MYOB Acumatica for Importers and Exporters: Landed Costs, Deferred GST and Multi-Currency

Selling into the US and buying out of Vietnam looks great on the margin sheet, right up until the accounting starts. Every shipment brings a foreign currency purchase order, a freight bill, a customs entry and a goods and services tax (GST) question, and most small business accounting packages handle maybe half of that. It’s a common wall to hit: the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 56,274 goods exporters in 2019-20, the most recent release of that series, and the accounting behind that trade is the same whether you ship one container a quarter or twenty.

So this guide looks at MYOB Acumatica for importers and exporters in practice: multi-currency that follows the whole transaction, landed costs that tell you what stock really cost you, and the two GST rules that decide your cash flow, deferred GST coming in and the 60 day rule going out.

How MYOB Acumatica works for importers and exporters

The useful difference from entry level accounting packages is that the whole trade workflow lives in one system. A purchase order raised in US dollars flows through goods receipt, customs costs, warehouse putaway and on to a sale in Australian dollars, with the general ledger picking up every step. The platform’s currency management tools cover multicurrency invoices and payments, funds transfers between foreign currency bank accounts, and revaluation of foreign currency balances, so month end reporting reflects current rates rather than the rate on the day you booked the invoice.

For groups, this extends across companies. Plenty of importers run an Australian entity and a New Zealand one, and our guide to MYOB Acumatica multi-entity accounting covers how consolidations and intercompany transactions work when the two sides trade in different currencies.

Landed costs: what your imported stock really costs

An imported carton has a supplier price, and then it has the truth: supplier price plus ocean freight plus duty plus insurance plus the broker’s fee. MYOB Acumatica records these as landed costs allocated to inventory, spread across the items on a shipment by value, quantity, weight, volume or a custom split, with the adjustments posted into inventory value automatically.

Why care? Because every report downstream depends on it. If freight and duty sit in a general expense account, your gross margin by product is fiction, and pricing decisions get made on that fiction.

“The importers we meet usually know their exchange rate to four decimal places and their true landed cost not at all. Getting freight and duty onto the item is the one change that makes their margin reports believable.”

Bill Alvarez, Practice Manager, Auboros

Deferred GST, the scheme importers keep leaving on the table

By default, imports attract GST that is generally payable to the Australian Border Force before the goods are released. The deferred GST scheme lets approved importers pay that GST through their monthly Business Activity Statement (BAS) instead, where it usually nets against the matching credit on the same statement. The conditions are simple enough: apply to the ATO, lodge your BAS monthly, and lodge it electronically.

In MYOB Acumatica the deferred amount itself needs no special handling, because the ATO fills it in when processing the BAS. What does need care is any GST you actually pay to customs, and MYOB’s support guide for deferred GST walks through that setup: the customs invoice is booked with a dedicated import GST tax code so the full amount lands as a GST credit in the right BAS label. Your implementation partner maps those codes once, and the monthly process becomes routine.

Exports, the 60 day rule and GST-free invoicing

Exports run the other way. Sales of goods are GST-free if exported within 60 days of the earlier of receiving payment or issuing the invoice, and you can ask the ATO for an extension if shipping schedules blow that window out. In the system this is more discipline than configuration: export sales carry a GST-free tax category, invoices go out in the buyer’s currency where that’s what the contract says, and the paper trail proving the goods left the country stays attached to the transaction.

Wholesale distributors do a lot of this trade, which is why import and export handling sits inside the scoping conversation for the FastStart Wholesale Distribution program, and why the platform features so heavily in our comparison of the best ERP for wholesale distribution in Australia.

Where to start

If your import costing lives in a spreadsheet next to the accounting file, you already know the failure mode: the spreadsheet is right up until the week nobody updates it. Moving the trade workflow into MYOB Acumatica is a scoped project rather than a leap, and appetite for that move is broad. MYOB’s 2025 Mid-Market Survey found 36% of Australian mid-sized businesses are looking to upgrade their ERP, and the ones trading across borders have the most to gain from doing it.

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Import and export accounting that survives an audit

Auboros implements MYOB Acumatica from Brisbane for importers, exporters and distributors across Queensland and beyond. If your landed costs, deferred GST or multi-currency reporting need to come out of spreadsheets, book a free consultation. We’ll walk through one of your real shipments end to end and show you what it looks like in the platform.