Continue reading Best Value for Money Xero Advanced Certificate Training Short Course
There is a lot of talk currently about negative gearing and whatever happens, we will all be affected. It’s the “wind that blows” according to Jim Rohn, a great inspirational speaker.
One of the topics which comes up about negative gearing is whether it should be available for existing dwellings or only new house and land packages.
As a result, EzyLearn is creating a real-life case study covering the investment and tax benefits of investing in a new house and land package. There are certainly plenty of them going up in the Central Coast to Newcastle and Maitland area!
I believe real estate is a terrific investment provided you don’t stretch yourself financially. It does fluctuate in the short term, but you have to think long term.
Certainly, the recent changes in the real estate market, with Sydney property prices dropping over 15 per cent, means that if you bought in the last 2 years your property is worth less than what you paid for it.
The problem with house prices going down is that this affects your equity. Equity is how much of the property YOU own. The banks DEBT stays the same and only reduces as you pay down your loan.
The problem with your equity decreasing won’t matter in the long term because house prices generally continue to increase, but it will be a problem if you need to refinance or can’t afford the repayments and need to sell.
It’s these situations that make lenders charge mortgage insurance. If you borrow more than 80% of the value of the property, you’re up for mortgage insurance.
The ability to borrow so much of a properties value is GREAT when property prices increase, because you only actually have a small amount of equity (which increases) but when prices go down it can be very stressful.
This is a hotly discussed topic right now but it mainly affects whether property investors should be able to claim negative gearing if they buy an existing dwelling.
This is not so much of an issue for new dwellings because governments generally want to encourage builders and developers to erect new homes to house the population.
EzyLearn is adding a new training course manual & workbook to our property investment course that is totally focused on the tax benefits of investing in a new property.
The great news for Sydney and Melbourne investors is that you can invest $450,000 to $600,000 and buy a completely new house and land package in the Central Coast to Newcastle area of NSW. This makes it much more affordable than the capital cities.
Featured image: Allam Builders and Developers’ new house in Forresters Beach Estate, Central Coast of New South Wales
I’m excited to be delving deeper into a micro course specifically targeting how you can manage on-the-job costs and track your project. This will be included in all of our Xero, MYOB and Quickbooks online accounting courses.
In many industries, no two jobs are the same, making estimating job costs and resources tough. Job tracking is one of the best ways to develop an accurate budget and avoid blow outs.
But this can be hard work. Are the latest job costing and tracking functions in MYOB AccountRight, QuickBooks Online and Xero making life easier?
Continue reading Why is job tracking and project costing so hard using MYOB & Xero?
IF YOU’RE RECEIVING the job alerts everyday — indeed, you may even have applied for some jobs already — but you’re still not getting called up for interview, then the following questions of doubt may be brewing:
OFTEN IN LIFE we’re told that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. Along the same lines as this is the expression that you get what you pay for. Indeed, I’ve commonly used the phrase: “Pay peanuts and you’ll get monkeys” but naturally, there are exceptions to this and plenty of cases where low cost can simply mean low cost – without meaning that quality or value has been compromised.
Continue reading Why such cheap online Xero & MYOB courses?
ONLINE TRAINING IS one of the most convenient ways for busy people to study. While some people take to it naturally, for others the flexibility and freedom it affords itself is a learning curve.
The key to successful online training, however, is family support and we’ve noticed that many students for our Xero & MYOB Courses are parents who are stretched for time.
Continue reading Does Your Family Support Your Study?
I was speaking with someone who just landed a part-time job, in-fact a contract position, even though the job was advertised as a full-time job.
The job seeker was telling me about the advanced new features of Australia’s leading job board, including:
MYOB has recently changed their website and in particular their pages for the free trial software.
We’ve updated the FREE MYOB Trial (within our MYOB courses) so look for the link when you access your MYOB courses and use the free trial software to practice what you learn in the video tutorials and training workbooks.
While we’re on the topic of free MYOB software, did you know that we provide free training course samples for most of our online courses?
Continue reading Don’t use the FREE MYOB Training Student Edition
In our educational guide, Bookkeeping Beginner Basics, which you can download from the EzyLearn website for free, you’ll learn how to record journal entries in your accounting software, whether you’re using MYOB, Xero or QuickBooks. Most bookkeeping newbies don’t know what a journal entry is, though, which is what this blog post – the latest in our Bookkeeping Beginner Basics guide companion series – is going to help you to understand.
An accounting journal is the record that keeps accounting transactions in chronological order (i.e., as they occur), while the general ledger is a record that keeps accounting transactions by the account – see our previous post on the chart of accounts [Bookkeeping Beginner Basics: The Chart of Accounts] if you need help understanding what the term ‘account’ means in this context. Before computers, bookkeepers used to log all the financial transactions of a business in paper journals, and then at the end of the month transfer these journal entries into the general ledger, which was divided into various accounts that is now called the chart of accounts, and all the transactions were posted to these accounts using a method called double-entry bookkeeping.
Today, however, accounting systems, such as MYOB, Xero, QuickBooks and the like, will automatically record most business transactions into the ledger immediately after the software prepares sales invoices, issues cheques to creditors, or processes receipts from customers, and as such you don’t have to create journal entries for most of your business’s transactions.
That being said, some journal entries still need to be processed, in order to record transfers between bank accounts and to record adjusting entries. You would need to make a journal entry, for example, at the end of each month to record depreciation or to record interest accrued on a bank loan.
If journal entries and general ledgers and the double entry bookkeeping method sound a bit too much, and you think you’d rather stick to the cash-based accounting method instead, prepare yourself for bad news: all businesses, whether they use the cash-based accounting method or the accrual accounting method, use double-entry bookkeeping to keep their books, and all accounting software applications, by default, are set up to adhere to the double-entry method, too. The double-entry bookkeeping method reduces errors and also ensures that your books balance, so as complicated as it may seem, it’s much easier in the long run.
If you still feel a little out of your depth, however, you can hire a reliable bookkeeper to manage your bookkeeping system and deal with all the journal entries and double-entry business for you, instead. Visit the National Bookkeeping website for to find a highly qualified bookkeeper whose experience and skills suit your business needs.
This blog post is part of our Bookkeeping Basics series, which are being published to complement our new educational guide, also titled Bookkeeping Beginner Basics, which you can download for free from the EzyLearn website.
