Have you noticed a change in how MYOB makes you login? They’re starting to do as they are told by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), that’s why.
We’ve seen lots of login issues with Xero in the past when they focused on authentication for their users and now it’s MYOB announcing improvements in their security – this time for inactivity.
Continue reading Why MYOB makes you log in after inactivity
Working with our graduates we’ve discovered that organisations are still looking for staff who can work remotely. A quick look on Indeed (which seems to have more remote working jobs advertised) shows a wide range of jobs from Sales and Customer Service administration to Bookkeeping and Business Administration.
One of the jobs advertised even wants someone who can do sales AND accounts! I thought the two of those would never meet!
We’ve had students enquire recently about whether we offer internships for our students and the answer is YES.
Our Business Administration Internships are available for graduates who have completed the full range of skills to be the most valuable employees for businesses.
Job ads for remote workers appear to need their team members to do more than just bookkeeping or data entry.
These remote jobs require staff to have good communications, customer service and time management and you can see why – YOU NEED SOME GOOD TECHNICAL SKILLS TO WORK ONLINE.
When Intuit bought MailChimp I realised that office and business admin staff now need to have some sales and marketing skills too.
Employers are looking for disciplined and skilled workers if they’re going to work remotely from home.
The Remote Contractor course package will give you
Have you spent any time looking at this foundational accounting formula? It’s a formula that shows how wealthy you are – what your worth.
If you are a property owner you would be smiling because of the increase in home values since Covid – and for the last 30 or more years in Australia!
Continue reading Your Equity = Assets – LiabilitiesLike most financial reports they don’t tell the full picture by themselves.
Unless you’re a tradie with a Commercial “PowerPass” account with Bunnings you probably wouldn’t know about their fantastic system of keeping track of all your tax invoices.
It’s actually quite easy to get a PowerPass account and it’s very similar to using Flybuys. You go and buy all the things you need – like I did to erect the garden shed in our Job tracking and Projects case study for the MYOB and Xero Courses – and scan your card when you pay. You get a discount and your tax invoice is recorded in the Bunnings PowerPass system.
You just log into the PowerPass admin area and EVERY SINGLE invoice is available to you there!
Xero made a big deal about their Hubdoc purchase and how it was included for all users when they increased their monthly subscriptions by $2 in 2019.
This was the start of what seems to be an ongoing increase in the monthly subscription price for Xero. Xero appears to come across like a money hungry landlord that has you hooked on their software and wants to see how much they can extract from you.
It’s a big job to change accounting programs and like many software publishers Xero need to increase their subscription rate or earn more money by selling addons that they own – or they can charge a per employee rate for payroll services!
If you are starting a new business or switching back to MYOB Business from Xero learn how to use MYOB Business online with us.
If you are looking for work you are best to learn both version of MYOB: AccountRight and MYOB Business. They are available in our MYOB & Xero Bookkeeping Course Bundles.
I was looking for quotes for end of lease cleaning recently and started sending emails and Facebook messages when one of the replies I received directed me to their online form – very smart!
Rather than ask me questions and wait for replies and sending 10 messages to find out basic information this cleaning company had it all laid out on their online form.
Continue reading Office Admin Courses – GREAT example of when to use online formsThe best part of this is that I had to do all the data entry work and my details went straight into their database and email system!
I wrote about the messy startup for Jerry’s new business venture. It is used in the BAS Courses for QuickBooks, MYOB and Xero and in The Next Quarter case study you’ll see the results of Jerry’s business decisions and how some of his financial transactions have turned out.
You’ll get enough information from the financial reports to advise Jerry how to make future decisions for his business – particularly when it relates to cashflow, credit management and purchases.
In The Next Quarter Bookkeeping Course case study we look at Jerry’s financial reports and start to keep better track of income vs expenditure as well as better ways to use his money (like buying assets vs paying off loans).
Jerry will also have the knowledge to make product and services decisions because he’ll know what is selling well and where he is making more profit.
In The Next Quarter we look at how his business gets discovered online and what other digital marketing options are available to him.
We explore whether he should continue to use a project bidding site like HiPages or focus on getting more traffic to his own website.
Ultimately, no matter which digital marketing medium you use you’ll want to strengthen your sales skills to learn how to identify ideal clients and turn them into customers. At the same time you’ll want to learn how to help clients who are not ideal.
Cashflow is critical for the survival of a business. It’s like the blood pumping through the veins or the air going into and out of the lungs and without enough positive cashflow you don’t have a business that can survive.
