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What’s Your Learning Style?

Humans all have different ways of learning and absorbing information. Which style are you?
Humans all have different ways of learning and absorbing information. Which style are you?

As Australia’s leading provider of online MYOB training courses, over the years we’ve come to observe the different learning styles of our students. What we’ve witnessed is that everybody has a different approach to learning, and in particular, that a one-size-fits-all approach to learning just isn’t that effective.

While it may not seem like it, the very flexible nature of the online learning environment actually better caters to all of those different learning styles — whether our students are visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners, we make sure to include something in the content of our online training courses that will make the learning process easier and more engaging.

Broader Content to Reach a Broader Base of Learning Styles

In fact, the different ways people learn was something we came to notice way back when we still operated our physical training centres on the north shore, northern beaches and other parts of Sydney. But we discovered that even though the face-to-face learning environment is the conventional way to learn, it is not necessarily an all-encompassing one.

When we moved our training material online, it presented us with the opportunity to provide a broader range of content that engaged with a broader range of students. In the years since we offered our first online MYOB training course, we have continued to update our content to ensure we’re always engaging with all of our students, regardless of their learning styles.

For those of you wondering what your learning style is, then you wonder no more! We’ve put together a series of posts, outlining the different characteristics of each learning style. Are you a visual, auditory or a kinaesthetic learners? It might help you realise why some techniques just feel natural for you and why some information just tends to stick!

Understanding Your Own Learning Style

Expanding your knowledge of how you learn helps you to learn better and work through the course content more efficiently — it may even help you work more efficiently in the workplace, or with others who may adopt a different learning style to yours.

Why not read first about kinaesthetic learners — could this be you?

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We Can Help You Deliver Your Company Training Material ONLINE

Now that’s going to be nasty … is your business complying with current WHS regulations?

When we moved our training materials online, we developed our own learning management system, a software application that administers our MYOB training course, small business management course and all of our other online training courses.

Deliver Your Company Training Material Online – Work Health and Safety

But an opportunity exists for small to medium-sized businesses to deliver their company training material online, using EzyLearn’s learning management system — this is particularly useful for work health and safety (WHS) training.

Now that Australia’s WHS laws have changed, there’s a renewed push for businesses to be vigilant when it comes to workplace safety. Harsher punishments for business owners found to be in breach of the WHS Act 2011 now includes fines of up to $3 million per organisation and $600,000 or 5 years imprisonment per person, per breach.

The changes follow a rash of litigation across the country, where companies have been prosecuted for not ensuring that contractors and sub-contractors working on their premises have been made aware of all the potential risks and hazards associated with carrying out work on their premises.

Under the Act, a business owner can be prosecuted based on what they can be reasonably expected to know in relation to work health and safety risks. This means that, if a contractor carrying out welding on the premises of a business is injured, the business owner can be prosecuted because it is reasonable to expect the business owner to know that carrying out welding near flammable gases is hazardous.

Contractor and Sub-Contractor Liability

The move to include contractors and sub-contractors carrying out work for, or on behalf of, a business is one of the key changes to the WHS Act 2011, which was introduced in January 2012, and replaces the previous OH&S Act 1991. This presents a number of potential areas of risk for business owners who retain the services of contractors, and even remote, home-based workers.

In a landmark ruling in 2011, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Queensland awarded a Telstra employee legal and medical costs after she slipped and fell down the stairs twice while working from her Brisbane home.

The tribunal’s ruling has effectively extended the employer’s liability beyond what they traditionally thought was reasonable, to include the unknowns of an employee’s home. As such, for small business owners employing or retaining the services of home-based workers, making certain you have the correct WHS procedures and training in place should be a priority.

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Using EzyLearn’s learning management system to deliver your company’s WHS training materials allows your staff, contractors or remote workers to access the content regardless of where they’re based, so you have peace of mind in knowing that they’ve been made properly aware of any risks or hazards relating to their work — and their workplace.

If you would like to know more about how EzyLearn’s learning management system works, contact us.

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The Lowdown on Zoho Invoice

If you're mainly just invoicing your clients, Zoho Invoice may be all you need by way of bookkeeping software.
If you’re mainly just invoicing your clients, Zoho Invoice may be all you need by way of bookkeeping software.

In a previous post we discussed Zoho and the range of turnkey solutions they offer small businesses. We specifically mentioned Zoho Books, which is the bookkeeping component of the Zoho Business Apps package and not that dissimilar to MYOB.

