Posted on by

How Online Marketing Differs from SEO

Knowing how to market your business online involves far more than just SEO.
Knowing how to market your business online involves far more than just SEO.

At EzyLearn we offer a number of internet courses and we’ve recently developed a digital business course designed especially for those people who want to operate an online marketing business. But it’s important to realise that knowing about online marketing is vastly different to possessing a knowledge of SEO (or search engine optimisation) and we say this because many people seem to think these two skills sets are one and the same.

Your Online Marketing Strategies Count!

Online advertising may be more accessible than traditional advertising, especially for small businesses, but that doesn’t mean you should leave your online marketing strategies to just anyone.

Your business’ online marketing strategies should be approached in the same manner as you would any other marketing strategy — or, in fact, any other business strategy. For this reason, a business would employ someone who specialises in online marketing.

Online Marketing is NOT the Same as SEO

But too often, business owners mistake the need for an online marketing assistant with SEO experts when really SEO is just one part of your overall online marketing strategy. The skills sets are also very different. SEO experts are highly skilled in the technical aspects relating to SEO, but usually do not possess any marketing knowledge; knowledge, which is quantifiably different from SEO.

In marketing, you get to understand demographics and how to reach them effectively through different marketing strategies. For instance, it’s widely believed that younger generations are the more active online than the baby boomer generation, but that’s actually not the case.

The baby boomer generation was really the fad generation — they embraced with great zeal, anything that came along, and they were also far more progressive than the generations before them. If you think about much of the social, political, economic and cultural change that has taken place in the last 50 or 60 years, it was the baby boomers who embraced it.

A marketing expert would know this, but would a technology expert? This is why online marketing assistants need to have skills that go beyond the technical know-how, to skills you find in most traditional marketing professionals.

Our digital business course provides our students with all the skills they’ll need to be responsible for:

  • Working with internal and external partners to achieve successful execution of the plan
  • Social networks – updating, question answering, troubleshooting
  • Budget spend monitoring and control, fees, commissions
  • Web analytics monitoring and reporting against key metrics
  • Search engine optimization tasks – improving page content, ensuring site structure is efficient, keyword relevancy, product names and tags etc
  • Email marketing – list maintenance, segmentation, execution, monitoring, reporting.
  • Affiliation partners – administration of contracts, payment chasing, conversion monitoring and corrective actions.
  • Paid Search – budget control, key word success tracking, ROI reporting
  • Data input – dependent on organizations particular needs
  • Keeping up to date with internet and marketing trends and contribute this knowledge as an integral member of the team

You will find this course an essential aid to starting your own business in bookkeeping or any industry and marketing your product or services. Check it out today!

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Web Analytics Made ‘Ezy’

If your business isn't using web analytics then you're still not using your website to REALLY understand what makes your customers tick.
If your business isn’t using web analytics then you’re still not using your website to REALLY understand what makes your customers tick.

Ok, so you’ve got a website and on it you have all this information about your company — who your people are, what you do, how customers can contact/connect with you — and best of all: you get heaps of page views every month! Talk about winning the Internet! You’ve got this website marketing business down, am I right?

Except that maybe you don’t. And for this reason, we’re currently developing a new Digital Business Course to help businesses transition into the online world. A big part of that transition involves understanding how web analytics work, which is the bread and butter of any successful website — and indeed, successful business.

How to Use Web Analytics

To get the most out of web analytics, you kind of need to change the way you view your website. You need to see it as a form of marketing, just like an advertisement in a newspaper or a piece of direct mail. Once you start treating your website the same as you would any other marketing activity, it’s likely you’ll have some questions you’ll want answered.

Your Conversion Rate – Do YOU Know It?

Somewhere on this list — though we imagine that it would be on the top — should be “What’s my conversion rate?” To answer this question, you need web analytics. We recommend Google Analytics, namely because it’s free and extremely easy to use.

Your conversion rate is the number of people who have visited your website and carried out some form of action — signed up to a newsletter, made a request for more information, downloaded an e-book, and so on. In short, it’s any action that involves the exchange of information that you can later use to develop into a sale.

