Steve Slisar has been training people how to use computers since 1994, opened a training centre in 1999 in Dee Why and by 2005 had 3 training centres and created over 35 individual courses that include Screen videos with audio commentary, training workbooks for those who prefer to read to learn, and exercise files that are used with the tasks in the workbooks so you get practical experience in the software you are trying to learn. Now the creator of 5 of the most popular online MYOB training courses in Australia.
Job reporting in MYOB enables companies to keep track of the costs and revenue for each project. It also helps in analysing the sales data of employees and tracking productivity.
We’ve noticed students of our MYOB training courses review this part of the course content more than other parts of the training material, so we thought we’d post this refresher video on job reporting in MYOB.
Sure, some bookkeepers can go a long time without having to use this function, but if they take on a client in the building or construction industry, or a client who wants detailed sales reports, they will suddenly need to know how to set up job reporting in MYOB.
Here’s the video:
Remember, the job reporting function makes it possible to extract highly detailed accounting information from MYOB. For businesses in the heavily regulated building and construction industry, such information is a government requirement.
This post has been created to demonstrate simple accounting principles for our MYOB Training Course students. It demonstrates, visually, a very simple fact that is often sensationalised.
I’ve been to many presentations, seminars and watched hundreds of webinars run by people who describe themselves as gurus yet the secrets they reveal are actually just plain old good accounting principles.
At EzyLearn we are always updating our course content and when you enrol you can access lifetime membership for free continued updates.
One of the many reasons we became early champions of MYOB Account Right Live when it was first released — the software you’ll learn to use in our MYOB training course — is because of the bank feeds feature. Take a look at the video below for a demonstration on how to set up bank feeds for a business:
The Beauty of BankLink
For a long time, one of the most tedious aspects of the bookkeeping process was the data entry. For bookkeepers with large clients, who had many expenses and transactions each month, the process of manually entering each of those transactions into MYOB could be the most time-consuming parts of the job.
That was until recently when MYOB added the bank feeds feature to their Account Right Live software by entering into a partnership with BankLink which they eventually acquired in 2013. The bank feeds feature in MYOB is a little piece of computer magic that eliminates all of the tedious data entry by automatically feeding transactions from your bank account right into MYOB.
And it’s not just large organisations with many expenses and transactions each month that can benefit from the bank feeds feature in MYOB. Everyone from sole traders through to large corporations can and should use the bank feeds feature.
Remember, enrol with EzyLearn to learn MYOB and take up our lifetime membership offer to receive continuous, free MYOB updates.
We also offer online courses in Reach Accounting, Xero, and of course, our flagship MYOB course as well as online courses in Microsoft Office (Word and Excel). You may recall from a previous post that we sell enrolment gift vouchers for our online training courses, so if your friend or family member (or even yourself) has been seriously considering starting a new small business, why not help make 2014 the year that dream becomes reality by giving them an enrolment voucher!
Small Business Management Course at Last Year’s Price
Since it’s still the festive season, we’re giving you the opportunity to lock-in your 2014 Small Business Management Course at 2013 prices.
As you complete each module within our Small Business Management Course, you’re working your way towards writing the business plan for your business, which you can then use to secure financing or as a model for the future growth of your business.
We take you through every facet you’ll face when it comes to owning and operating a small business, from researching the market and undertaking market activities, through to customer service.
Our Small Business Management Course includes training videos featuring real-life business owners, so you can see how each module practically applies to a real-world small business. Take, for instance, the video below with David Hall, the ‘Customer Service King’ and Director of Sydney’s The Clean Plumber.
Happy New Year to all our readers! And take comfort in knowing that we think the death of the bookkeeper is FAR from imminent! Read the post to find out.
All right, so it’s not the most joyful heading we could have gone with on New Year’s Eve, but it’s not actually meant to conjure up doom and gloom! We have researched and developed new online training courses for Reach Accounting and Xero, which have now been added to our suite of training courses that include the flagship MYOB training course. In the process we’ve spoken to a number of accountants to see what software they’re using, to ensure we’re providing the training courses you need to get a bookkeeping job. This is good news because you can then rely on us to inform you what more you may need to offer clients.