We offer training courses in MYOB, because it’s the market leader in accounting software and because it’s the preferred software of choice for most accountants. For start-ups or other small businesses, however, Zoho Books or Invoice might be all you need for your business, which is why we’re going to provide some videos on how to use Zoho.

Just What is Zoho Invoice?

For now, though, we’re going to look at the functions of Zoho Invoice. If you have recently started your own virtual assistant business or another business that really only requires you to invoice your clients, then Zoho Invoice is all you would really need.

The best thing about Zoho Invoice is that if you have 5 or fewer customers and only need access for one user, it’s completely free — forever. After that, the next step up is the standard plan, which allows you to have up to 500 customers and 3 users for $USD15 a month; the professional plan costs $USD30 with unlimited customers and unlimited users.

Even if you use the free plan, you can still access all of Zoho Invoice’s features, including time tracking, recurring invoices, expense, tracking, multi-currency, payment gateways and automated overdue payment reminders; you can even customise your invoices with your company logos and branding.

As your business grows, you can upgrade your plan to the standard or professional versions of Zoho Invoice, or even upgrade to Zoho Books if you’re in need of a more comprehensive piece of accounting software. There’s also an iPhone and Android app for Zoho Invoice, which allows you to create invoices on the go.

While Zoho is an American owned and operated company, you’re still able to customize the settings for an Australian business. This means you’re able to charge in Australian dollars, add GST, and you’re able input information like ABNs.

The downside is that there isn’t a local number for their customer service team, so you have to get in contact via email. That being said, Zoho has an online forum where you can ask and answer questions and they also provide a number of videos to help you with troubleshooting.

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Overall, Zoho Invoice is a good piece of cloud-based invoicing software that is both inexpensive and highly functional. For a virtual assistant or a start-up that only needs to invoice customers, it sure beats the hell out of that tired, old Excel invoice! Stay tuned for more on Zoho and the Zoho Office Suite.

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Want to be a teleworker? The Australian Government wants it too

Telework-work from homeSince we closed our Sydney-based training centres in Dee Why, Gordon and Parramatta in 2006 and went 100% online we’ve been able to offer more for a lower price.

For the same price we use to charge for a one day training course in MYOB we are now able to offer ALL 5 MYOB training courses AND provide lifetime course access (INCLUDING updated course content).

You might also recall that our online support team comprises remote workers who operate their own virtual assistant business from all over Australia and even internationally so we are thrilled to be part of the new revolution in remote workers.

We are also very proud to be a Partner of the Australian Government Telework week in the SME (Small Business Sector) and look forward to helping more and more students find work as well as run their own businesses from their own homes.

Remember that we even offer the opportunity to start your own online training business using our established infrastructure AND if you are looking to start your own business as a bookkeeper (or any business for that matter) we now have the Cert IV in Small Business Management on our Learning System.

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Get Your Business Noticed for FREE: The Difference Between PR and Marketing

PR is about getting word of your business out there for free, often by providing people with obligation-free information.
PR is about getting word of your business out there for free, often by providing people with obligation-free information.

At EzyLearn, we’re committed to helping students of our MYOB courses gain employment as an MYOB bookkeeper or even start their own bookkeeping business; it’s why we provide you with lifetime access to our MYOB training courses as part of our commitment to continuing professional development. We also offer students a small business management course, which can be extremely relevant for bookkeepers who want to branch out and operate an existing small business or start one from scratch. One of the topics we cover in our small business management course is marketing for small business and we thought it was worth devoting a blog post to pointing out the difference between the two.

The Difference between Public Relations and Marketing

For some reason, marketing and PR are two activities that are often confused with one another. Perhaps that’s because many companies combine their marketing and PR departments, or maybe it’s because people don’t really understand what PR is.

At its most basic PR is the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation and it’s public. Marketing, on the other hand, is the business of promoting and selling products or services, which includes market research and advertising.

It’s important to keep these two definitions in mind when undertaking either activity, because if there’s one thing PR is not, it’s selling, which is the ultimate goal of marketing.

That doesn’t mean that PR won’t result in eventual sales, but it shouldn’t be the primary objective of a PR campaign, (although it’s not uncommon for many established PRs to forget this subtle nuance between the two).

