
Import contacts, invoices, bills and inventory
Import in a fixed order. Contacts first — customers and suppliers with ABNs, payment terms and bank details. Then the chart of accounts, opened as at the cutover date. Then the item master with standard costs and opening stock quantities. Then open sales orders, open invoices, open purchase orders and open supplier bills. Finally, bank accounts and the opening bank statement position.
Use Odoo’s built-in CSV import for small datasets; use a scripted migration via the odoo-migrate pattern for anything over a few thousand records. Validate every import with a reconciliation report before moving to the next step — importing invoices against a chart of accounts that hasn’t been checked will cascade errors you’ll spend a week chasing.
Opening balances and reconciliation
Opening balances come from your MYOB trial balance as at the cutover date. Every account in MYOB needs a matching account in Odoo, and the debits and credits must balance exactly — not approximately. A $12 rounding variance today becomes a $12 variance that haunts three BAS cycles.
Reconcile bank accounts to the last cleared MYOB statement. Reconcile the GST clearing account to the last lodged BAS. Reconcile debtors and creditors subsidiary ledgers to the control accounts. Document every adjusting journal. Your auditor and your future self will both thank you.
Payroll, STP Phase 2 and super handoff
Payroll is usually migrated on the first of a new pay period, not mid-cycle. Finalise STP Phase 2 in MYOB for the year-to-date, pay out super and PAYG, then import employee master data into Odoo — or into Employment Hero if you’re using that for award interpretation.
Year-to-date gross, PAYG withheld, and super paid need to travel with each employee record so their first Odoo payslip shows the correct running totals for the financial year. The ATO doesn’t care which system lodged the STP event; it cares that the numbers reconcile. We covered the mechanics in detail in our Xero to Odoo migration playbook — the same pattern applies here with MYOB-specific export steps.
Award-interpretation payroll — the one thing MYOB does that Odoo doesn’t
This is the gap you need to plan around honestly. MYOB’s payroll has award interpretation built deep into the product — penalty rates, allowances, loadings, shift stacking and leave accruals for most Fair Work modern awards are handled natively and kept current with the Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review.
Odoo’s payroll module is capable for base award rates, salaried staff, simple hourly workers and standard leave, but it doesn’t try to be a full award-interpretation engine. For businesses with complex awards — construction EBAs with RDOs and site allowances, hospitality with split-shift penalties, aged care with sleepover rates — the standard Australian pattern is to run Odoo for everything else and hand payroll off to Employment Hero (formerly KeyPay) via the official connector.
Employment Hero interprets the award, pays the staff, lodges STP Phase 2 to the ATO and sends journal summaries back to Odoo’s general ledger. You get Odoo’s operational integration everywhere else and a payroll engine that matches what MYOB was giving you. Budget $6 to $10 AUD per employee per month for Employment Hero on top of Odoo licensing. It’s the right answer for most Australian businesses above fifteen staff with award-driven payroll.
Running MYOB and Odoo in parallel during cutover (what actually breaks)
A short parallel window — three to five business days before go-live — is standard and useful. You enter the same transactions into both systems and compare the outputs. Bank balances, GST positions, debtor totals and creditor totals should match to the cent. That’s the acceptance test.
Running both systems live for weeks or months is a different question, and almost always a mistake. We’ve inherited it twice. The problems are predictable. Your bookkeeper posts an invoice to one system and forgets the other, so debtors ledgers drift. Bank feeds reconcile to MYOB but Odoo’s cash position lags by a week. Payroll year-to-date splits between platforms and STP Phase 2 lodgement picks up only half. BAS reconciliation takes a full day instead of an hour.
If you need MYOB after cutover for any reason, archive it as read-only. Lock the user accounts to view-only, export a final trial balance, and use it as a historical reference — not as a live second ledger. If you need live integration instead, build a one-way sync from Odoo to MYOB for a defined period with a scheduled end date, and hold yourself to it.
Test, train and go live
Two weeks before cutover, run a full rehearsal on a copy of production. Raise an invoice, pay a supplier, close a stock count, run payroll, generate a BAS, produce management reports. Whatever breaks here is what will break on day one if you don’t fix it now.
Train the bookkeeper first and deepest. Train sales, warehouse and payroll users on their specific workflows — no one needs the full Odoo training deck. Publish a single-page cheat sheet for the first fortnight. Keep a migration channel open in whatever your team uses for comms so issues surface fast.
Migration timeline and cost
Small businesses on MYOB Business with standard accounting and light inventory: four to six weeks, $20,000 to $35,000. Businesses on AccountRight with inventory, CRM and some customisation: six to ten weeks, $35,000 to $70,000. MYOB Acumatica migrations with manufacturing or multi-entity: three to six months, $80,000 to $200,000. Odoo licensing on top is around $34 AUD per user per month for the all-apps plan.
These numbers assume a scoped project run by a partner using our implementation method. DIY migrations can be cheaper in cash terms and usually cost more in rework — we wrote about that trade-off separately.
If you’re weighing the decision itself rather than the mechanics, MYOB and Odoo solve different problems and the comparison between them is worth reading first.
If you’re planning a MYOB to Odoo migration in Australia and want a scoped plan with fixed milestones before you commit, we’re a Perth-based team that runs these end to end — export, import, BAS cutover, payroll handoff and go-live support. Have a look at our migration work or get in touch for a first conversation about scope and timing.
Frequently asked.
Does Odoo integrate with MYOB?
Yes, but integration is usually a stepping stone, not the destination. Odoo can sync customers, invoices and payments with MYOB via middleware like Zapier or a custom connector against MYOB's API. Most businesses use the integration for a short overlap period during cutover, then retire MYOB once Odoo's books are stable.
Is Odoo a Chinese company?
No. Odoo S.A. is Belgian, headquartered in Ramillies near Brussels, with regional offices including Sydney and Hong Kong. The source code is open-source under LGPL for the Community edition and a commercial licence for Enterprise. Australian customers are served through the local Odoo office and an accredited partner network.
Can I use Odoo in Australia?
Yes. Odoo ships an Australian localisation module covering GST handling, BAS Types A, C and D, STP Phase 2 lodgement, Peppol e-invoicing under BIS Billing 3.0 and ABA file generation for ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac. It's used across manufacturing, wholesale, field service, construction and professional services here.
What is the alternative to MYOB in Australia?
Xero is the closest like-for-like alternative at the SME accounting tier. For businesses wanting accounting plus operations in one system — inventory, manufacturing, CRM, field service — Odoo is the obvious alternative. Reckon, QuickBooks and Sage also operate locally with smaller footprints and narrower feature sets.
What is the disadvantage of using Odoo?
Odoo's depth cuts both ways. There's more to configure, more to learn, and weak implementations produce cluttered systems nobody trusts. Australian localisation is mature but needs a partner who understands ATO quirks. Annual major releases mean upgrades need planning. Picked properly and implemented well, none of this is disqualifying.