Throughout this process, we’ve come across a number of accountants who are using BankLink, an accounting service we’ve written about previously, which streamlines and automates the data entry portion of managing a client’s account.
The ‘In-House’ Extra Employee
For many accountants the BankLink software, which was acquired by MYOB in June of this year so they could further extend their reach into the accounting space, is being billed as an “extra employee” that never makes mistakes and is comparatively cheaper than the additional in-house bookkeeper or admin person headcount.
The big question for us is: Does this spell the end of the bookkeeper? For instance, think of the way personal computers did away with the need for the office stenographer working in a steno pool? The answer is that this is indeed possible — but this is only if data entry is the sole service you offer. Like most professionals today, the more specialised you are and the more services you can offer, the more likely you are to experience career longevity.
At the end of the day, software is only as good as the person who uses it. If you’re a highly experienced bookkeeper in a particular industry or possess a number of highly sought-after accounting skills, you’ll find BankLink a dream come true in that it eliminates the tedious, time-consuming data entry from your job.
BankLink: Giving You More Time
With more time on your hands, you’ll be able to grow your client-base — a goal for most small businesses and previously only available if you miraculously grew a spare set of hands, or employed a spare set of hands, at least. You may even be able to move your business out of the narrow bookkeeping space into the small business management space.
With the number of new small businesses increasing, the key to their individual survival in a highly competitive marketplace is good management — and who’s more suited to that job than someone with a thorough understanding of account keeping?
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So while BankLink may spell the end of tedious, time-consuming data entry, for the experienced bookkeeper it presents more business and career opportunities — not less. Upskill and enjoy greater career success as a result.
Your accountant can access your records easily via BankLink.
As we have freshly rolled out our new Reach Accounting course, as well as our new Xero Accounting course — in addition to our existing and ever so popular MYOB training course — we have been speaking to a number of different accountants across Australia to find out how they currently manage their clients’ bookkeeping needs.
What we’ve discovered during this R&D process is that an increasing number of accountants have told us that they use a service called BankLink, so we thought we’d take a closer look at BankLink to see how it works and what it means for the bookkeeper.
BankLink for Bookkeepers
BankLink is an accounting service that delivers bank transaction data from banks and financial institutions and directly to an accountant, which the accountant then uses to code their clients’ transactions.
For any uncoded data, there are number of online tools that allow an accountant to request additional information from their clients; the coded data is then used for GST, end-of-year tax reports, management reports and various other reports required for tax compliance.
In short, BankLink eliminates all of the data entry usually performed by a bookkeeper, and in June of 2013, BankLink was acquired by MYOB to further facilitate accountants as they manage their clients’ books.
For sole traders and very small businesses that have neither a bookkeeper, nor the time to manage the data entry side of their accounts, their accountant can now manage this for them easily and efficiently, without the added cost of employing an external bookkeeper.
One accountant, extolling the virtues of the BankLink software on the MYOB website calls Banklink his “extra employee; one that never makes mistakes, gets lots done and doesn’t cost much.”
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BankLink is being billed as the future of accounting; the inexpensive future of accounting, where people are being replaced by machines and pieces of software.
So what might that mean for the humble bookkeeper? We look at this in our next post.
Want a share of $237 billion? If you’re in online business it’s up for grabs!
If you spent money on Christmas pressies recently, you’re a small part in the continual climb of online trading in this country. Did you know that in 2012, the value of online trading in Australia reached $237 billion dollars? This represents a 25 percent increase year-on-year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This increase in online revenue reflects the growing number of small businesses moving their operations online, either in part or entirely — and it’s largely thanks to new technologies facilitating e-commerce for small business.
The Growth of Online Businesses
Prior to 2006 the online marketplace was all but monopolised by the eBays and Amazons, organisations that had the resources to create the necessary infrastructure needed to allow customers to shop entirely online. After 2006, when we first moved our MYOB training courses online, offering a completely online shopping experience was just starting to gain popularity among the small players like ourselves; in the years since, it’s now pretty much become the norm.