If it’s done right, PR is a great way to generate buzz about a new business or product, particularly for small businesses that may not have a huge marketing budget.

Simple Ways You Can Create a Buzz for Your Small Business

For a home-based bookkeeper or virtual assistant just starting out, PR activities to generate interest in your business could include holding an event with other home-based bookkeepers or virtual assistants and inviting local business owners along so you can educate them in the benefits of employing a remote worker.

The goal for an event like this would be to build relationships with your “publics” — people that may come to employ or use your services—but not necessarily to win new business on that particular day.

Alternatively, you could contribute to a few online business publications on what it’s like being a remote worker, or seek opportunities to be quoted in those publications.

Ultimately, that’s the goal of any PR campaign: to gain exposure for yourself or your business by educating and informing first. The selling part comes second, which is where PR differs substantially from marketing, of which the ultimate goal is to promote and sell.

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If you’re a remote worker, why not give your business a PR boost in addition to your regular marketing activities — contact us and tell us your success story. In fact, this very blog is always looking to hear how our students are doing since completing one of our courses, so if you’re now working remotely as a bookkeeper or a virtual assistant, get in touch! It’s great exposure for your business.

 

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Now YOU Can Start Your Own Online Training Business

If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.
If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.

We’ve mentioned before how we offer enrolment vouchers for our MYOB training courses, which we sell to training organisations and accountants. The idea is that accountants and other trainers can give their customers additional training without having to having to provide the materials and content themselves.

Are you a Bookkeeper? What about Becoming an Online Trainer Too?

But this also presents the opportunity for existing bookkeepers to extend their businesses into the area of online training. We’re looking to partner with existing bookkeepers who would like to provide online MYOB training courses, for which we’d provide the website, tailored to your business needs.

For bookkeepers, this allows you to extend your business beyond just bookkeeping, and use your knowledge and skills to train others in MYOB without having to provide the course content or the necessary infrastructure to facilitate an online training course to your students.

For EzyLearn, it gives us the opportunity to extend our reach and capture a larger pool of students we may not have previously been able to reach. It also fulfils our goal of helping bookkeepers start their own businesses and take control of their careers.

How Does It Work?

Sound interesting? This is how it would work: you register your interest in working with us, and we would have a conversation about your business goals. If both parties are happy to move forward, we’d provide you with a website, tailored to your needs, and sell you the initial stock — vouchers for EzyLearn’s famous MYOB training course, which you would then sell onto your clients.

The end result is a partnership where we provide the materials and infrastructure to operate a training business. What you do after that is entirely up to you. For instance, you might decide to bundle our online training course with one-on-one training, for which you’d charge extra for your time. The possibilities are endless!

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If you’re interested, please let us know what type of online training partnership you want so we can have a discussion about your goals and what’s on offer.

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If You Don’t Try, You’ll Never Learn: FAILING Helps You Learn

Don't beat yourself up if you get it wrong - all the while you're learning from your mistakes - which is a darn site better than never having tried at all.
Don’t beat yourself up if you get it wrong – all the while you’re learning from your mistakes – which is a darn site better than never having tried at all.

We’ve talked previously about cheating and what’s to be lost by students who cheat, and in particular, what a person has to lose from cheating. Not only do you miss out on learning, you also lose out on the valuable experience of sharing the learning process with others. We believe this is such an important part of the learning experience that we’re even in the process of creating an online community for the students of our MYOB, Word, Excel, and WordPress training courses.

Studying Online? You Can Still Share with Others

When you study online it can sometimes be a lonely business. But we want to change all that, and encourage our students to interact and connect with each other; to share their tips and advice, and make the most of the learning experience.

For people who decide to cheat in their coursework, it’s usually for one reason: they don’t want to fail. But realistically, from the moment they decide to copy someone else’s work, they’ve already failed, but without the valuable experience that comes from trying something and failing: learning.

So you take a test and you get a couple of the answers wrong; at least now you know where you went wrong. It gives you an opportunity to go back over your coursework and try and learn that portion again — or even ask someone.

If you were taking one of our online training courses and you were stuck on a particular portion of the coursework or you got an answer wrong in the test, you can contact someone in the EzyLearn team to help you, or you could discuss the problem with your fellow students, and see how they tackled that question.

Developing the Skill of ‘Problem Solving’

But the important thing is that you’re problem solving; you’re taking steps to resolve a problem. And those problem-solving skills that you employ when you reach a bump in the learning road are invaluable when you operate your own business.

