Breaking News & Updates
A new national taskforce has just confirmed what a lot of small business owners already feel: the financial side of running a business is where people struggle most.
If that’s you, here’s some good news — you can start learning the basics right now, for free, with our sample Xero and MYOB bookkeeping training.
The Problem Australia Just Put a Spotlight On
In August 2026, a national taskforce convened by Xero was launched to tackle a genuine crisis in small business financial literacy — and the research behind it is sobering. According to data cited by the ABC, more than one-third of small business owners don’t know whether they made a profit last month.
Read that again. Not “aren’t sure of the exact figure” — don’t know if they made a profit at all.
As Xero’s managing director Angad Soin put it, if you’re running a small business and you don’t know if you’re turning a profit, you don’t know if you can pay yourself a wage — and that ripples out across the whole economy, affecting whether businesses can hire staff and pay other small businesses.
The human side of this is real. Newcastle small business owner Storm Menzies told the ABC that when she launched her business, the financial side blindsided her: the product design was the fun part, she said, while the financial and operational side was something she had no experience doing.
With few reliable tools available, she turned to YouTube, describing the experience as a lot of trial and error, a lot of mistakes, and feeling very overwhelmed.
There are more than 2.6 million small businesses in Australia, contributing around $623 billion to the economy each year — and yet, as the Council of Small Business Organisations’ Skye Cappuccio pointed out, we don’t have the established systems and structures to support that learning across the country.
The stress this creates spills into relationships and mental health, one taskforce contributor noted.
You Don’t Have to Learn It the Hard Way
Here’s what we’d gently say to any business owner feeling like Storm did: you don’t have to piece it together from random YouTube videos, and you certainly don’t have to feel ashamed for not knowing. Bookkeeping is a learnable skill — a set of specific, practical tasks — and the best way to learn it is to actually do it in the software, guided step by step.
That’s exactly what our free Bookkeeping Basics samples let you do. Before you spend a cent, you can try real training built around the two most popular accounting programs in Australia — Xero and MYOB — and see how approachable this stuff actually is when it’s taught properly.
Explore the free bookkeeping course samples
What’s in the Free Bookkeeping Basics Samples
Our Bookkeeping Basics training content is designed to answer the exact questions overwhelmed business owners have — the ones that feel too simple to ask but matter enormously:
- What is a debit and what is a credit, really?
- How do I record money coming in and money going out?
- What’s the difference between a quote, an invoice and a receipt?
- How do bank feeds work, and what does it mean to “reconcile” an account?
- How do I know, at a glance, whether my business is actually making money?
These are the fundamentals that turn “I don’t know if I made a profit” into “I can read my own Profit and Loss report.”
And because the samples use real accounting software rather than abstract theory, you’re building genuine, transferable skills from the very first lesson — the same applied approach we use throughout all our courses.
Free Resources Beyond the Samples
The Bookkeeping Basics samples aren’t the only thing we make freely available. Our blog — the one you’re reading right now — is packed with plain-English explanations of exactly the things small business owners tell us they find confusing: bank reconciliation, BAS, payroll, the new Payday Super rules, and how to choose between Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.
It’s all there to be read at no cost, any time.
We built these resources for precisely the reason the taskforce exists: because too many capable, hardworking business owners are being held back not by their products or their work ethic, but by a lack of financial confidence that nobody ever helped them build.
From Free Samples to Real Confidence
Storm Menzies said something in that ABC article that stuck with us — that what business owners really need is to build the self-confidence to believe they can learn what they need to keep their business going.
We couldn’t agree more. That belief is exactly what a good, hands-on course delivers: not just knowledge, but the quiet confidence that comes from having actually done the task yourself.
If the free samples show you that bookkeeping is learnable — and they will — our full courses take you all the way to genuine competence across Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks, with real-world case studies and support from real people.
Start free today — and when you’re ready to go further, explore our full range of bookkeeping and office admin courses.
You don’t need to know if you made a profit last month by luck. You can know it because you learned how to check. That’s what we’re here for.
Source: ABC News, “National taskforce launches to improve financial literacy rates for small business owners,” 14 August 2026 (abc.net.au). This article is general information only.
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