As platforms like WordPress have made it possible to create and maintain a website without any design or HTML knowledge, theme clubs like Woo Themes, which provide web-themes to suit a range of different business types, now even include ecommerce plugins that can be linked with a PayPal account.
By offering you services online, you’re opening yourself up to an entirely global customer base, allowing you to offer new or different services than you did before. Since we moved our business online, we’ve also been able to build on our business — this year we added the highly popular Small Business Management Course to our suite of training courses, for example.
For some businesses, moving online is more of a necessity, a way to stay competitive in a world with ever-evolving technologies. For example, new cloud accounting software like Reach (and we offer a course in Reach Accounting too) makes it easier for small businesses to manage their own books, without needing the services of a bookkeeper.
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For many bookkeepers this could spell doom and gloom, or it could provide them with the opportunity to venture into the business of training people on how to manage their own books. As a bookkeeper looking to extend their services into training as well, by setting up a website with an e-commerce facility, you could partner with us to sell vouchers to our training courses.
With a share of $237 billion up for grabs, now is a good time to consider offering your services online, particularly when it’s become so darn easy! We even offer WordPress training courses, which covers setting up ecommerce, so you’ve no excuse for missing out!
Don’t be a scrooge this Christmas – it’s often not best to go cheap unless you intend to stay that way.
WITH CHRISTMAS AROUND THE CORNER, good ol’ Scrooge deserves a mention. In the “Selling Your Products or Services” module of our EzyStartUp Course we cover how to determine the correct prices for your business; a decision many new business owners often don’t realise requires quite a bit of research and planning.
Instead, many people fall into the trap of using their prices as a way to market their new business to potential customers, using the “cheap is best” mentality. Bah — wrong! That may be no better than a Scrooge…
Often cheap is not best, and you need to ask yourself whether those cheap prices you’ll be offering are sustainable.
By that we mean, whether you’ll earn enough to draw a wage that’s commensurate with one you could earn as an employee elsewhere. If the answer is ‘no’, then you need to rethink your pricing structure before you start attracting clientele.
What Kinds of Customers Do You Want?
Because that’s the other thing: the prices you set attract a certain kind of customer. Consider the kind of shopper you would typically find in a department store, like David Jones, with the kind of shopper you would find in Target. Both stores sell fairly similar products, but the prices are different — and, often, so is the customer (although with the amount of sales constantly happening, there’s probably a significant overlap these days).
What a David Jones customer may be happy to pay for a new dress, for example, is likely to be different to what a Target shopper would be happy to pay for a similar item. Even if in this instance, the Target shopper learns that the dress from David Jones is superior in quality and worth the higher price tag (and they may well agree with you) it will probably change nothing: they will still shop at Target.
Low Can be a Loss
That’s not to say cheap is bad. But there is sometimes a high-cost associated with cheap. Consider the price wars between Woolies and Coles over the cost of milk, which Coles reduced to $1 a litre first and saw Woolies quickly follow suit. But who’s the real victor when you’re selling milk for a dollar? Not Coles or Woolies, where the profit margins are between two and minus-three percent, and certainly not the farmers.
If setting low prices is your strategy for winning customers, it may pay more to think of another one, as cheap is easily replicated and not every business can sustain it. Start out how you mean to continue — if you don’t always intend to offer bargain basement prices then don’t offer them at all. Or at least, offer them in a way that makes it clear to potential customers that you don’t intend to always charge those prices.
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One thing is certain: there’s a lot to weigh up in setting prices for your new business, which is why we consider the Selling Your Products or Services module of our EzyStartUp Course such an invaluable one. If you’re starting a new business, don’t sell yourself short. Make sure the price for your services is right, rather than just cheap.
“As a freelancer, my business is pretty straightforward: I write words for a living and charge people to use them. As a creativity merchant, I’m not paid by the hour; I’m paid for each word that survives the ‘delete’ button, which is fortunate since the left side of my brain is a bit lazy.
Getting new commissions (or business) is a process that involves a bit of back-and-forth with editors over email — outlining story ideas, deadlines and finally agreeing on a price. As such, I never have the need to create estimates and I don’t need to log the time I spend working on my stories.