As a business owner you need to be able to problem solve, often on a daily basis. When you reach a problem in your coursework that you’re having difficulty with, by asking questions and talking with others, you’re building up your problem-solving skills, in addition to learning how overcome that particular problem, itself.

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So don’t forget: if you don’t try, you’ll never learn. As business owners, we should exercise our problem-solving muscles from time-to-time, so start now while you’re studying a training course.

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Feel Threatened by a Newcomer in Your Workplace? Gain Knowledge, Instead!

The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.
The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.

As part of our MYOB Training Course, we’re constantly adding new content and helping our students win work and improve their employability. That’s why we always emphasise the importance of continuing to educate yourself — for the obvious skills advantages you bring to any company, but also for your own confidence.

For many people, it can be a little nerve racking when new blood enters the workplace and in today’s job market, it’s not at all uncommon to see a new face appear. Sometimes it’s in the form of a new employee there to share your workload and other times it’s because your organisation has employed someone to help restructure the business so they operate more efficiently.

The Many and Varied Threat

For many employees, this new face around the office can make them feel threatened — threatened about the future of their jobs and threatened by the prospect of the office dynamic changing. Fortunately, however, there’s an antidote for this rather common reaction to change: taking a course or continuing professional development.

The thing about feeling threatened is that it’s entirely to do with your confidence. You may feel like you’re not quite as educated or as skilled as this other person and as a result, you think your employer won’t need you any more. The truth is, your employer probably has no intention of letting you go, but nevertheless, the job market is changing and up-skilling to increase your knowledge base is invaluable — to you and your employer.

Confidence in Upskilling and Continuing Professional Development

Aside from the tangible knowledge and experience a highly-skilled employee brings to an organisation, they also bring with them confidence. The more secure you feel with your ability to do your job and do it well, the more confident you’ll feel as a result. For this reason, EzyLearn is a big believer in continuing professional development.

Our MYOB, and Microsoft Word and Excel training courses each come with lifetime access to the course content, so that you can review the course material and even access updated content, whenever you need it.

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A truly confident person would embrace the idea of working with someone new and potentially learning and sharing knowledge, rather than feeling threatened by them. But the key to achieving this confidence is being able to feel secure in your own knowledge base and that’s what EzyLearn’s Continuing Professional Development Program aims to provide bookkeepers with: knowledge.

So stop worrying, stop feeling threatened, and feel more confident in your skills and knowledge by taking one of our online courses today!

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Is Zoho the Small Business Solution?

Check out the numerous Zoho apps for small business.
Check out the numerous Zoho apps for small business.

It’s fair to say the MYOB is the undisputed market leader in accounting software. Even despite the number of new cloud-based software packages that have sprung up in recent years, MYOB is still the software of choice for most accounts and it’s why we offer MYOB training courses. But for someone starting a new business, MYOB might not actually be the must-have accounting software; there’s a new player in town, offering turnkey solutions for small businesses: Zoho Office Suite.

Cloud-Based Zoho for Small Business

Gone are the days of needing several different, rather expensive, software packages installed on your PC; with Zoho Office Suite you don’t even need one. Entirely cloud-based, the Zoho offering is broken down into three app packages: Zoho Business Apps, Zoho Collaboration Apps and Zoho Productivity Apps.

The Many Zoho Apps

Zoho Business Apps includes CRM, books, invoicing software and a website builder, along with other more ingenious tools such as, the support app for managing your customer service, a custom app-builder tool and a recruitment app that allows you to collect resumes and schedule interviews with candidates.

Zoho Collaboration Apps includes a project management app, a social network app called, Pulse, along with chat, mail and docs apps.

Zoho Productivity Apps features a number of word processing apps, including Writer, Sheet (like Excel), Show (like PowerPoint), Notebook, and a Calendar app.

Select a package and a plan that suits your business needs, pay a small monthly fee, and your business has access to each of the apps within that package whenever and wherever they’re needed. The downside: there’s no pricing plan for all three packages, bundled together.

Zoho Books

But say you don’t want all that anyway; you just want some decent invoicing or bookkeeping software. No worries — each Zoho app is available separately. Zoho Books, which is the closest thing to MYOB and offers unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, reconciliation, time tracking, multi currency support, and the newly added automatic bank feeds and credit card feeds feature, costs only $USD24 per month and includes access for two users.