Constant Improvement

But the real genius of analytics lies in how it allows you to isolate problems with your website’s content and refine them. For instance, if you have a rather average conversion rate, but a high bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website within 30 seconds of landing on it), there’s a good chance that’s there’s something wrong with the keywords you’ve selected for your SEO. Or you’ve selected keywords that your website’s content doesn’t address properly. Either way, you need to fix this.

Finding Out How Your Customers Think

Once you do, you should see you bounce rate drop off and your conversion rate increase, which means more opportunity for more sales. And just think: if you didn’t have analytics, you’d have never known. This is what makes web analytics invaluable for small business owners, because it gives you rare insight into what makes your customers tick — what are they really looking for, and how can you adapt your business to meet their needs? — and provides you with the opportunity to meet those needs.

In essence, small business owners now have the same resources at their disposal as large multi-nationals, who typically spend bucket-loads on research and development, focus groups, and the like, trying to ascertain what exactly their customers are looking for — and even then, often don’t get it right.

***

At EzyLearn, we use web analytics extensively to ensure we’re constantly meeting the needs of our students and potential students. Through web analytics data, we ascertained that a number of small business owners were looking for a cheaper alternative to MYOB, so we developed two new cloud-accounting courses: the Reach Accounting Training Course and a Xero Training Course to satisfy that need.

For more information or to receive alerts about our forthcoming Digital Business Course, subscribe to our blog by clicking here.

Posted on by

2014: There are Currently More Opportunities THAN EVER for Home-Based Bookkeepers

The numbers don't lie - find out why statistically now is a better time than ever to begin your bookkeeping business.
The numbers don’t lie – find out why statistically now is a better time than ever to begin your bookkeeping business.

With 2013 now come to a close, many of you may be thinking about how you will work in 2014. Now is a better time than ever to start a home-based bookkeeping business! It’s why we offer online MYOB training courses, in addition to Reach and Xero, so you can learn how to use the most popular accounting software in the world. But now, let’s give you three tangible reasons why NOW is one of the best times you could start your own bookkeeping business, working from home:

1. Health and Well-Being Reasons

The reasons for starting a home-based bookkeeping business are many and varied, but some of the first are to do with your own physical and mental health. In a post we published earlier this year, we listed five reasons why you should start a home-based business; we’ve also discussed the benefits to your health that working from home can bring, particularly in reducing your stress. Working from home has never been easier, and it’s a trend that’s fast catching on, particularly in the accounting and bookkeeping industry.

2. Cloud Software and Low Capital Investment — Creating More Opportunities

Cloud-based accounting software is also creating more opportunities for home-based bookkeeping businesses. According to market research firm, IBISWorld, in the five years to 2013, revenue in the bookkeeping and payroll industries has reached $2 billion, with an increasing trend among companies to outsource bookkeeping functions due to the higher level of connectedness — thanks in part to cloud-based accounting software.

But there’s even better news for people looking to start their own home-based bookkeeping business: capital investment is extremely low, and for every dollar spent on capital, the industry spends an average of $26.25 on labour. This is largely due to capital investments being small, and usually only include, computers, access to the internet, accounting software and office furniture.

Due to the industry becoming increasingly fragmented — in 2013, there were some 1,892 registered bookkeeping businesses operating in Australia — there’s a huge demand for bookkeeping services, particularly among SMEs, who usually don’t have any payroll or bookkeeping staff employed full-time.

3. LOTS of Work Available — And Accounting Services Growing

According to ABS data, 96 percent of the businesses operating in Australia are small businesses, of which the largest number operate within the construction industry (16.2 percent), followed professional and scientific services (11.7 percent), and rental, hiring and real estate services (10.5 percent). For bookkeepers that are highly skilled in these industries, there’s no shortage of work. That’s why we also offer a Small Business Management Course, to provide bookkeepers, virtual assistants, or simply anybody who wants to work for themselves, with comprehensive training in what you need to know to run or manage a small business.

But for those bookkeepers hoping to strike up a working relationship with a local accountant, there’s good news on that front, too: the accounting services industry has recorded annual growth of 2.9 percent in the four years since 2009, and annual revenue totaling $16 billion, according to IBISWorld.

***

If you’re a bookkeeper and you’ve been thinking about starting a bookkeeping business, you know better than anyone that the numbers don’t lie — the time to start that business is now!