I’ve been using Zoho Invoice ever since I started freelancing, mainly because I didn’t have a spare five hours to create an invoice template in Excel when I first set up shop. To me, Zoho looked like the easy way out — and to date, it has been.
But how does it compare to the latest bit of accounting software, Reach Accounting? I’ve spent a bit of time using Reach, and for its price point and target market, it’s a pretty handy piece of software for sole traders and small businesses — I can see that it would be particularly valuable for virtual assistants and teleworkers.
As soon as you sign up for your Reach account, you’re asked to enter in your basic, yet important, business information — like your ABN and bank account details — so, without doing anything else, you can send an invoice to one of your customers right away. With Zoho, there was some setting up of invoice templates, adding customers and setting up email gateways, which was a bit tedious.
Then there’s the matter of cost. While Zoho allows you to invoice your customers in Australian dollars, it’s still an American company so your $15 monthly fee is subject to change with the exchange rate; you’re also charged a currency conversion fee from your bank, which is something to be wary of.
Reach, on the other hand, is an Australian company so you don’t need to worry about exchange rates and conversion fees; something I find quite appealing. Plus, included in Reach’s $14.95 monthly fee is the actual accounting software, whereas a full suite of accounting software with Zoho costs a little more.
With Reach, you’re effectively getting more bang for buck and even if I don’t use the accounting side of Reach’s offering, it’s good to know it’s there. I feel the same way about the bread maker I have at home, even though I don’t actually eat bread. Which raises the question: how many businesses would end up using the full accounting side of Reach?
As an accounting novice, I still have an accountant who weaves their magic, presumably in MYOB. I just export and email my earnings for that year, along with my business expenses — which is basically my entire life since I’m a freelancer, so the lack of an ‘export’ function in Reach is a major drawback for me.
I imagine most sole traders and small businesses would do something similar with their accountants and I don’t know how many accountants would be eager to use Reach.
But Reach excels precisely because it isn’t MYOB — or even Xero, for that matter. And it doesn’t need to be. Reach caters to a section of the market that was previously alienated by the likes of MYOB; and now those business owners have a low-cost, easy-to-use solution to their Excel spreadsheet and shoebox-full of receipts. It’s also Australian; and supporting Australian businesses, as an Australian business, myself, just makes sense.
So, at the end of the day, for my money, it’s worth it.”
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If you’re a sole trader or small business owner looking for a low-cost way to manage the accounting side of your business, Reach could be the solution. EzyLearn has partnered with Reach Accounting so that you can access a free student account when you enrol in our Reach training course.
We help you figure out whether Reach is better than MYOB for your small business.
We’re thrilled to announce the addition of our new online training course for cloud-based accounting software — Reach Accounting. It’s a great, low-cost option for small business owners. But there are some businesses that will still be suited to MYOB, so let’s take a closer look at how Reach compares to MYOB to help you select the best accounting software for your business.
Bank Feeds and Payment Gateways
The first thing you’ll probably use in Reach is the invoicing software, which is not entirely different to MYOB — or Zoho or Xero, either. (On that note, we’ve also introduced a new Xero course to our suite of online courses.) In Reach you can enter all of your company details, set up customers, enter your bank account details, create an invoice (or use the pre-defined template), and so on.
Where Reach differs from MYOB, however, is that it doesn’t offer a bank feeds service, which means that you still need to manually record each payment your customer makes. This can be a time-consuming process, particularly if you don’t stay on top of it — which can be embarrassing if you set up the automatic late-payment reminder service, and then forget to record your customers’ payments.
The other points of difference between Reach and MYOB is that Reach does not allow you to set-up payment gateways to connect your PayPal account, nor can you connect your Reach account directly to an online web store; functions that are handy for online businesses.
While those functions aren’t currently available, Reach does have plans to make them available in the future. But if you’re not going to miss those functions, or aren’t likely to use them, anyway, then the Reach Accounting software will work for your business.
What Reach Will Enable You to Do
Reach allows you to create invoices and estimates, manage your payroll, expenses and complete your BAS return, among many of the other traditional accounting functions you find in MYOB.