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For new businesses, Zoho is certainly an affordable option, whether you only sign up for Zoho books, or whether you take on an entire business, collaboration or productivity apps package. For bookkeepers, however, MYOB is still the preferred accounting package. That means training in MYOB is still as necessary and vital a skill as ever.

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Would You Employ A Cheater?

would you cheat in a small business courseWhen you choose to study an online MYOB training course with EzyLearn, you learn every aspect of the MYOB software and how it applies to real-life business and accounting situations. Then, at the end of each module, you complete a test to prove to yourself (and your future employer, even) your knowledge of each module of MYOB, such as payroll, for instance.

There are many people who will argue that tests aren’t necessary; that they’re just an exercise in testing how well you can store lots of information in your short-term memory, then forget it afterwards. They advocate, instead, that you’re marked on how well you performed on your overall coursework, and do away with exams altogether.

[quote]But the thing about an exam is that the better you know your coursework, the better you’ll perform.[/quote]

An exam is designed to taken be taken under pressure. They’re testing your knowledge of things that you are likely to encounter in your day-to-day, and may require you to act immediately. They’re not testing you on something that should be considered at length.

Even though EzyLearn offers lifetime access to our MYOB and Excel training courses, we still expect—in fact, we require it—that our students will pass each test at the end of each of the course modules.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

  1. The first, and this is probably the main reason, is that if you decide to, you can pay an additional fee to receive a certificate that shows you’ve completed and passed our online training courses. This can then be used to show potential employers that you actually know what you’re doing in MYOB—which for many accountants and bookkeepers is either a deal breaker or a deal maker.
  2. But an exam also forces you to study the coursework, whether it’s arbitrarily just to pass the test or thoroughly to make sure you understand and perform well in the test—and this largely depends on your own personal code of ethics. Even if you haven’t done a scrap of coursework before you go to complete a test, the mere fact that you have to complete and pass a test to progress through the course forces you to review the coursework.

It’s easy to cheat in any course by plagiarising someone else’s work. In the academic world, the ramifications involve being awarded an instant fail; in business, it usually involves legal action. But a person’s inclination to cheat and plagiarise someone else’s work raises other ethical questions that those respective punishments don’t address.

Cert IV in Small Business ManagementI recently attended a networking event and spoke with someone who had completed a Cert IV in Small Business Management at a local BEC (Business Enterprise Centre)- they had completed a Government funded course and used the excuse of having to do the course as quick as they could so they could start their own business. The problem was that this person “encouraged” many of the students to work together (which is a good thing), but they ended up handing in the same assignment and in some situations forgot to change the name on their assignment!

Working together in a group is a fantastic way to learn because everyone has their own strengths and the really smart students can often be good teachers for the slow learners, but to simply replicate another persons work and not even use your own writing style and interpretation is very sad. It’s particularly sad when the Small Business Management course is designed to help you create an individual business plan for your own specific business.

[quote]Our assessors mark every assignment and provide individual feedback to ensure you properly examine your new startup business.[/quote]

This brings us to whether or not you would feel comfortable employing someone who had willfully cheated in a training course. Personally, we wouldn’t. Aside from that person displaying very little work ethic (they couldn’t be bothered to do the work themselves, so cheated instead), it also makes us wonder whether they would behave unethically in other ways—would they take our client base and start-up a rival business?

This is why we test our students at the end of each module, and only those students who receive a passing grade do, in fact, pass the course. It’s not because we think our students will cheat; it’s because we want our students to really learn and understand the coursework, so they can excel and succeed in business.

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Do you need the MYOB software to do our MYOB courses?

Free MYOB test drive software
Free MYOB test drive software

A common question we are asked about our MYOB courses is if you need to have the software on your computer to do the course. The good news is that MYOB offer a free version of their software for students and trials, it’s called the MYOB Test Drive.

You could do most of the MYOB courses without using the software because we have over 170 MYOB training videos (covering BOTH MYOB version 19 and earlier AND MYOB version 11 and newer – all for the one price). You can also test your skills using our MYOB course knowledge reviews, but there is no substitute for actually using the software as you learn. The biggest thing it will give you is the confidence to say “I’ve done that using the software”.

Our MYOB training workbooks include step-by-step exercises that enable you to perform most of the tasks that are performed at a business so you’ll definitely need to have the software for that. But many students like to replicate what they see in the training videos.