This case study is used in our Advanced Certificate in Xero Cashflow and Financial Reporting Course.
People often ask “How long does it take to complete a Business Activity Statement” but there are several different correct answers to that question.
If all your transactions are entered correctly in your accounting software and your bank account is reconciled the BAS Lodgement takes a matter of minutes.
The hard work is often completed by bookkeepers who do the daily data entry or the catchup bookkeeping to make sure all the data is captured. This task can take days or even weeks!
If you want to save money you can lodge your BAS yourself and use our BAS Course workbooks to learn how to do it.
Learn how to lodge your BAS, including simple payroll wage payments using our Xero BAS Course training workbooks and sample data.
We use Jerry’s Messy Startup case study and you will be his bookkeeper to make sure everything is accurate for lodgement.
It is assumed that you know how to perform daily data entry and bank reconciliations using Xero.
The tricky part of lodging Business Activity Statements is making sure you get the correct tax codes for GST transactions and payroll. If you get these codes wrong you could end up paying less tax to the ATO than you are supposed to or even underpay your staff.
The difference between a BAS Agent and a junior bookkeeper is the compliance requirements to make sure they get it right. A BAS Agent has a duty of care to ensure that the correct tax codes are used and the Cert IV in Bookkeeping and BAS Agent skillset courses (which are Nationally Accredited) take students through the legal framework around compliance.
When a Registered BAS Agent provides these services as a contract bookkeeper they are providing a BAS Service and that is administered by the Tax Practitioners Board.
A BAS Agent is trained but more importantly insured to ensure they get the information 100% correct – otherwise they can be sued. That means they have to have Professional Indemnity insurance to provide BAS Services to clients.
If you want to start your own bookkeeping business and provide BAS Services you need the Cert IV in Accounting and Bookkeeping Course.
In most circumstances where you are completing the BAS as an employee you will be working under the supervision and direction of the business owner, business manager or the bookkeeper or accountant for that business.
Students who enrol into our BAS Courses simply want to know how to perform these tasks using accounting programs like QuickBooks, MYOB and Xero.
You don’t need to subscribe to expensive accounting software like Xero if you only have one or two staff members. Business owners have been processing payroll manually for years and these basics are taught in our BAS Course with the Ad hoc payroll spreadsheet.
I was speaking with a hairdressing salon owner last year and she mentioned that she uses the manual weekly pay tables provided by the ATO and a spreadsheet program to pay all her staff.
We use these pay tables to introduce students to the foundation concepts about payroll.
Every business owner collects GST and taxes on behalf of the ATO from the money they pay their staff. This money is a liability payable to the ATO as part of their quarterly or monthly Business Activity Statements.
As part of the BAS Course you’ll be introduced to the process to enter payroll transactions as journal entries.
It’s a great introduction to basic payroll skills and leads beautifully into the Advanced Certificate in Payroll Courses using QuickBooks, MYOB and Xero.
Learn Payroll Accounting, earn certificates and learn about Payroll Administration with the Advanced Certificate in Payroll using QuickBooks, MYOB and Xero.
This advanced level online payroll management course will help you learn the necessary skills and enter the payroll sector as a Payroll Officer using all the modern online accounting programs.
Undertake the payroll fundamentals course subject and case study and then progress to the advanced case study covering Single Touch Payroll, Terminations and understanding employment awards.
Learn about the tasks performed by payroll officers and develop in-depth payroll knowledge and receive your payroll certification on completion.
Payroll Officers are responsible for processing payroll, tax calculations and deductions. This can include creating and modifying the roster and making note of days off and sick days.
They also prepare monthly, quarterly and year-end financial statements when working with the company accountant or payroll administrator. In small businesses this role may also include elements of accounts payable and other bookkeeping responsibilities.
Learn about the Payroll Officer Job Role
Payroll gets advanced when you start going a little deeper into the lives of your employees.
Younger staff members under 18 are often keen and willing to learn but also get paid much less. Older workers and parents might be more flexible but may come with obligations to pay child support payments which need to be deducted from their pay.
The issue of rostering, changing shifts and sick days also fill up a lot of time for payroll officers and these tasks and the obligations around them are taught in the Advanced Payroll course case study.
Hiring and firing is a normal part of running a business and although it can be challenging you need to get these steps right. They’ve covered in the Advanced Payroll course case study.
Does this sound familiar? What does it mean? Is it fair?