Posted on by

The REAL Benefits of Cloud-Based, ‘Real-Time’ Accounting Programs – A CASE STUDY

Having access to real-time info about their business helped Cheryl and Jim climb from just breaking even to owning two stores.
Having access to real-time info about their business helped Cheryl and Jim climb from just breaking even to owning two stores.

So you’re thinking of starting your own business in bookkeeping — or perhaps a small business in another industry? Cloud accounting programs like MYOB Account Right Live, Reach and Xero can make it much easier for you to start a bookkeeping business from home; these accounting programs can also help existing business owners operate and grow their businesses. And the great news is that EzyLearn now offers courses in all three.

MYOB Account Right Live

Today we’re blogging about MYOB Account Right Live. We recommend this in all of our MYOB training courses — not because it’s the latest version of the hugely popular MYOB software — but because it gives business owners the kind of data they need to run their business efficiently and securely. This was no more evident than in the case of Cheryl and Jim; business owners who discovered that they were literally throwing money away by using an outdated version of MYOB. With the recent addition of our new real-time accounting programs to our suite of products, we figured it’s an apt time to revisit this popular case study.

The Blessings of ‘Real-Time’

Perhaps the biggest bonus with cloud accounting software is that you have access to information about your profits and expenses in real-time. This is enormously useful for small businesses to constantly track how they’re going and make any necessary changes.

We decided to take a look at how one business owner grew a moderately successful business into a totally thriving one by using cloud accounting software to track their expenses.

From a Break-Even Bakery — To Owning Two Successful Stores

Cheryl and her husband, Jim, operated a small neighbourhood bakery in a busy block of local shops. Jim was the baker and pastry chef in residence, while Cheryl, who had previously worked as an account executive at an advertising firm, managed the office side of the business.

“I was used to budgets and targets, so it made sense that I would handle the admin side of the business,” Cheryl tells us. “But, coming from a large-scale ad agency, I had been spoilt for choice in the way of CRM and other software that tracked my sales in real-time,” she says. “I didn’t have any of that with the bakery. Just an outdated version of MYOB!”

Cheryl and Jim estimated that it would take them about a year before they would start to see any real traction with the bakery, but a year had come and gone, and they were still just breaking even.

“Jim would come in and go ‘we had a great day today, heaps of customers’ but at the end of the month we were still struggling with all the expenses, paying our staff and trying to pay ourselves a wage too,” Cheryl says. “Finally I asked my accountant what was going on and he just said ‘update your MYOB.’”

Cheryl comments that having access to data they had previously only received once it was too late was a game-changer. “This sounds funny, but I could see we were spending all this money on flour, but our sales didn’t reflect a need for it,” Cheryl laughs.

“Finally I asked my accountant what was going on and he just said ‘update your MYOB,’” Cheryl says.

“I asked Jim if he was over-ordering because that seemed like the logical answer, but he said he only ordered what was needed,” she says. “This led me to do some investigating.”

What the Data Revealed…

Jim would bake an average of 75 loaves of bread a day, but sales records in MYOB showed they old sold an average of 40 loaves a day; Jim was baking twice as much bread as he needed and all left-over stock was thrown out at the end of the day.

“We were literally throwing our money away,” Cheryl says. “But it was a learning curve.”

Before long Cheryl and Jim implemented various other systems to track their stock, so they could better manage their expenses. Within a year, Cheryl and Jim had completely turned their business around.

“Now we have two shops,” Cheryl says. “Where before we struggled keeping just the one going. Being able to see what we were spending as we were spending it — that changed everything.”

***

Basically you’re running blind if you’re not able to see your accounts in real time. The use of cloud accounting software like MYOB Account Right Live, Reach and Xero grants you this, safely and securely. Want to get up to speed with everything MYOB? Our MYOB training courses will equip you with the information you need. Enrol today.

Posted on by

Financial Settings in Xero (FREE Training Video)

In our quest to always present you with the latest information about bookkeeping for your own business or someone else’s, we are pleased to present you with another free training video from our recently added Xero online training course. Last time we showed you how to enter a credit note in Xero, but this time we’re going to show you how to enter a business’ financial settings — something every bookkeeper needs to set up for their clients.