[quote]You can pause the MYOB videos and have a go at replicating it using the free student MYOB software.[/quote]

If you are looking for bookkeeping or accounting jobs you will almost always be asked about your MYOB skills and nothing gives you more confidence than actually using the software.

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Internet Marketing Scholarships Available for Mums in Chatswood

Digital Business Course - Google marketingPerhaps you’re a mum who’s available during school hours and want to start your own business? We might have the opportunity for you. Due to the success of our MYOB training courses and with requests from our students we are developing the Digital Business Course in conjunction with the Australian Small Business Centre.

[quote]We’re looking for talented mumpreneurs who want to learn some new skills while working with a live online training business.[/quote]

With the Small Business Management Course on our Learning System we’re keen to help mums create a business plan for their own business from our office right here in Chatswood. If you’re a reader from another part of Australia (or the world for that matter) you can still learn about our developments at this blog and at the Small Business Centre blog.

Michelle provides support for MYOB course students
Michelle provides support for our MYOB training course students

Michelle recently started on our training support team and we are looking for mums to help us with the development of the Digital Business Course and we are looking for mums who have excellent skills or motivation in:

  • Graphic Design
  • Business and Blog Writing
  • Website Design using WordPress
  • Social media
  • Online and Telephone based support
  • Bookkeeping
  • Marketing and Advertising
  • Google Online Marketing

If you would like to join us on a journey of learning and growth please enter your details at this form: http://www.australiansmallbusiness.com.au/services/business-service-provider/ (make sure you mention the EzyLearn blog post and we’ll receive all your information).

You’ll be interested to know that our Digital Business Course is designed around helping a printing business in Artarmon get a professional website using WordPress, but more importantly students will learn about:

  • Integrating social media,
  • Creating and optimising a blog (just like this one!),
  • Using YouTube
  • Using Google Analytics to measure your results
  • Getting the most from Google Adwords
  • Learn about Google authorship
  • Google Local Marketing

Students will also learn about a host of other Google services available to help businesses become more visible to their potential customers and step into the new age of online marketing. Students will learn about how to make a business “relevant” in Google searches.

The other aspect of our Digital Business Course is we want to educate mums how to perform the tasks that many businesses need to become visible online. In the same way that learning MYOB enables mums to work flexible hours from their own home, the Digital Business Course will provide an excellent structure to enable mums to work flexible hours while helping businesses get into the digital age.

Enter your details at this website for an opportunity to win a scholarship:  http://www.australiansmallbusiness.com.au/services/business-service-provider/

 

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Why Join the MYOB Job Seekers Student Community?

Mums study group for MYOB job seekersI recently welcomed Michelle, our newest team member who completed our MYOB training course and whom we found by writing a blog post as opposed to spending lots of money on Seek with no success at all.

[quote]I’m not stressing too much how bad our Seek experience was am I?[/quote]

Moving on, I want to share with you what we discovered are the reasons that students join a study community and more specifically a Study group for specialised programs like MYOB. The reasons are very similar to why some people prefer to do an trainer-led (or class-based) course at places like TAFE.

It’s important to remember the goal for the course and joining a study group and that is to find an MYOB job.

Here are the reasons:

Tips and Tricks using MYOB

You may be studying the same course content as other students, but you will interpret some things differently to others just based on your life and work experiences.

Help with your MYOB course

Just because you’re studying online and there is not a teacher standing at the front of the classroom, help and support is available.

Request more MYOB training

We understand that it can be hard to stay up-to-date with market demands—and costly, too. Software vendors are always changing their products, technologies are changing, and then there is the advent of new ones. But as an employee the more you know about changes to software and new technologies, the more valuable you are to an employer.

Get Inspiration from other MYOB students and our Tutors

At some point in our careers, we’ve all needed some form of mentorship or guidance to inspire us to keep going, to reach our goals and our dreams.

Get Recognition in front of their peers

An award ceremony—where you’re presented with your MYOB certificate is a significant and important part of the learning experience.

Find a Study Buddy

Don’t go it alone, get a study buddy. It make the learning experience much more social and human.

Compare yourself

We all do it at some point or another: we size each other up to see how we’re fairing by comparison.

Read more about our Revamped Student Community and come along and join us.

