AI and MYOB.

What MYOB’s own AI does (October 2026)

MYOB’s AI is branded Iris. On MYOB’s NZ AI page, as listed on 19 October 2026, Ask Iris answers questions on Lite, Pro and AccountRight; AI Business Insights is in beta for eligible Pro and AccountRight browser customers; Smart Reconciliation is rolling out progressively; and Smart Invoice Reminders suggest payment follow-ups while you stay in control. MYOB says its NZ product is built for Inland Revenue requirements.

The MYOB Connector lets Claude and ChatGPT query MYOB Business through MCP. It is read-only, the Owner user must allow each AI tool per business in My Account, and it covers revenue, profit, expenses, receivables and cash, but not payroll, inventory, job tracking or tax lodgement. A decision rule: if the owner wants answers, turn on the connector. If you want bills entered or checked, build with the API and an approval step.

Integration routes and when to use each

Automation 1: supplier invoice review before posting

Inputs

Supplier invoice PDFs from the accounts payable inbox, plus the supplier card, the last year of bills from that supplier, open purchase orders and tax codes, read from MYOB.

Model step

Extract supplier, GST number, invoice number, date, lines, GST and total into a fixed schema with page references.

Checks in code

Lines and GST reconcile to the total; the invoice number is new for that supplier; unit prices are compared with history; the bank account on the invoice matches the supplier card.

Human approval

The accounts payable officer sees the extraction beside the PDF with flags, then approves, edits or rejects. A changed bank account always goes to a second person and a call to a known supplier number.

Write-back

The approved bill is created through the Purchase/Bill endpoints, with the PDF attached through the matching bill attachment endpoint.

Failure and recovery

Any error leaves the item in the review queue and creates nothing. A wrong posted bill is reversed in MYOB like any manual error, and the review record links the bill to its source PDF.

The accounting-practice version is mapped in invoice coding and exception review; extraction design is covered by our AI document processing service.

Automation 2: a month-end coding check

1. Read. Pull the month’s general ledger transactions and bills with their accounts and tax codes.
2. Compare. Code flags suppliers coded to an unusual account for them, and taxable suppliers coded GST-exempt.
3. Explain. The model writes one line per flag explaining why it looks wrong, citing the transaction.
4. Review. The bookkeeper or accountant fixes genuine errors in MYOB; the model changes nothing.

Permissions and approval design

Apps are registered in the my.MYOB portal for a key and secret, and users authorise through OAuth. MYOB’s docs list scopes by area (general ledger, sales, purchases, supplier contacts, payroll and more), so an accounts payable tool should not request payroll. Cloud requests carry three credentials: the OAuth token, company file credentials in x-myobapi-cftoken, and the developer key in x-myobapi-key. Give the integration its own company file user with a restricted role. Reviews follow the patterns in human review queues.

With the connector, MYOB handles sign-in so Claude or ChatGPT never sees the password, but conversations follow the assistant’s own privacy, training and memory settings. Supplier records for sole traders are personal information under the Privacy Act 2020.

Costs and limits (as listed 19 October 2026)

• Developer programme: $110, $220 or $630 including GST, billed monthly; currency not stated.
• Rate limits: not published on the developer pages we fetched. Exceeding them returns 403 with “API key has exceeded the per-second rate limit” or the daily equivalent.
• Model cost, worked example: 300 bills a month at 5,000 input and 800 output tokens on Claude Sonnet 5.5 is about 300 × US$0.018 = US$5.40.

Where it goes wrong

• 403 means two things. Retry logic keyed to 429 never fires; read the error text before treating a 403 as a permissions fault.
• Wrong source in ChatGPT. MYOB warns that if the MYOB plugin is not selected, ChatGPT may answer from the web with a plausible figure.
• Stale memory. Assistants may recall numbers from earlier chats that are no longer current.
• Duplicate bills. Suppliers resend invoices; the uniqueness check stops double payment.

Businesses comparing ledgers should read our Xero guide, and hospitality operators our supplier invoice processing workflow.

Written by the Levy Street team in Wellington. Last updated 19 October 2026.