Continue reading Jackie was dismissed from employment and received a non-genuine redundancy payment
Do forms frustrate you? I’ve come to learn that forms are critical to organise and systemise a business. They’re an orderly way to collect relevant information for the different admin tasks of a business.
Without forms you’ll have a messy filing system or an Inbox that is so full of confusing information that you’ll spend half your time just looking for thing!
We use forms for tasks like:
When you think about forms the concept is pretty simple really – you just use a program like Microsoft Word to create a form and then hand it to your clients to fill in, right? WRONG
Most forms are completed online these days so you need a specialist form builder that enables you to collect the information from anywhere (usually your website).
Using online forms in your business means you don’t need to do the data entry, your customers do. This makes the information accurate and takes away unnecessary work for your staff – and that is called productivity. It also makes it easier to get that information into other software programs used in your business.
Xero became a massively successful bookkeeping program because of the hundreds of software programs that integrate with it. Learn about some of the popular Xero integrations. Integrations enable information to be shared between different software programs.
Using an Online Form Builder enables you to do the same with information that is collected using your form.
Microsoft Forms is an online form builder that enables you to
The Microsoft Forms course is included for free with the Microsoft Office Academy training course package.
A typical use for online forms is:
I’ve been reviewing our Payroll courses and the practical case studies included in them and thought I’d take the opportunity to share some details about it with you.
The advanced payroll training course topic uses some typical payroll scenarios that go above and beyond the basic payroll tasks in a small business.
Payroll can get messy when it comes down to
In Australia small businesses are agents of the Australian Taxation Office. They act on behalf of the ATO to collect taxes and pay superannuation relating to their employees and these transactions are entered in their bookkeeping systems as liabilities until they are paid.
Learn more about our Advanced Payroll Course Case Study
More of our popular Xero course training workbooks are now available to purchase separately!
The Xero course workbooks contain the practical tasks that our students love.
Watch the interviews with our course graduates and you’ll see how some students learn how to use MYOB, Xero and Microsoft Office just by completing the workbook exercises.
Just follow the step-by-step instructions to enter the transactions based on our small business case studies and increase confidence and knowledge of the software.
This is a quick and cheap way to learn and by-pass the assessments.
Things are moving fast in the software industry as Intuit (QuickBooks), MYOB and Xero compete with each other with regular software updates. It has become so fierce that many students are enrolling into our Bookkeeping Academy Combination courses.
The key frontiers are still
These are some of the features promoted by NAB Bookkeeper for NAB Business banking customers but what is MYOB’s huge announcement?
Continue reading Amazing NEW Update from MYOB
The most common jobs for office admin and office support require confident knowledge of Microsoft Office and MYOB or Xero for bookkeeping tasks.
The office admin role is the person that connects most of the other business roles, including
This means you’ll be speaking to existing clients about the administration tasks involved in their purchase, while also coordinating with other employee of the business to help complete the services.
In the building and trades industry you’ll be helping with paperwork relating to their building project.
Office admin jobs require good communications skills because you may not know the answer to all your clients questions but you are the first person they speak with. You’ll need to correspond with other parts of the business to ensure that the client has the information they need.
This can include scheduling meetings, allocating meeting rooms and reminding clients and technicians about appointments, most of which is done using Microsoft Outlook.
This role can get even trickier when you are also the person following up for payment! You may need to be nice and friendly to maintain a good client relationship while also being stern and enforcing the business credit management policies.
Combined Office Admin Course and Basic Bookkeeping Training
The Office Admin Course includes training in Microsoft Office as well as MYOB & Xero Training for daily transactions.
If your employer supplies complex solutions which involve project management and many different milestones one of your first tasks will be to collect information about the customer needs from the sales person and provide them with a quote or tender that is created by an experienced estimator.
Your role might be to convert complex information into a glossy brochure or proposal that makes it easier for the client to understand.
If you are preparing this information for a sales person to present you may also need to condense it into a slideshow presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Read more about Office Admin Job Descriptions and Training Course outcomes
If you want to climb up the ladder where you work or find a higher paying office admin job you should explore some of the requirements for business administration jobs. This previous blog posts explores actual job ads and requirements for staff.
All the marketing messages I hear is how much better Xero is than MYOB but that isn’t always the case.
MYOB and QuickBooks both had more in-build inventory features than Xero but Xero has always promoted their integrations to fill gaps in their core software. I wrote about this several times:
The Integrations for Xero Courses reveals some of the powerful features that other companies do better than the accounting software companies!
Continue reading MYOB is better than Xero Payroll for some things