Finally! A Cheap Small Business Accounting Solution
For many small business owners operating fairly simple businesses (say, virtual assistants or teleworkers) the need to invest in rather expensive accounting software like MYOB has probably never existed.
It’s not uncommon to find a sole trader who still uses Excel to create their invoices, and still keeps a shoebox-full of receipts that they then enter into another Excel spreadsheet, or else endure the wrath of their accountant if they don’t.
This is generally because there’s never been any low-cost accounting software available to them — that was until Reach Accounting, a division of Net Registry, entered the fray a little while back.
Because we’re constantly looking to help small business owners, we’ve partnered with Reach Accounting to offer small business owners a low-cost Reach training course, which includes a free trial of Reach to use while you’re taking the course.
Compare us with some of the competition and we think you’ll find we stack up pretty well!
After operating face-to-face training centres right across Sydney for many years, in 2006 we realised that the future of short-course learning was in an online delivery method. Since then, we’ve offered all of our training courses online, including our most popular MYOB course.
There are plenty of reasons for taking an MYOB course. We recently highlighted a case study example of a couple who completed our course to better manage their business’ books easily and in real-time (and subsequently saw first hand where they were losing money!) or maybe it’s because you’d like to start a remote bookkeeping business.
Where Might You Do Your Online MYOB Training Course?
Whatever your reasons, you need to learn somewhere. But where is the best place to learn MYOB? We compare three of the leading providers with EzyLearn.
TAFE NSW:
Offers a beginner MYOB course via a face-to-face delivery method at two Sydney campuses: Hornsby or Meadowbank.
Attendance: two evenings a week for three weeks (28 hours)
Cost: $450 (GST exempt)
Trainer: Not specified
Certification: TAFE Plus Statement
Extras: None specified
University of Sydney:
Offers a face-to-face training course at their Newtown campus.
Attendance: one evening a week for two weeks (15 hours)
Cost: $490 (GST exempt)
Trainer: MYOB certified consultant
Certification: Certificate of Completion
Extras: free repeat class
Bizmate:
Offers an online basic MYOB course, online payroll MYOB course and online advanced MYOB course.
Attendance: 6-8 hours of total work, delivered online. Course must be completed within 60 days
Cost: $220 per course ($660 in total)
Trainer: MYOB Certified Consultant
Certification: Certificate of Completion
Extras: None specified
EzyLearn:
Offers five MYOB courses that cover all levels and competencies of MYOB for one price.
Attendance: Delivered online, no timeframe to complete course
Cost: $347 (5 full courses + lifetime access) or
$444 (5 full courses + lifetime access + assessment and certificate)
Trainer: Registered BAS agents and experienced MYOB professionals
Certification: Certificate of Completion with Institute of Certified Bookkeepers accredited training provider logo
Extras:
Join the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers for FREE,
Unlimited repeat courses FREE (go over as many times as you need, when you need),
Lifetime access to course content (Including new material),
Access to new and updated training video and other content.
Several versions included (version 19 and earlier, and version 2011 and later)
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We believe we’re the best provider of MYOB courses in the country, because we offer up-to-date content in a flexible delivery method, with access to industry professionals and lifetime access to our course content. If you’ve read this far then get all the details at our website. You won’t be disappointed – we promise! Enrol in our MYOB course today.
For any new business, it’s important to market your new business so develop new leads and customers, but it’s also important that your marketing costs don’t outweigh your income. In the marketing module of our small business management course, we talk about Google Adwords, which is a low-cost way to advertise your business online, using keywords.
Another Option is Facebook
Facebook is also another option for businesses large and small, but we think it works particularly well for small businesses, due to the community-minded nature of Facebook, itself.
There’s an old saying around EzyLearn: People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. Facebook helps you to develop online relationships with your customers, allowing them to get to know, like and trust you.
But in case you’re still not convinced, here are another 6 reasons why you should be on Facebook:
Population and penetration: We know that over 1 billion people are on Facebook, but what’s the penetration rate for a market, like the USA, for example? 67 percent of internet users in the US are on Facebook; in Australia that penetration rate is much higher—82 percent.
Age: Facebook skews young—83 percent of 18-29 year olds are on Facebook—but the 45-54 age-bracket has also seen 46 percent growth since the end of 2012.
