Category: News

House renovations and improvements are interesting projects which need good project management skills. Several years ago I had to erect a shed for a tenant and to show how naïve I was about building back then I just saw a nice sized shed advertised for $600 and thought that would do the trick – good size and nice and cheap.

Luckily I had a friend who was much handier than me and some staff who could help with the project.

Job Tracking (in MYOB) and Projects in Xero is a system where you can allocate job numbers to transactions and then run reports to show the income and expenses that relate to that job number. Seems pretty simple right?

The problem with proper project and job tracking is that it involves many people making sure that they use that job number. Not just office admin staff but the trades people who are working on site need to keep track of every aspect of the job.

In this case study you’ll see how the trades people going to Bunnings to buy screws and wood for the concrete slab need to keep track of their expenses, just like the tradies who picked up the 10 bags of cement from the depot.

A tricky transactions was when they needed the help of another staff member to come and help put the roof on the shed. This person had to come from another work site, spend 30 minutes helping and then driving back to the other site – it was 1.5 hours of time that needs to be tracked as an expense!

Learn Job Tracking in MYOB and Projects in Xero

Learn how to manage the income and expenses for job tracking using both MYOB and Xero in The $600 Shed Case Study with the Advanced Xero and MYOB Courses. Read other blog articles relating to Xero Projects.

Combine these skills with good credit management skills and you can ensure that your business doesn’t lose money when working on small or large projects for clients.

I wrote about our case study in the Advanced Payroll Course and now happy to announce that you can buy this training workbook separately.

When you buy one of our Xero Training Workbooks you get them instantly as a downloaded PDF file.

You can print it out and bind it at Officeworks or just open it up on your screen.

You can use the training workbooks on any device including a tablet or mobile phone but it is always easier to work with on a desktop computer or laptop.

Some students prefer to learn using the workbook and performing the practical tasks in them. This Xero Advanced Payroll Course Workbook BUNDLE includes extra training workbooks in

• Single Touch Payroll (Phase 2) and
• Processing Termination Payments.

See what EzyLearn course graduates say

Graduates across Australia love EzyLearn course because they are thorough and inexpensive and cover a wide range of skills.

Watch our video interviews and see what they have to say

How do you learn payroll?

A comprehensive training course and certificate includes many different learning resources, including:

1. Instructional videos
2. Practical case studies
3. Training manuals and workbooks
4. Assessment questions
5. Online support

An online course with EzyLearn is more than just a handful of videos of someone speaking to a camera. Our instructional videos actually show you how to perform the tasks performed in our practical case studies.

The case studies are carefully created to teach you by taking you on a learning journey starting with basic beginner level tasks and progressing to more advanced topics later on.

Learn more about how we deliver online courses and support students to learn Payroll

See the Advanced Payroll Course workbook and buy online now.

I bought a new laptop recently and one thing is frustrating my like crazy. It’s only a small thing and easy to just click away but how many times do I have to do it!?

The ads for McAfee protection is what I’m talking about and I thought that one click to say “No, thank you” would be enough but it keeps coming up and it looks scary.

Microsoft partner with thousands of companies to leverage their command of the operating system market but how bad can this get? It’s enough that they are pushing their new “same as Chrome” browser to compete with Google Chrome but here are some of the examples that just keep popping up.

Surely new Windows Laptop buyers shouldn’t have to deal with this every day or so!

Maybe it’s Dell I should be complaining about?

The laptop I purchased is a Dell and you can see that McAfee is recommended by Dell in some of these messages.

What you should realise is that I have NEVER clicked anything to say I consent to these message or want to use McAfee but they keep appearing.

The worst part of this saga is that McAfee now appear to have installed itself as an extension in my Google Chrome browser!

If there is a Government body or some organisation that allows you to vote to stop this constant bombarding of advertising messages please let me know because this is just over the top.

We seems to simple go with the notion that we should just accept these ads and just swipe them away but doing so is like swatting flies away around a BBQ in the middle of summer.

Master Microsoft Office with online training courses

Microsoft remains the market leader for office productivity software and their flagship software programs are mandatory skills in most office support and office administration jobs. These programs are:

• Microsoft Excel,
• Microsoft Word,
• Microsoft PowerPoint and
• Outlook.

Master them all in our Microsoft Office Academy Course Package. It includes beginners to advanced skills in all these programs and include

• instructional videos,
• exercise files to practice with,
• training workbooks with practical exercises
• business case studies and scenarios

Discover our Microsoft Office Courses

It’s annual report time again and Xero just released their annual results. I always find their annual presentation fascinating because they reveal a lot of visual information about the small business market that they sell to.

Small businesses that employ 1-20 staff are the majority of their users so learning how to use Xero means that these companies will be your employers.

The annual report and presentation also reveal gaps in their software and one interesting one that I’ve written about before is inventory.

Xero has basic inventory for businesses like a telephone sales and support business in our Xero course case study but not for serious retailers.

Master Xero with the Xero Complete training course and find work with small to medium employers.

Are you finding work quiet this time of year? We’ve just been handed down our budget and emails are starting to fly around showing what it means to us.

Its the time of year where we find out how well we’ve done financially. It’s the time of year where workers will see how much they can borrow to buy property in the 2025 financial year and where they need to cut back.

Most of this financial information will be worked out using Microsoft Excel.

Continue reading Microsoft Excel skills are important this time of year

Tradies are the critical workers in the Australian property market. They’re responsible for new home builds as well as renovations and extensions. Since Covid they have been in hot demand and one builder I spoke to said he use to advertise and not even get one response since Covid.

They also run some of the most complex businesses and need the help of bookkeeping software like MYOB and Xero, particularly where it relates to Project or Job Tracking.

In the 2024 Australian Federal Budget they got some good news.

Continue reading Tradies are winners in the 2024 budget

The one thing I’ve found fascinating in accounting and bookkeeping is watching technology companies try to win clients. I’m not just talking about the special offers, features and pricing but how they use technology to make bookkeeping seamless – to replace some of the bookkeeping tasks!

The most recent event I’ve witnessed is NAB bookkeeper service that has a six month free trial and is $20 per month thereafter. 

When you read the fine print it is revealed that Thriday is the technology behind NAB bookkeeper. After a bit more research I discovered that they want to capture a massive part of the micro and small business market by reducing the business administration tasks.

I’ve written in the past about how NAB use Slyp for for smart repeats and this is another example of a technology investment aimed at helping small business owners replace the cost of accounting software and even having to have a bookkeeper. 

Friday is a service that uses technology to combine data entry from transactions with your actual bank account. One of the biggest challenges for small businesses it’s all the data entry involved to reconcile their accounting software like MYOB and Xero to the actual bank statement.

This represents the majority of bookkeeping jobs and can be learnt in our Beginners Certificate in MYOB and Xero.

We are a long way from the majority of businesses using Thriday, Hnry and services like Slyp but with their laser focus to help to eliminate the data entry and time wasting admin tasks and inaccuracies it is good to be aware of these companies and their technology.

The big question now for companies like Xero is can they continue to increase the monthly cost of their subscriptions when services like NAB bookkeeper a targeting the time costs inaccuracies of doing your bookkeeping. 

Perhaps in the future bookkeepers will have to focus on customer service, sales and more of office administration type tasks as well as simply reviewing the data and financial reports and information that are created automatically by services like NAB Bookkeeper.

Is this how artificial intelligence will replace manual labour by Australian bookkeepers