 

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Admin Assistant position filled and new MYOB job at Chatswood

Michelle provides support for MYOB course students
Michelle provides support for our MYOB training course students

Did you remember receiving that blog post about us looking for a person to work with us doing office admin in Chatswood? Michelle, one of our MYOB course students, completed her Business Service Provider profile and fit the bill so we brought her in for interviewing.

You might recall that we wrote about an MYOB course student who also created a website for her fathers business? It was Michelle!

Michelle is a hard working mother of two teenage children and she has worked hard to learn new skills, while managing her fathers business, building it’s website and lots of other great things.

Michelle is now part of our team and she’s learning a lot of new things about how we operate our business, how we promote ourselves online and also how we use online marketing tools like Google. Most importantly I’m introducing her because she’s available to help current students get through their course as part of our Student Community and Tutor Support program to helps them in their journey to find MYOB jobs.

But more than MYOB, Michelle is currently completing her Cert IV in Small Business Management with the aim of being able to help people start their own business or manage their existing business better.

Welcome aboard Michelle 🙂

We’re revamping our Student Community and Tutor Support service to specifically focus on skills to help students find MYOB jobs and learn small business management skills and Michelle will be available to help students.

MYOB jobs in Chatswood and Gold Coast.

I was so impressed with the result of our search that I’m reaching out again. We are looking for another admin assistant at our Chatswood office and also in the Gold Coast area so if you live in these areas make sure you complete the Business Service Provider and tell us a bit about yourself. We prefer to work with students who have completed our course and understand how we operate our business so you get the first chance!

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Writing Off Asset Purchases

The ATO is allowing businesses to write-off more assets than before without having to depreciate them.
The ATO is allowing businesses to write-off more assets than before without having to depreciate them.

Our MYOB training courses come with LIFETIME student access and we are constantly adding new content to these courses.

When the ATO introduced changes to asset purchases we wrote a blog post about how the ATO brought in changes to the value of capital goods that had to be depreciated (raising the figure dramatically from $1000 to $6500). This content is particularly relevant at the end of each financial year so we put it into our MYOB Reporting Course.

The result is more content for you to sink your teeth into and really understand Assets, Expense, Depreciation and Accelerated Depreciation.

If you are an existing student of MYOB, you can access this new workbook free of charge within our 504 course material.

The Assets of a Business

First of all, what is an asset? When referring to the term “Asset” it is simply referring to what the business owns (ie. a car is an asset, or your computer desk is an asset).

There are two types of assets that we commonly refer to: Current Assets & Non-current Assets. A current asset generally means one that can easily be converted into ‘cash’ within the next 12 months. An example of current assets may be your business bank account balance, inventory and debtors (customers who owe you money).

Examples of non-current assets may be investments (shares or bonds), trademarks, copyrights, land, buildings and cars.

We know by now of the afore-mentioned changes that the ATO announced back on the 1st July 2012 that businesses with a turnover of less than $2M were know able to instantly write off assets of $6500 and below to an expense account —and this amount is exclusive of GST.

AN EXAMPLE: Accelerated Depreciation on a Motor Vehicle

A lot of people don’t quite get the Accelerated Depreciation side to purchasing a motor vehicle (new or secondhand) so we’ll try to explain this a little better. Let’s use the scenario of Jerry Lame:

Jerry has just purchased a new motor vehicle outright for a total of $25,999 including GST and this was obtained on 1 June 2013. As he is GST registered, he can receive an instant claim of the GST (2,363.55) component which will be applied in the 4th quarters BAS as GST paid; you may see this coding referred to as CAP on your reports, which merely represents it was a capital purchase.

Now what’s left is the remaining capital amount of 23,635.45 to purchase the asset. (This amount is the cost of the car excluding GST) and this will be seen in MYOB as an Asset At Cost. Now how do we work out the Accelerated Depreciation amount? It’s simple — we know that for the first year we can automatically receive $5000 and an additional 15% of the remaining price after the $5K. Here is how it is worked out:

When we enter this into MYOB as depreciation, we could enter a journal like:

Desc: First Year Accelerated Depreciation

CR 1-XXXX account (MV Accum Dep) $7795.32

DR 6-XXXX account (Depreciation) $7795.32

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To find out more, enrol in our online MYOB course and have full access to this workbook — and many others that EzyLearn Online provides. Remember, if you are an existing lifetime student of MYOB, you can log into our training site and automatically get access to this new workbook, any new videos and our online helpdesk, all totally free of charge.