Income: The incomes of Facebook users higher than any other social media platform. 73 percent of Facebook users earn more than AUD$75,000 compared to 17 percent for Twitter.
Mobile: Social media is the most popular social media app on smartphones and accounts for 66 percent of total social media sharing on iphones.
Gender: Like every other adverting medium, Facebook also skews toward women, but it’s still more gender neutral than Google+ or Pinterest.
Education: Nearly 75 percent of Australian Facebook users have some form of university or tertiary education.
If you’re looking to target any or all of these demographics for your small business marketing campaign, then create a Facebook page and start marketing your services to your followers.
So what’s auditory learning? You may not think we’d have many auditory learners completing an online training course and there was probably a time when that was so. But with the ability to upload videos to our learning management system, we’re now able to bridge the gap and provide our training courses to the nearly 20 percent of the population who are auditory learners.
Where Auditory Learners Excel
Typically, auditory learners excel at writing responses to information they’ve just heard, and because they’re also verbal learners, they’re good at delivering speeches or oral exams.
Auditory learners are likely to:
Enjoy discussions, talking things through and listening to others
Acquire knowledge by reading aloud
Follows spoken directions well
Watch videos
About 20 percent of the world’s population are auditory learners and they thrive being in the company of others, particularly in the learning environment where they can bounce ideas off other students.
There was a time when online learning or distance education perhaps wouldn’t have been the most viable option for these kinds of people, but that’s now changed. Auditory learners can use our video training videos and connect with other students at our online student community so they can discuss the course content and exercises.
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At EzyLearn, we’re aware of the different ways our students learn and we’re always adapting our course content and materials to satisfy those different learning styles, and ultimately, to help you learn better.
Visual learning is one of the most common ways people learn.
In our post called “What’s Your Learning Style?” we looked at the ways our students typically prefer to learn, and in our last post, we discussed the characteristics of the kinaesthetic learning style. In this post (are you following? You should be able to if you possess the learning traits of our next learning style!) we’re going to discuss visual learners.
The Most Common Way to Learn – Visually
As our most popular online training course, the MYOB training course, is a software-based course, we have a great deal of visual learners among our students.
Visual learners are those who learn best by seeing them, and find that confusing information is best explained with the aid of a picture or video tutorial.
Visual learners are likely to:
Take detailed notes
Need quiet study time
Benefit from illustrations, presentations and videos
Remember diagrams or pictures
About 65 percent of the population are believed to be visual learners, and even though they’re good with written materials, the online learning delivery method didn’t always meet their needs when it came to visual aids. Now, thanks to the internet, learning providers like EzyLearn are able to provide our content online, accompanied by training videos and presentations, so our visual learners now have the added visual aids to help them learn.
As one of Australia’s largest providers of online MYOB training courses, we’ve come to learn a thing or two about our students’ learning habits and what we’ve discovered is that there are three different kinds of learners — visual learners, auditory learners and kinaesthetic learners.
There’s no right or wrong way of learning, but we thought it would be interesting to have a look at these three learning styles in a little more detail.
Learning … Kinaesthetically
First up: kinaesthetic learners. People with a kinaesthetic learning style learn by touching and doing things, and although they only make up about 5 percent of the population, they’re a group of learners we see a fair bit at EzyLearn. This is because our training courses are software-based and at some point people become pretty eager to give the software they’re learning about a test drive.
Kinaesthetic learners are the students who learn by discovery, can complete more than one task at once and are those students who like to listen to music while they work.
Kinaesthetic learners are likely to:
Need lots of breaks
Speak with their hands and gesture a lot
Learn by working with others
Remember what was done
Learn by doing activities
The benefit of being a kinaesthetic learner and studying with EzyLearn is that you’re able to study at your own pace (so you can take lots of breaks), get hands-on with the software and try some of the exercises, and you can also interact with other students at our student community to get that much-need dose of human interaction.
It is this kind of flexibility that online learning offers that makes it so appealing to a broad range of learning styles that the traditional face-to-face offering often can’t provide.
Not a kinaesthetic learner? See tomorrow’s post on visual learners.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