Knowing how to set up a business’ financial settings is important as every business will need to enter their financial information (such as the GST collection method, frequency of GST calculation, PAYG withheld, and so forth). As a bookkeeper, all of this is probably familiar to you, given that MYOB, too, requires this information in order to produce accurate reports. That being said, there are some differences between how you enter this information into MYOB and Xero, and in this training video we break it down for you:

 

 

Xero is currently one of the most straightforward, yet powerful pieces of accounting software and fast becoming a major rival to MYOB for its simplicity of use. Check out our new Xero training course. We also provide an online training course in cloud-based accounting program, Reach as well as our flagship MYOB training course.

 

 

 

 

Posted on by

Entering Credit Notes in Xero (FREE Training Video)

At EzyLearn we are constantly refreshing the content of all our courses, such as our MYOB training course and our Xero training course — which we have recently added to our suite of online training products. Xero is the cloud-accounting software that is fast becoming one of MYOB’s key competitors. So that you can benefit from all the new information that is always emerging about being a bookkeeper and running your own bookkeeping business (or doing the books for someone else’s business) we want to share with you the following video about how to enter a credit note in Xero:

 

 

Where Xero Differs from MYOB

If you’re familiar with MYOB, then you know that when you enter or approve a transaction in MYOB, you can still delete it from the system at a later stage — in the event you need to give a customer a refund, for instance.

In Xero, however, you can’t delete a transaction once it’s been approved. In one sense, this is great for auditing purposes as you can see everything that’s occurred in the account over the past month or quarter or year. But it also means putting through credit notes, which in MYOB is notoriously hard.

The fact that pretty much everything in Xero is easier to do than in MYOB, including entering a credit note, is one key reason why Xero is fast becoming one of MYOB’s biggest rivals. Again, we invite you to check out our new Xero training course. EzyLearn also offers courses in other cloud-based accounting programs, such as Reach.

Posted on by

Job Reporting in MYOB (FREE Training Video)

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.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

How Could You Possibly Make 10 Times What You’re Earning?

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.

Continue reading How Could You Possibly Make 10 Times What You’re Earning?
Posted on by

How to Set Up Bank Feeds in MYOB – Free TRAINING VIDEO

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.

 

 

Posted on by — 2 Comments

It’s the New Year – Resolve to Start that New Small Business Today! – free success tip video

It's never too early to make the resolve to start your own business - don't put it off any longer!
It’s never too early to make the resolve to start your own business – don’t put it off any longer!

If you or someone you know is looking to start a new business, up skill to provide additional services to existing clients, or partner with us to build a training business, our Small Business Management Course provides you with essential information for operating a new small business.

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.

***

The New Year is the time for making resolutions — resolve to start your new small business today and enrol in our Small Business Management Course! Or if you’d like to gift a training course to your friend or family member, contact us and secure your 2014 training courses at 2013 prices!

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Is the Death of the Bookkeeper Imminent?

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.
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?

***

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.

Posted on by — 4 Comments

What is BankLink and Why are So Many Accountants Using It?

Your accountant can access your records easily via BankLink.
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.”

***

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.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

How Would You Like to Earn a Share of $237 Billion?

Want a share of $237 billion? If you're in business it's up for grabs!
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.

***

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!

Posted on by

When the Price is Right, It’s Not Always Cheap

Don't be a scrooge this Christmas - it's often not best to go cheap unless you intend to stay that way.
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.

***

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.

 

Posted on by — 1 Comment

CASE STUDY: Is Reach Reaching the Mark? Hear the Honest Opinion of a Business Owner…

We test drive Reach to see if it reaches the mark for one small business owner.
We test drive Reach to see if it reaches the mark for one small business owner.

We’ve recently added a Reach Accounting course to our suite of online training courses. In a previous post, we gave you the low down on how the Reach Accounting package stacks up against MYOB, but we thought we’d find out what a real, present-day business owner had to say about Reach. So, we asked Angela, a freelance journalist, to test drive Reach for 30 days and then provide us with her honest feedback. Here’s what she had to say:

“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.”

***

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.

Posted on by

Reach Accounting vs MYOB: What’s the Right Accounting Software for You?

which-one
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.

Students who enrol in our online Reach training course will be able to access a trial version of Reach for 30 days while you complete the course — so enrol today! You can also find out what a small business owner thought of Reach as a solution for them after test-driving it for 30 days.