Many companies need to track performance in more than one division or department.  In order to see which areas of the business are performing the company needs to know the profitability of each.

Quickbooks does this very well using the Class feature, where every transaction line can be allocated to a Class as well as an  account or item. It operates independently from the job costing feature and has powerful and flexible reporting options.

MYOB does this by way of the Category Tracking feature. The problem with Category Tracking is that a category can only be assigned to a whole transaction, rather than being able to assign a category to individual detail lines within a transaction. This means that one transaction cannot be split over multiple categories. One way around this is to use Jobs instead of Categories to track divisions in MYOB, because transactions can be split over multiple jobs. However, this limits functionality of the MYOB Jobs feature where job costing is used. In both cases the reporting is very limited. There are, however, a number of independent add-on products that enhance MYOB job reporting (for example, Sidekick)

Xero achieves this very well using its Tracking feature. What puts Xero ahead of Quickbooks and MYOB is the option to have 2 tracking categories (or dimensions), not only one. For example: a nationwide company wishes to track profitability of each region, but would also like to track profitability of each of its 3 divisions. For each transaction or transaction line, there will be 2 additional drop-down fields, Region and Division (the names of these fields are specified in the tracking setup area) - for example, a sale transaction takes place in the Marlborough region for the Commercial division (as opposed to Residential).